Last Days of Childhood
Last Days of Childhood By Martin Franks Graduating fifth grade was a bigger deal to everyone but the kids that were actually graduating. For us it was just another day we had to go to school [ but didn’t have to learn anything. Like when you had a substitute teacher or your regular teacher was a few days away from a complete mental breakdown, which happened to both our second and fourth grade teachers. We all had to dress up for this deal , which was easier for the church kids than it was for the non-church kids. At the last-minute Mom remembered we had to dress nice and ran down the block to borrow a dress shirt and a clip - on tie from Billy Peterson’s mom. Billy got run over by and ice cream truck on Bradly Street a year earlier and died. Mom knew that Billy’s mom still had a lot of Billy’s clothes. I should have felt weird in a dead kid 's clothes, but all I felt was uncomfortable. Billy was wider and shorter than I was. At school, when Burt aske...