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(Dear Reader:  today’s “Small Town Stories” post was meant to be another humorous story of the mischievous journeys of our crew of boys, yet, I realized I couldn’t possibly begin the story without first introducing you to one of our greatest weapons of choice:  plastic cutlery.  This seemingly innocent box of utensils sets up numerous stories …  legends like “Mrs. G and the Midnight Holdup”, “Don’t Leave the Grand-Am Exposed”, “Where Are My Keys”, and “Deputy Dixon’s D-Day”.  So, before we get into those stories, let’s go back to the origin of the infamous, plastic forks, spoons, and knives).

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Plastic forks, spoons, and knives.  These “Small Town Stories” wouldn’t be complete without their honorable mention.

At any given time, given the moment to slow things down a bit and ease into reminiscing about childhood, these darling cutlery utensils appear.

It all started when this new kid showed up in high school.  His Dad was a doctor of sorts, something most of us kids had never heard of … an “Internist”.  I wasn’t sure if that was somebody who looked inside of you, or if was like a Junior Doctor or something (Intern) trying to catch up and get a real job.

Word spread quickly down the streets about the new family’s arrival.  Word spread even more quickly that there were four kids.  FOUR KIDS.  That’s a score for us.  To top that, one of them was MY AGE.

As if things couldn’t get better, this family bought the mansion.  No, not just any house in McRae, GA — they bought THE MANSION — The Max & Emma Sue McRae House of 1897.

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The Mansion was this massive, white, colonial home with this huge wrap around porch, towering balconies, and stone chimneys that would come to serve as brute force protection from bottle rockets, roman candles, and police car search lights.

Though Presbyterians from Baltimore, this new family somehow found a home on the pews of good ole’ McRae United Methodist Church.  Just about everybody in our crew went there – as far as we concerned, Baptists were as much a cult as any other weird religion.  It was there that we first met our new found pal, Chad.

It didn’t take long for Chad to become a fixture in our crew.  He was funny, smart, the chicks liked him, and he’d come from the city — so he knew things that were a bit foreign to us small towners.

One such thing?  Forking.

Forking (as in, forking a yard) is a stunt where you sneak out in the middle of the night and stick plastic forks in someone’s yard.  They wake up to a mini-graveyard of plastic forks poking out of the earth and the cleanup is a real … well, let’s say “nuisance”, but you thought the word, most likely.

Now I’d heard of some kids “rolling” a house or trees with toilet paper, but forking?  This seemed kind of strange.  Soon, we’d have our first opportunity.

So here’s the catch.  You can’t really just go up to your folks and say “Mom, Dad, could you please pickup several hundred boxes of plastic forks for me at the Piggly Wiggly today?”.  That’s like planning your own funeral.  As a result, we were stuck buying our own cutlery.  The only problem with that is there is limited shelf space in Dickie Rich’s Quick-Stops, so instead of giving us a choice of forks, spoons, or knives, you had to get a big combo box with all three.

I’m still not quite sure what these late-night cashiers thought when a group of hormonal, silly, clumsy guys strolled in grabbing every box of plastic cutlery in the store.  You’d think we were buying some serious contraband they way we checked out.

Soon enough, “forking” became known not just for forks – but for forks, spoons, knives, and whatever else could be had.

Forking wasn’t  a passing fad.  It became part of our ritual.  A calling card of sorts.  Others adopted our evil practices but none were as eloquent as “The Crew”.  Forking would soon give way to some of the funniest (and scariest) stories of our adolescence.

(Stay tuned over the coming Saturdays for more stories, including forking stories like the ones mentioned above).

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