The Drinking Fountain
I hadn’t felt that depressed since I was caught drinking from the middle fountain at Newcastle Elementary School.
One of the wrong girls had sipped from that fountain and, by the time my classmates saw that I’d touched the same knob, they spread the news throughout the entire playground! I wasn’t sure what had happened, but the consensus of laughter and ridicule made it clear that I now suffered a severe case of the cooties.
I rushed home in tears to my mother, only to have her laugh and tell me to go play.
But a strange and wonderful thing happened when I returned to school the next week. I discovered that by joining the anti-cootie party and not being friendly to certain classmates, I could inoculate myself against further cootie outbreaks. None of this made sense to me, but I was too desperate for the cure to ask questions.I had to laugh at this one - it reminded me of something that happened to me when I was a kid. My mom and I were at a bus station in the 50's (when segregated water fountains were common) and I went to get a drink of water. A man remarked to my mom that I had drunk from the water fountain marked "Colored Only". "It's alright," my mother replied, "he can't read!"
LOLOL!!!!!! What a classic (and classy) response.