Yeehaw! A shotgun wedding!
My third grade teacher wasn’t too bright, but she was a great story reader. She did all the dialects in a loud, raucous voice. We ate it up. One day she was reading a story — I have no idea what it was — and someone made reference to a “shotgun wedding“. Maybe it was in the story, but equally likely was that someone in the class just asked her because they’d heard the term.
She boldly looked right at us — and lied. I’m sure she knew what a shotgun wedding was, but she wasn’t going to try to explain it to a bunch of 9 year old children. So she said these words to us: “That’s when a hillbilly gets married and all the kinfolk come out and celebrate by firing their shotguns off into the air.”
I grew up around country folks, so I could plainly imagine this going on. Just like every other bit of trivia I learned, I filed this away in my head for use some time later. That time came 8 years later.
I was 16 years old. I had a 15 year old girlfriend and her 18 year old sister was getting married. These were country folks, living in trailers and cabins in the woods outside of town. They had all driven “into town” to pick up the wedding dress.
I honestly didn’t think of the words until they were leaving my mouth. But there I was, standing in the hot sun, girlfriend by my side, her mother and sister facing me, and the fiance thankfully out of earshot, when I heard these words in my own voice: “Well is it gonna be a shotgun wedding?” In my head I was imagining the two families coming out in the woods (it was an outdoor wedding) and firing off their guns in celebratory jubilation.
But as soon as I heard the words out loud, their meaning became clear in my mind. Quickly my mind raced to the thoughts of my third-grade teacher faced with a classroom of 9 year old students, lying to us to avoid having to tell us the truth, and subsequently catapulting me into the catastrophic moment in which I now found myself. As I regained my senses a few milliseconds later, I looked up into the cold, black stares of the sister and mother. I turned to my scared and angry girlfriend and realized that I was all alone.
This fallacy, like the bubblegum story, had got itself embedded in my head where it waited in hibernation for its moment in the sun. This one, however, escaped into the wild before my very eyes. I’m not sure how I survived this event; I think I blocked out the ensuing wrath of all involved.
But I’ve never forgiven my third-grade teacher for telling me such an embarassing whopper.
August 20th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
Aren’t most third graders 8 years old?
August 21st, 2005 at 8:42 am
I believe this was late in the year when everyone was 8 or 9, depending on their birthday. But it was almost 30 years ago, so I can’t be sure. I would’ve been 8 (birthday in October).
Not that it matters, but this classroom was an odd experiment: it was a 2nd grade & 3rd grade class combined in one room. So in reality, she had 7 to 9 year olds (at least) in the room.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:54 am
When I was in, I guess, first grade, my social studies teacher regaled us with a tale of how her mother once showed her a picture of an “orange-u-tan”. She and her siblings went on to believe her, and years later, her mother discovered that she’d been incorrect, and called them to apologize and tell them that the correct pronunciation is “orangutan”.