Sunday, June 21, 2015

A Few Sandwiches Short of a Picnic

Do you know that expression?  It's one of the many charming phrases I grew up hearing that no one else seems to know.

If someone fits that category, they aren't quite all there.

For the 4th day this week, I'm playing with the SITS girls in their Stop the Summer Slump Blogging Challenge.  I'm a few days behind but let's pretend I'm not.

Today's theme is picnics.  We are supposed to write about a picnic, show pictures of one we had, make up a short story about picnics, etc.

I realized I haven't had many actual picnics in my life, but I suppose the closest I've ever come was one time in college.

Like probably every college, Vanderbilt had a freshman orientation program for the first few days of school called VUCEPT.  It was an acronym for something and since I was a VUCEPTOR my sophomore year, which meant I was a leader of a freshman group, I suppose I was all gung ho about what the letters stood for but 20 years later, I haven't the slightest idea beyond v(Vanderbilt) u(university).  Maybe the rest was about the conCEPT of college?

Who knows.

VUCEPT was all about making freshman feel like part of a group within the first few hours so they would embrace college life and not be sad about leaving home.  Our VUCEPTORS met us in our rooms very soon after moving in and we got together in a group of about 10.

One of the first things I remember doing, and it might actually have been the very first thing, was to go with our group across the street to Centennial Park.  This was a mini Central Park, very mini but more expansive than any park I'd ever been in, and it has its own Parthenon.  Like the one in Greece.

A Parthenon in Nashville.  Who knew?

We took a couple of pizzas to a table in the park and sat and ate pizza and got to know each other a little.  It was no picnic with a blankt or ants or kids paying with bubbles.  But, it was a meal outside in a park, with people, so I suppose was  a picnic.

I can't remember a single thing about our conversations that night and I vaguely remember some of the people in my group.  I know my VUCEPTOR was blond but I have no recollection of the guy VUCEPTOR.  I thought vucept groups became lifelong friends, but other than passing by a few of them a couple of times, I never saw them or talked to them again.

Isn't it funny how much you do with people when you have to, and you think you have a lot in common but when the push to do things together goes away, you just drift?  I can tell you a few of their names but I don't have any pictures of anything we did and it was all so busy and fast those first few days, I don't remember a lot of what we did.

Why that "picnic" stands out is a total mystery!

Linking here:
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2015/06/clever-chicks-blog-hop-144-with-brinsea.html

1 comment:

  1. If you're an american, you may not be that familiar with the expression 'a few sandwiches short of a picnic'. It was an expression that originated in Australia around the middle of the 19th century, then was printed in a news paper in the 1980's, many people wrote in with their own variations (& there are many) but the basic principle is 'an X short of a Y' indicating one is not all there in the head, low intelligence, a bit slow or crazy...

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