Miss Crabbe! I will never forget her. Probably because I never learned a thing when she was teaching class.

To explain, let me start at the begining. I went to school in a small town in Northern California in the Redwood Empire. The Pacific Northwest is a very rainy part of the country. Our parents often sent us to school wearing galoshes. Of course, we hated them, but our kid opinions didn't matter. We still had to wear them.

Miss Crabbe was a very old lady. In kid years, she had to be 150. She was a retired teacher, but she came in sometimes to substitute. It is a good thing she wasn't there every day because we would have learned nothing any rainy day we had in her class.

The reason we would have learned nothing from Miss Crabbe was because at exactly ten minutes before the final bell rang each day she was substitute teaching, she would announce that it was time to put on our galoshes. But Miss Crabbe did not call them galoshes. She called them RUBBERS! Of course, being ten years old, we thought of something else: the funniest thing to ten-year old kids in the world---rubbers, prophylactics! We weren't sure exactly what they were, but we knew it had to do with S-E-X!

Every rainy day that Miss Crabbe taught class, we spent the day looking at that clock, anxiously awaiting the time she would say IT. We could not keep a straight face the whole day. All we had to do was look at another classmate and we would burst into giggles. Rubbers were a pretty funny thing to ten-year-olds in the early sixties.

To this day, when I see a pair of galoshes on a child or even a picture of a child in galoshes, I smile to myself. I will never forget Miss Crabbe and her rubbers.