I was surfing around my blog roll catching up on my blog reading recently, when I came across GrannyMar‘s book meme. She was offering it as a challenge to anyone who wanted to give it a go, and since today is one of the busiest days of my week, and books are all over the place in my house, I couldn’t resist the temptation. Here’s what she said I was to do: 

* Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
* Find Page 123.
* Find the first 5 sentences.
* Post the next 3 sentences.
* Tag 5 people. 

As the title on the cover suggests, WAY OFF THE ROAD is a book by Bill Geist, who is, or was the roving correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, and serves up glimpses of the lives of small-town Americans and their off-beat ways of life. This book is a collection of some of the discoveries he made along the way, the kind of book that often jumps off the shelves into my hands on the non-fiction aisle of my favorite bookstore. 

The story being told on page 123 is about Figure 8 school bus racing, or wrecking, in a little town in Florida, Bithlo, with a population of 4,626.  There in Bithlo, not far from Orlando and Disney World in Orange County, Geist attended a Crash-A-Rama, which is a slamming stock car race, plus the more anticipated main event where school buses take the track for “figure 8” racing for the sole purpose of smashing into each other at 60 mph. I skipped five sentences down, to find and reproduce the following three sentences for your reading pleasure:

“What makes this appealing, is that it’s something you don’t see every day. Anybody can have a demolition derby, but how many people wreck school buses at sixty miles an hour? Another driver named Mayor offers: “People like to watch buses turn over.”

There! Does that make you want to buy the book? or go to Florida for the next Crash-A-Rama?

When I was sixteen, my father moved my mother and me from the farm to that big university town of Gainesville where we lived on Archer Road. Our house was directly across the road from Kanapaha Presbyterian Church and the (only recently) famous historical village of the same name. Running alongside the main road between our house and the church was a railroad track, where my friend Nancy and I found excitement putting pennies on the train track and waiting for the train to come along and smash them.

So if you happen to have the misfortune of living in an area of the country where watching school buses crash into each other is the most exciting thing you get for entertainment, and waiting for trains to crush pennies on railroad tracks comes second, my advice is, “Get the h*** outa there–sooner than later!

As for tagging five more bloggers to take up the meme, nah! Like Granny, anybody who takes a fancy to the idea of a book meme can have it. Be sure and invite me.