Stealing Canned Food for Snacks

Snack time losers.

Growing up we didn't have snacks per se. That is to say, we consumed anything snack like at such a rapid pace that there was no chance for accumulation to occur. I was shocked when I went to a snack-having house and saw cans of soda just sitting in the fridge all higeldy-pigeldy without a care in the world. The philosophy at my house was to consume as much as possible as quickly as possible to keep anyone else from getting any.

When I wanted something sweet to eat in the middle of a long day of building forts or making inventions, I would pop down to the cellar and get a canned food snack. I would open a jar of peaches, pears or apricots and eat the whole quart on a whim. If I was feeling a little more tropical, I might jump right into a can of pineapple. To really satisfy the old sweet tooth, I would drink a can of sweetened condensed milk. Drink maybe the wrong word for something of that consistency, slurped might be more appropriate.  

I even stole and ate some desserts out of army MREs that my dad had in case of an emergency. In what may come as a complete surprise, I have not maintained healthy eating habits as an adult.

This method of meeting my daily sugar intake needs had me skating on thin ice. One of the two things my mom held sacred was wasting food, the other was nap-time. If I was caught consuming food outside of the legal channels the punishment could be a rigorous yelling at and grounding.  

The Headless Horseman

This guy was a mainstay in the stable of my pre-pubescent 

Mixed up in my young mind with the devil worshiping scare were the scary stories my dad would tell his scout troop when we went out camping. One night they were over at our house and I was supposed to be asleep in my bed, but I was actually hiding underneath a china hutch so I could listen in. In the interest in my long-term mental stability, I should have stayed in bed, but I stayed to hear the horrifying tales. 

The kid's stories were malformed  and fell stillborn from their unsubtle minds. My dad, in great storyteller fashion, stole his story whole cloth from Washington Irving. He told about the Hessian soldier who had his head shot off by a cannon ball and thereafter spent his eternity riding down travelers to take their heads. 

Definitely cozy bedtime stuff for a high strung and anxious kid like myself. I loved my head and was always concerned for its safety. For years, every time I was in a dark place at night I fantasized about being decapitated by the headless horseman.  I couldn't enjoy a walk in the woods for years after and was too terrified to sleep outside. Even in my own bed at home I would wake up panicked in a cold sweat from a headless horseman related dream. 

In a few years, when I outgrew this terror, I went as the headless horseman for Halloween. I thought it would be most effective, terror-wise, to put an actual pumpkin on my head. This was not the case and I ended up looking like a ten-year-old with half a pumpkin on his head. Kids from the neighborhood thought it was so funny that they called me pumpkin-head for years afterward. In a strange way the headless horseman still haunted me, he had just shifted from preying on my fear of decapitation to my fear of pre-pubescent social awkwardness.

Devil Worshipers Everywhere

Daytime talk shows keeping America safe by reporting on the secrets of Satanism.

I just realized that I had not heard the term 'devil worshiper' in about 10 or 15 years. There was a time when they were blamed for every bad thing we couldn't otherwise attribute. 

Dead cat? Devil worshipers. 

Weird campsite with a box of porn and empty beer bottles? Devil worshipers. 

A pentagram made of rope in the bell tower of the old school? You better believe it was devil worship. 

They were on daytime talk all the time and adults would postulate devil worship as a possible root cause for all kinds of strange or criminal behavior. I even remember some kids from Tennessee on the news being convicted of killing someone in a Satanic ritual. Then it all just went away and that was the end of that.  

Kidnapped by Devil Worshipers

No devil-worshiping kidnapper can capture this passcode protected kid.

The reason that I was so afraid of being kidnaped and murdered by devil worshipers is that my mom told me that was what was going to happen if I was not careful. In the 80's there was a Satanic ritual abuse scare and my mom got right into the thick of it reading books and going to classes.  She learned all about how children were abducted and abused or killed in satanic rituals. None of it was actually true, but that did not stop it from feeling true. The worst part is that she was telling us about it at every opportunity. You know? To keep us safe.

She went so far as to develop a secret honk to identify a potential ride as authorized by my parents and not the devil. We had a second level of protection in a passcode phrase that would identify, or just confuse, someone sent to pick us up in case of an emergency. The hypothetical situation my mother presented us was that of a stranger approaching us after school, telling us our parents had been in a car wreck and that they needed to take us to the hospital. This next part is the top of top secret so I tell you in the strictest faith that you yourself are not a devil worshiper or kidnapping pedophile; if you are, look away. I was in this moment of high stress supposed to question the credentials of my would-be assailants with this question:

I would say, “What is your name?”

If they were a full-on-devil-worshiping-kid-killer they would respond with their real name. If sent by my parents, the ones in intensive care because of the horrible accident, they would know to respond, “Pudin-Tain, ask me again and I'll tell you the same.”

I never got to use this method except in role-playing practice.

I was the only blonde in the family so my mom would sometimes take me aside to give me an extra word of warning. I needed to be extra careful walking to and from school or going out at night because Satanist wanted most of all to kidnap little blond kids. Thanks for the heads up mom, I'll just be crying to myself in the corner.  

Having to Kill to Survive

I don't have the numbers right here in front of me but I think I read somewhere that between 100% and 200% of all murders happen in and around cellars. 

Growing up we had a root cellar that was underneath the empty house in front of our trailer. That is where murderers and kidnappers lived pretty much all the time. 

Of course they had day jobs, so the cellar was perfectly safe when the sun was up. Come dark, they would scurry home to hide behind every dark corner and lie in wait. Just in case there were any eight-year-old boys that ordered to get a can of apricots from the basement. 

The cellar trip was about a hundred feet and making it worse was that the outside garbage cans were about two-thirds of the way there.  Every time I went past, there was a stray cat hanging around. When I turned the corner it would run off, in a blatant attempt to cause my already cautious heart to explode. 

When I reached the cellar door it was vital, if I wanted to preserve any minuscule chance of survival, that I open the door as little as possible to reach my my arm in and turn on the light. Once the light was on, the killers vanished and I could get my canned goods without fear. Then I had to go back. I would reverse the process by almost shutting the door with me on the outside before shutting off the light and running full tilt to get back to the house before I captured by the forces of evil. While I was running back I would hold whatever canned good I was retrieving over my head in a high ready-kill position. In case someone did try and accost me I was coiled like a spring poised to attack.

Which is what I had to do one night when one of my dad's friends thought it would be funny to wait around the corner from the garbage cans and impersonate a murderer. I rounded the corner at top speed. He jumped out and yelled 'Boo!'.  I bashed a jar of green beans down on his head, as per plan, and then hit him with them again while screaming and scrambling to safety. 

The lesson here is clear; if you don't want your head cut up by a broken jar of home canned green beans don't go around pretending to be a devil worshiping, kid stealing, murderer in the dark. Simple as that. 

The Rewards

Maybe I wouldn't kill my own mother to sit here but maybe I would. . . hard to say.

 If we were good in class, or it was our birthday, we got to sit in a plywood train desk for a little while or for the whole day. I will testify that never have so many given so much for so little. We would sit quietly for an hour just for a chance to be chosen the quietest and be beckoned forward to our reward.

If I am being honest, and I am trying to be, was like most of life's rewards, much superior in the anticipation. The desk was cramped and had little visibility. Also like most of life's rewards, the chosen pretends to have a great time just to rub it in. This is how Disney Land works.

The other great reward was going to recess a few moments early. That meant we could run over and monopolize the swing set before anyone else got out of class. We had a small play-set in the little kids playground with only two swings. The goal was to run fast to get on a swing and then sit there as your butt went numb for the entire recess. The slowpokes begged for even one tiny turn and the swing lord would gloat as the choked on the jealousy. The swing was not fun enough to justify a 15 minute commitment but being the center of attention while the hoi polloi begged was. This is how country clubs work.

See? I did learn important life lessons in school.

Like a Burned Up Raisin

This was what I was referring to when I called him a burned up raisen. I blame the media.

I did get picked on a lot but my smart mouth was a big part of the the reason. I always pushed jokes too far or made jokes about someone that hurt their dignity and pride. 

Truth be told, making fun of and then getting in a fight with someone is how I made my best friends. I was in a class with a Mexican boy who was much larger, taller, and wider than the rest of us. I thought it was hilarious to call him the six-foot-raisin. I know, I know, I can't believe what passed for humor when I was eight. 

He took it pretty well until one day he asked my why I called him the-six-foot-raisin. I told him it was because he looked like a burned up raisin, a reference to his brown skin and his passing resemblance to the dancing Raisins on TV. The problem was we were in a group of about 20 kids standing around in the slushy snow waiting for the teacher to unlock the door for the morning. They laughed, he got embarrassed and we got in a knock down roll in the slush rip our clothes fight. It left us both bleeding and covered in slushy mud. We fought for so long we missed the first and second bell and both staggered in cold and wounded 5 minutes late.

The teacher freaked out, called our parents and while we both waited for our parents to come get us in the office I apologized and we bonded. We were good friends all through school and I still keep up with his family. Good guy. I have since learned the politically correct term is Hispanic or Burned-Up-Raisin-American. 

Stacking Up the Teams

When we played games at recess the popular kids loved to stack up the teams in favor of the cool kids. The kids would make ridiculous picking rules to keep all the good kids on one team. They would say that their team got to pick the first four and then the loser team could pick. Another trick was that two good players would refuse to play if they were not on the same team. It was called a two-for-one deal.

As a adult I now have a little bit more dignity and would just walk away from an abusive team picking scheme. Doing what the popular kids said seemed so big and essential when I was eight. We of the second and third tier athletically and socially would wait in line as the cool kids worked out their Machiavellian self service. Then we fought over the scraps, not in the sense of who got the bad kids but who had to take them. On occasion, I would end up on the all winners team which only damned me to watching the action and staying out of the good kids way. If the ball came to me my job was to throw it to someone good and not screw that up or face expulsion from the team. I should have walked away and kept my dignity but I wanted so badly to be popular and to be cool that I thought that it would be better to try and play along. It didn't work.

Butt Ball

It looks like I was not the only one who sucked at butt ball.

 Baseball was huge in my elementary school and  popularity was tied to how good at baseball you were. I wasn't, either.

We could not play baseball during recess so we played its psychopathic cousin 'Butt Ball'. The rules of 'Butt Ball' are complex, but the object is to get nerdy kids to play so that you can drill them in the butt with a tennis ball. The game is played by everyone getting in line and a kid "breaks the ice" by throwing the ball against the dugout. Once it is in the air everyone tries to catch it and throw it against the wall before the thrower can touch the wall. If he touches the wall, he is safe, but if the ball hits the wall first he gets one 'out'. If someone is able to catch the ball before it touches the ground then the thrower gets an automatic 'out'. 

After three outs, or basically instantly for me, you have to stand against the wall and let someone 'peg' you with the ball as hard as they could. They were supposed to throw it from a line twenty feet from the wall, but if the victim was a nerdy kid no one cared much if you scooched up 10 or so feet and let rip. It hurt exactly as you would imagine a tennis ball thrown at your back would hurt. If you flinched then they would call out a 'firing squad' where everyone got to throw the ball at you once. The judgement on what constituted a flinch was also influenced by social standing.

I don't know why I ever played this game. I couldn't throw, I couldn't catch and I hate, hate, hate, getting hit hard in the head with projectiles. 

Too Nerdy to Play, and Getting Decked.

Doesn't look too rough, I mean I'll need a towel and some sunblock but otherwise, I'll be fine. 

 As insufferable as I must have been I did have one friend. Not in the sense that we played together but sometimes we sat by each other at lunch and would both get picked last for games. His name was Robby and really wanted to be his friend because he was possibly the only person lower on the social ladder then myself. I would call him every once in a while and he would say he didn't want to play, he just wanted to read books, but if I wanted to I could bring some books over and join in. Too nerdy to play? I thought I was all-in nerd wise, but here I was out classed. Robby even had thick lensed plastic glasses. That magnificent bastard.

Robby did try to save my life after I had made fun of a much older boy at lunch recess one day. The older boy chased me down and I was bravely holding tight to a fence post while he tried to pry me off and in his words – 'deck me in the mouth'. 'Decking in the face' was the misuse of the old slang 'to deck someone' meaning, to punch a sailor so hard he was knocked unconscious and fell to the deck of a ship. While the boy was claiming that he was going to deck me in the face I was too terrified to point out his misuse of the colloquialism. 

Robby saw my predicament and ran over and started to pull on the kids waist to pull him off of me. Robby being less occupied with survival started right in with making fun of the way he was using the term 'decked'. He was saying, “You are going to deck us in the face? Why don't you deck us on deck of a boat on Lake Tahoe. Or do you mean a deck of cards?” The whole time he was pulling and mocking keeping the situation from degrading into a full blown deck-a-thon. The bell rang and we went in to class, not to bad off for having looked death in the eye. After school we stayed around the class for a bit until we were sure any murderous 5^th graders had gone home.

Top of the Class

You are always the smartest kid your age in home-school

The isolation or the lack of comparison of home schooling engendered in me a sense of intellectual  superiority. I always assumed that my completely unstructured homeschooling somehow made me more intelligent than my peers. When I went back to school, every other year, there was a transition period where I realized that there were other smart kids in my classes. I then had to hate them. Hate is maybe too strong a word, but it was definitely on the angry side of jealousy. 

I was only good at one thing, being smart, and I felt like anyone else that was also smart took away from my glory. I may have been massively misinformed about the amount of glory that was on the table to be divided up. If I would have known, I may have tried harder at sports. As it was my pride was on the line in all academic endeavors, I had to be the first to finish assignments, the first done with worksheets and test. I would have to always get 100% on tests or my day was ruined. If anyone else ever got praise for getting a question right, I would try and get in on it by expanding upon and correcting the original answer. Yes, I was that kid, actually not 'I was', It should read 'I am'.

There were two areas in which I took particular interest in doing mental battle, speed math and creative writing. A girl named Shelly was amazing at math and once a week we would get a 100 problem speed math worksheet with addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems on it. The goal was to try and answer all of them as fast as we could. The problem was Shelly's faster was much faster than mine. It killed me, I would be in the 60's when she slapped down her pencil and raised her hand. I tried to be practice being faster, but she was just so much better than me that it was not even close. This is where I should have worked harder got better and learned good sportsmanship. What I did was cheat.

The teacher handed out the papers and we were supposed to wait until everyone had one and then flip them over and start. I would flip mine over early and covered it with a plain piece of paper that I could read through and solve the first twenty questions before Shelly even got started. The sad thing is, half of the time I would still lose to her. When I would win I would think that my cheating just proved that I was smarter to have thought of that trick.

In creative writing, there was no cheating so I had to resort to fan service. In writing my arch nemesis was named Ben. On Thursday's everyone was supposed to write a story and anyone who wanted to could read it in front of the class and have it voted on to see who's was best. There were pretenders, but week in and week out it would come down to Ben and I in the final. I discovered early on that third graders loved only one thing and that was humor and the closer you could get to the potty variety the better. We couldn't come right out and hit them with our 'A' material it was a little blue for a Thursday afternoon, so we trafficked in euphemism, name dropping and innuendo. For example, the principal would fall into some misfortune that almost, but not quite, crossed the line of scatological decency. We would weave popular kids into the narrative as protagonists and have their powers be the hyperbolically best-er-est ever, pandering the vote was never so easy. The winner would get a piece of candy. The loser got the satisfaction of of all rejected writers, having the better story, but just being misunderstood by those idiots. 

Getting Glasses

To dorky? well maybe these bad boys will sort you out and have you looking cool in no time. Maybe.

When I was in third grade I finally filled out my nerd credentials. I got glasses. I failed one of those school nurse run eye exams and my mom took me to get glasses. We went to a place that promised my glasses would be done in about an hour so a bragged to everyone at school that I would have a new pair of glasses the next day. I went in looking at some frames that I thought would be cool, something dark with oblong lenses. My mom would hear none of it she said she thought gold rims with square lenses were the only 'sharp' looking ones. Being eight and not as wise as I am now, I went with her judgment.

It turned out they were not really going to be ready in about an hour because, as the sales guy explained to us, that was an advertising gimmick and only a few stores could deliver on that promise. The trick was to have us get the exam, pick the frames, and pay and then tell us it would be a week. Classic.

The next day I had to explain that the glasses were really special and super cool and that is why they had to be made custom and they may take more like a week to be fully ready. When my week was up we picked up my glasses and I thought I looked pretty cool and smart and my mom confirmed my thinking on that so I went back to school with a little bit of swagger. I think that is really what is wrong with nerds, we don't know what cool is and we can mistake a new pair of glasses that our moms picked out as a really happening thing. Of course, the glasses didn't make me look cooler, if anything my classmates thought I looked more like a nerd.

Peeing my Pants at the Color Play Recital

A Purple Pirate is 100% more lame than a baseball player. Fact.

The third grade teachers had us put on a play for the school about colors, I don't know why, but they did. I mean that the subject is more appropriate for kindergartners. So if we were not there to learn our colors, then was it to expand our skills in acting, song and dance? 

Third graders hated kindergartners, would mock them and call them, 'kindergarten babies, born in the gravy'. If that insult seems nonsensical that is because it is. Enmity notwithstanding, the 3rd grade teachers put their heads together and decided that we should teach about the colors through the medium of big, beautiful, show-stopping, song and dance numbers. 

They divided the kids into thematic color groups; blue baseball players, purple pirates, pink princesses, and five or six others. With limited places in each group there was fierce competition for the boys to play baseball players and the girls all wanted to be princesses. I had to be a stupid purple pirate. 

After lunch every day the third grade classes would head down to the lunch/gym/stage room. There we would get yelled at for an hour as we tried to learn our songs and dances. I don't recall who was in charge of the project, but she wasn't one of the third grade teachers and she was fat and mean. She was from the motivate-through-insult school of musical theater. She demanded perfection and would belittle us out of concern for the quality of the show. In short, it was more about her than us.

Before one of these recitals I had spent my entire lunch break making place-mats out of yarn and not going pee as I should have. I was to the crotch pinching, pee-pee dance stage of bladder discomfort when the purple pirates were called upon to sing and dance.  We were generally holding forth on the merits of the swashbuckling life and how that was deeply intertwined with the color purple. I was locking elbows in a 'do-si-do' with a fellow pirate and skipping in a circle when a little bit of pee came out. By 'little' I mean most of it. I decided the best course of action was to keep dancing like it was no big deal and hope no one noticed. That did not work. 

My pants were quite obviously soaked in pee and it only took a second for one kid to notice and to yell to everyone else that I had peed my pants.  All hell broke loose with kids laughing and teachers trying to maintain order and me exiting stage left to take the walk of shame to the office to call my mom. The office lady even made me sit on a towel while I waited. I vowed never to come back to school. I commitment I kept until the next day. I thought my life was over, but to my surprise no one said anything about it again, ever. 

Crochet Gets Big

That is the most beautiful thing since the whole world combined.

 In third grade our teacher introduced us to the most wondrous pastime, crochet and hot pad making. At recess in the winter she would let us stay inside if we wanted and teach us how to crochet. For the uncoordinated she had these little yarn-pattern nail boards that you could string copious amounts of yarn into a pattern on, and then tie at the intersections, cut loose and bam! A hot pad or a place mat. 

As you know every home needs at least two good hot pads. These were not good hot pads but they were so quick and easy to make we figured our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts could all use a couple of ratty looking yarn messes around the house. We had to supply our own yarn so kids were begging their moms to feed their addiction. We would promise to turn a bunch of useless yarn into hot pads, place-mats and anything that a flat mat of yarn could be re-purposed into. 

We would get so absorbed into making these that we would forgo the usual necessities of recess like going to the bathroom to spend just a few more minutes at the loom. If you didn't go to the bathroom during the break you had to spend one of your tickets to go during class. each student got two tickets every day and at the end of the week you could buy candy with your tickets. I never used any because the teacher would sell these massive fruit flavored candy sticks for ten tickets, which was a perfect ticket week. My obsession with hot pads and my determination to never use a ticket along with a school play conspired to publicly humiliate me. But that is story for another time.

Pencil In the Arm

Click, Click, Stick!

 In that same 3^rd grade class I had to sit next to a stinky girl. She would spend most days hocking up phlegm, spit it onto her desk and then lick it back up. She smelled terrible and was always slopping her books and papers onto my desk. When I would push them back to her side she would punch or slap me.

When she was really bored she would take her mechanical pencil and click it out to be about an inch long and then stab it into my arm. I would sometimes have five or six leads broken off in my arm before she ran out of ammo.  She was also a shameless cheater who would just grab a test off of my desk and copy it at her leisure. I tattled as often as I dared but the teacher didn't seem to care she just told me that the girl needed special help and that I should try and be nice. A few months after school started she was walking on top of a wall on the school grounds and fell and broke something that made her miss school for a month and I was blissfully un-nieghbored for awhile. When she came back the seats were changed and it was someone else's turn to get abused.   

Defending My Mother's Honor

Yes, I know where babies come from, they come from this old hospital, which was re-purposed to a city center. The musician Jewel Kilcher was born in the same hospital on the same day. Coincidence? No.

I went back to school in the third grade and had to try and fit back in like I was a new kid. I was a goofy  kid who had clothes from a thrift store and I was a terrible athlete to boot. Unfortunately for me few 3^rd grade friendships are based on how good someone is at math and science. There are few friendships based on that, period.

Recess consisted of me misunderstanding social signals and trying to include myself where I was not wanted and either being awkward or inadvertently starting a fight. As you may recall, I was a veritable 7th level black belt in nerd karate. There are major differences in the practicality of pretend nerd karate and real fighting ability. The main difference being that fake nerd karate is useless in a fight that is not in your imagination, or versus much younger kids. Armed with my ineffectual fighting skills one day I decided to beat up an Italian kid who we called Tommy Tomato.

We called him that  because we couldn't pronounce his last name which sounded a little bit like tomato. Why did he need a beat down? Because he insulted my mother's honor. He told me at recess that my mom and dad had ESS-E-EX and that is how I was born. If there was one thing I knew for a fact at eight years old was that sex was naughty and I knew for certain my dear mother was no dirty sex-haver. I attacked Tommy with all my nerd fury and got a bloody nose and he ripped my shirt.

When we came in from recess all bloody and muddy the teacher took us aside and asked each of us our story. At first I was not going to tell her the cause so as not to embarrass myself and further besmirch the name of my sainted mother. When she told me she would have to call my parents if I didn't tell, I cracked and told her the whole story. I had to literally spell out the accusation that started the fight because I couldn't say 'sex'. When I told her what Tommy had accused my mother of, she smiled and covered her mouth to suppress a giggle. I was furious. She thinks some kid calling my mom a sex-haver is some kind of funny joke? 

She got the class settled in and then took Tommy and I to the principal's office. Tommy went in first while I sat on the couch fearing the worst. I didn't know what went on in there, but every kid in the school was terrified of being sent to the principal so it had to be horrible. He was actually a sweet guy who sent Tommy out and called me in. He asked me to tell him my side of the story and when I laid out the provocations that pushed me beyond the brink of my restraint he smiled like he thought it was funny. I was so mad that everyone thought this was some kind of joke that I was boiling inside, but my nerd rage was kept in check by my overwhelming cowardice. 

He called my mom to come get me and he talked to her alone in his office for a minute and then we left without me even getting in trouble at all, not from her, not from him. This was not a clean getaway because we went to the Provo library and checked out a video called the 'Miracle of Life'. We went home and my mom put it in the VCR and left me alone while I was introduced to the horrors of childbirth. 

I wish she would have given me a softer introduction than a clinical documentary. You know? Something like, 'When a mommy and daddy love each other very much. . .”. 

Not an hour long movie that ends up in a crotch shot of a baby popping out. 

Get Off My Property! Or You are Getting Sued!

Just fill in the part about how they wouldn't get off your lawn and then let the law take its course

Maybe it was a local phenomenon but as children we were really concerned about the concepts of property rights and civil litigation. Even in the mobile home park, where none of us owned the land, if you wanted a kid to leave your house you would tell them to 'get off our property'. It seemed like a couple of time a day someone was telling someone else where the property line was and how far back from the property they were legally required to stay. 

If a kid wouldn't leave the only recourse was to threaten legal action. Every kid was telling other kids that if they didn't get off the property that they would either call the cops or they would sue the offender. If there was a lawyer who was in need of some brisk but profitless business he could have just hung around the mobile home park and slapped some don't-touch-my-porch litigation down several times a day. I am not really sure what we thought suing was but that constant specter hung over all the very serious goings on we kids got up to.

Huge Snow Hills

Whoa, there is so much potential sitting right here laced with gravel and dreams

 There seemed to be more snow in the 80's. Now they just push the snow off to the side of the road in one continuous slushy mess. Back then the snowplows pushed the snow out of the road into huge beautiful off-white mountains. These were the perfect enticement to grab a sled and go sledding. Much like the false promise of a jumping into a pile a leafs, you hit bottom before the fun could begin.

What they were good for was making snow forts. Every year we would go out and try to make an igloo by rolling balls of snow and stacking them, this is impossible. I suspect an Inuit prank to waste the time of unsuspecting kids from small western towns. When we had a huge pile of snow already in place all we had to do was dig and in an hour or two we would have a snow fort death trap. I would take old appliance parts and stick them into the wall of our snow cave to simulate a technical control center. Making all the necessary sounds with my mouth and pretend that our little base was always in deep crises and I had to make noises and flip switches to hold the catastrophe at bay.

About November every year, my aunt and grandmother would buy us all new coats and gloves and give them to us at a party they called 'little Christmas'. By the middle of winter those gloves would be long gone, lost or destroyed. To protect our hands from the cold we used to grab a pair of socks out of the big laundry basket we always had full of unmatched pairs. We would slip those on our hands for mittens. If you are familiar with socks or the function of mittens you may have realized the major flaws in our plan, soak through and the lack of a thumb. The socks would be sopping wet in 15 minutes and we would bring them in and put them on the wood stove and freshen up our hand-wear. When my dad would come home at the end of the day he would have something irrational to say about how he didn't have any socks for work because we had used sixty pairs for mittens and that if we couldn't keep track of our gloves then we couldn't use his socks for mittens.

Can't? I think a quick look around at the piles of soggy socks in the living room will show you that it was not only possible, but the Fait is already Accompli as the French say.

Lighting Things on Fire

Should have clearer instructions about not filling with gas and playing under the house 

My brother and I were into fires, not a passing playing with matches fancy, more like the kind that involves accelerants. We were well versed in the old standby of gasoline, but we were always looking for ways to expand our repertoire. 

My dad's business used all sorts of flammable substances, glues, solvents and the like used in tragically non-fire-starting, legitimate ways. We were compelled to re-purpose them in more entertaining ways. We smeared flammable glues onto surfaces and then try and light them by throwing lit matches at them. We poured solvents into trenches built around ant piles in the famous flaming ant moat maneuver. We held matches in front of an aerosol can and made an awesome flame-thrower. Molotov's? Molotov's? This isn't amateur hour so, heck, yes. 

Where were our parents? I am not sure. I almost got caught lighting some alcohol on fire just before my dad came around the corner to talk to us. He never noticed the fire because alcohol burns nearly clear. Bullet dodged. Everything went along fine until one day we bought some miniature heart shaped kerosene lanterns on clearance from the pharmacy. We brought them home and filled them with gasoline and lit them, which was awesome. By reason of our stupidity we thought it would be even better to play with fire under the house. 

We brought the lanterns and some gas in a cup and were fooling around with them on the concrete pad under the mobile home. For those few who have not spent much time underneath a mobile home, I will set the scene for you. It is dark, dusty and filled with cobwebs. It has just about enough clearance to crawl, but the main beams stick down close to the ground and cut the clearance to about a belly crawl. There are also lots of pipes and wires hanging down. Best of all though is that parents never, ever, go under a mobile home. One of the lamps tipped over and spilled its gas, but it was actually pretty cool looking so we watched the gas burn on the pad until it was about to go out. I decided to re-stoke the fire with a little of the gas that we had brought. This is where things could have gone terribly wrong. The whole cup of gas lit on fire in a flash, but somehow managed not to light either Matt or I on fire and the house only lost cob webs. We were singed and rattled but otherwise no worse for wear. 

So, constant reader know this, that old saying about how God protects pyromaniacs is true. That's not an old saying? Well, it darn well should be. If this anecdote doesn't prove it, I don't know what will.

Running Away to Live in a Dryer

This will be my home until mom and dad have had time to repent, that will teach them

Like a lot of kids who were unjustly treated I figured that running away was the best way to teach my family a lesson. The fantasy was that they would have pushed me too far, and I would strike out, living by my wits alone, while they stayed at home lamenting their lost son. My plan had two main problems; first, I had no idea how to live by my wits alone and second, I had no patience and wanted the weeping and wailing to start sooner. They usually hadn't noticed I was gone by the time I came to see what sorrow my absence had wrought.

One time I decided that the time for half measures was past and that I needed to do this running away thing for real. I got a blanket, a can opener, and some matches to make a fire and headed out. My dad was in the appliance business so he had a little bone yard about fifty feet from our house. My plan was this, I would go and live in the drum of an old dryer. That way I could still look into the front window of my house to observe the emotional wreckage, have a nice little bit of shelter and my own little door. The major drawback to living out your life in a dryer drum is the curve of the house and the uncomfortable little beater bars in there that are designed more for breaking up lumps of clothes as they tumble and less for sleeping comfort. As you may well know, runways cannot be choosers as the old saying almost goes.

I put my blanket in my new house and went and procured a little food from our root cellar and settled in to watch the pandemonium that would break out when they realized their favorite son whom they had mistreated was gone. I ate my food, which was a can of pineapple rings. I looked over at the front door and front window waiting for any sign of desperate searching to begin.

I waited.

I was just about to write 'patiently', but that would have been a lie. It had only been about two hours and there was no signs of sorrow. My pineapple was gone and I was bored so I decided to go and check on the amount of sadness I had already inflicted to judge if it was sufficient. I went in and my mom was reading a book and had no idea I was gone. Disheartened, I decided to call off my running away. I moved back in a and took a nap on a nice flat comfy bed. 

Renting VCRs and Nintendos

Nice right? To be honest it is just a rental

We didn't have a cable connection or even an antenna and there were times when we needed to get our media fix. That meant a trip down to the Video Hut or the Bijou and a look over their meager collections. We would peruse for the nine-millionth time hoping against hope that there was something new or interesting that was rated 'G' or 'PG' that we could watch. If the pickings seemed too slim my mom would load us up and drive six miles to the next town over and we indulged in the House of Videos vast collection of movies. 

They had a whole section of Disney cartoons and classics that got well gone over in those years. In the early eighties we didn't have a VCR so we would rent one of those as well. We had to bring the whole set up home hook it up, watch our movies, and haul it back. 

We also never possessed a video game console, so for special occasions like deathly illness or a party we would rent a Nintendo and a game or two. To get our monies worth we would not sleep for two days playing it non-stop until it had to be returned.  

Watching General Hospital for 'Home School' - Mom Breaks the TV

Luke and Laura, at some point in the history of American television that low-rent stage magician looking goof ball had stay-at-home mom's all a twitter. Pathetic. 

To say that my home schooling was unstructured would be generous in the extreme. It was free time all the time. Well, all except for the first three days of the school year.  We would get out some books and supplies and do some assignments. That was as far as that ever went.  I loved to do math, so I would get a teachers worksheet book of math homework and try and do the whole book in one day. I would spend some time reading in the World Book encyclopedias and then head back to the fort. The rest of the time was building something else onto that magnificent deathtrap. 

Some days my mom would be watching soap operas, especially General Hospital, while she did laundry or ironing and I would hang out folding towels and watching the unbelievable sadness and tragedy unfold day after day. I remember the Luke and Laura plot and Luke tied up by bad guys trying to get to Laura. Truly sad. 

One day the cable was not working and my mom, who is as helpless as a baby kitten with technical problems, tried to fix the cable wall jack with a butter knife. There were a lot of blue sparks and the power went out. When my dad came home he decided that we would be better off not having any television so we just played outside. We would later buy a VCR and watch movies occasionally but we never had broadcast or cable TV again. 

That made it so whenever we were at someones house with TV we would want to watch whatever was on for as long as we could.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Even when it wasn't good, it was good.

Saturdays I would wake up super early to start on the cartoons when they first started in the morning which was around six. I would power through the entire Saturday morning cartoon block, girl cartoons included. I would still be vegging out as the cartoons got worse and worse and then faded into the dregs of Saturday afternoon infomercials. Then my dad or mom would come in and startle me out of my stupor by asking, “What the hell are you still doing watching TV?”

To be honest, I would not know. I was mostly numb but felt a deep desire to own a salad shooter. I felt like that would make my life better, but I was waiting because there was more. They would send me outside for some child abuse like weeding the garden or picking up garbage.

Lined Up For The Spankings

While generally absent my parent would occasionally interact with us to discipline us. This discipline came in two basic flavors. My mom was a rage hitter who would grab up whatever was handy and spank us with it. My dad would sometimes throw stuff at us or smack our heads taking us unawares, but his preferred method of punishment was an execution style spanking. 

It played out like this, we would do something naughty during the day and my mom would tell us she was going to tell dad when he got home. We would beg and plead to have more 'chances' and about half the time that would work if the infraction was minor and knocked right off. Otherwise, when dad came home mom would rat us out while we hid in our bedrooms. Dad would sit on the couch and call out the guilty parties and we would go line up in front of him while the interrogation began.

He would ask, “What is this spanking about?”

I would hitch out, “It, it, it, it, it, it, it, is 'ecuse we were fighting and I hit Matt in the face with a stick.”

He would say, “Do we hit our brother in the face with sticks?”

I would say, “No.”

He would say, “Let's get this over with.”

He would then bend me over one knee and trap my legs with the other and give me three to five whacks and then I would be let go. He would then give me a hug and tell me he loved me, but that he couldn't have me hitting my brother in the face with a stick. I would cry like this, 'Uhp, uhp, uhp, whooooooo, Uhp, Uhp, Uhp, whooooooo.' Which is the classic whimper on the inhalation, wail on the exhalation style. After about a minute of that my dad would yell to wherever I was crying and say, 'that's enough turn that mess off.' This always made me visualize a shower tap for my crying and I would mentally try and turn it off. That changed my tune to a jerkily inhaled, 'Uhuhuh, uhuhuh.' and then the drama was over until next time.

Teaching the Cousins Karate

There is no more perfect visual

If you are unfamiliar with the true nerd psyche what you must understand is every nerd believes himself  to be a secret tough guy. Each one is a self prescribed unappreciated cool guy, who is the smartest person he has ever met, a guy who looks amazing in a classic tough guy article of clothing a fedora or duster. His peers disagree with his diagnosis and therefore he is a nerd. 

There is a loophole, it is that kids younger than the nerd are ill equipped to determine what is cool for a kid 2-3 years older than themselves. This leads them to misjudge what a typical cool kid would be interested in or how they should be act for their age. They may not know too much about karate and cannot know if I knew Karate or not. 

I exploited this loophole to my advantage and most of my friends before I was twelve were much younger than me or much older. Older because the trick works both ways, you see? The trick worked well on my younger cousins that would stop in from time to time. I would gather up my fans and regale them with lies about how cool and tough I was. Did I abuse my power? No. I was generous with my completely fake knowledge of all things cool and tough. In the eighties that meant Karate. Every nerd knew that karate would make you invincible. We had all seen a documentary that was quite popular at the time about a nerdy kid who moves to a new town with his mom and gets picked on by rich kids from a rich, mean dojo and is saved by a kindly old karate master. The old man cons the kid into doing endless hours of free work in exchange for teaching him fake Karate. Using his crazy fake Karate the kid defeats the good looking rich kid. If you are interested this documentary is called 'The Karate Kid'. 

When my cousins were over, I would get on the trampoline and impart my vast knowledge of Karate to them through instruction and hands on demonstration. I would teach them the basics like how a kid 4 years older than them could easily defeat their weak techniques. For years after I taught them my unique brand of fake self defense, they would keep me up to date on how they had been practicing and perfecting my techniques. This became increasingly shameful as I grew out of my Karate master phase and they would tell me they had been practicing some inane bit of advice like 'never spin kick without having your arm out to block'. A piece of Karate wisdom I believe I made up in the heat of adoration.

Pee Training

I thought I was embarrassed by my bed-wetting imagine the shame of being the bed-wetting book cover child.

After many years of bed-wetting my mom realized that it was not a phase that I was growing out of in a reasonable time frame. She cracked under the pressure and decided to buy a pee training program. This fact blows my mind, having spent so much of my life with the internet always on, it is hard for me to fathom how a desperate parent would come across a book on bed-wetting training. Maybe they have those type of things in book stores. I don't know what is in bookstores because I have not been in one in years.

Training manual in hand, we kicked my brother out of our shared room and prepared to spend the night training. I wish we had a classic '80s movie training montage here, something along the Rocky lines, but with a poor tired mom encouraging her son to drink plenty of water and then go to sleep and then waking him up in an hour to go to the bathroom to pee into a cup to measure how much his bladder could hold and then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. The really cool thing is that it worked, not perfectly, but it cut the peed bed down from a nightly thing to just special occasions when it would be the absolutely most mortifying, like camp-outs and sleepovers.

Peeing the Bed. Getting on the Heating Vent.

The recipe is simple, pee on the blanket, then cover the heat vent and let the goodness percolate.

I peed the bed until I was about nine years old. That was the source of quite a bit of embarrassment and shame. I think that my parents were not too  excited about it either because they yelled at me, reasoned with me and plead with me about it a lot. I ruined sheets and mattresses and I also had the rather unpleasant habit of taking my pee soaked blanket and body, which was cold from being wet all night, would go turn up the furnace and make a little urine themed warming tent over the top of a heating vent. 

Some houses wake up to the smell of coffee wafting in the air. Not us. My family was privileged to wake up many mornings to the olfactory symphony which was the Eau de Nate. My dad banned any thermostat tampering and threatened me with certain death should I ever hot box the house with my urine again. I am not the kind of guy to cave in to the demands of terrorists, I am much, much, too passive aggressive for that. The pee tenting continued until my mom decided it had gone on too long and she spent a night pee training.

G.I. Joe Ain't Going to Watch it Self

Great American Heros? No, the greatest.

Some deranged masochist at the programming department for a local TV station would play G.I. Joe cartoons at 5:30 am before school. Which, I was of course, compelled to watch. Unfortunately, Bozo was on at 5:00 and my temporal aim was off at times forcing me to watch most or all of that before I got to see some hot Cobra on Joe action. I was not aware of the principles of sound traveling so I was constantly amazed to find that my dad had once again sussed out that I was up at 5:00 a.m. watching cartoons and not asleep or getting ready for school. 

He banned the cartoons outright, so I devised an ingenious plan to enjoy my Joe on the sly. I would put a blanket over my head and the TV and form a parent free G.I. Joe themed early morning pleasure tent. It turned out that a blanket is not the most effective sound barrier and once again my dad was able to bust me. I would not watch for a few days and then build up courage by forgetting the spankings and groundings I got and would go back periodically to suckle at the teat of pre-dawn war cartoons.

I only broke the habit when they replaced Bozo and Joe with some insipid morning happy news show. The nerve.  

Camel Doo

A new crop of camel doo starting nicely, just need to take a crap in it.

Over the winter one year a tire that had filled with leaves and other detritus had rotted into a horrible concoction. We decided to befoul the brew further by peeing and pooping in it and adding all sorts if rotten garbage. My brother Matt called the stuff 'Camel Doo' and the name stuck.

One day we loaded up a few gallons of the mix into a bucket and snuck over to the neighbor's fort. It was much nicer than ours and was more like a house in a tree. Well built and sturdy compared to our death trap. It had a lock on the trap door entrance, we broke that off with a hammer and went inside. There was some old furniture, a tape deck and a case of tapes that were one of the boy's dad's recorded daily lessons for his home schooling. We stole the tapes and then painted the place with camel doo and fled the scene. 

We listened to the tapes which, to be fair, were the funniest thing we had ever heard. They were a combination of directed study, compliments and affirmations that were to be repeated by the listener. Hilarious. When the boys discovered our treachery they came to destroy our fort. They came over armed to the teeth and we started raining down rocks and horse chestnuts on them. To add to the insults we began repeating affirmations from the tapes like, 'You are a good, smart boy” and, “You can have more friends if you try to be more friendly”. That failed to defuse the situation. 

They stormed the castle and were beating everyone they caught which in the end was all of us. They took back their tapes and broke down a few parts of our fort. We limped home licking our wounds intent on tattling on those bad and wicked boys. Unfortunately, my mom called their parents to complain about the unprovoked beating their evil boys had given us and heard some crazy story of vandalism, camel doo and theft. In my mother's mixed up mind it almost seemed like we had brought this injustice on ourselves. A classic case of blaming the victim if I ever heard one. She made us help them clean their fort and apologize. 

I felt like that was child abuse.

Fort Wars!

Building a fort attracted the attention of our two backyard neighbors. They were both households of with boys in their early teens who were still into building forts and playing army. They were not the most socially adept youngsters. We became fort war enemies and stayed that way for several years. 

The Swiss are known for two things, their army knife and their improvised trapping abilities. Their anti-pirate trapping skill was documented in the 1960 Disney film

To defend ourselves, we built fortifications and spent hours building traps, barricades and weapon systems to defend our fort from all attackers. We took our inspiration from a pair of documentaries on improvised trapping; "The Swiss Family Robinson" and the Ewocks in "The Return of the Jedi". We built lots of trip wires, pit traps, and swinging log traps. They were, as I remember, pretty much useless. We also collected horse chestnuts which have a spiky casing, perfect for throwing and poking. Of course we had sticks, rocks and other primitive weapons.

Several times a week we would repel attacks by the older boys. They would mount a charge and we would repel them with a barrage of missiles and camel doo. It usually came no nothing but good fun. 

One Sunday the battle had become particularly heated, tempers flared and what had been good natured fun turned ugly. After increasingly violent skirmishes over the course of the afternoon I hit one of the older boys in the face with a stick. He chased me down, tackled me and was punching me while I was pinned to the ground. My five-year-old little sister, outfitted with a club spiked with nails, ran up and smashed it into my attacker's back squarely between his shoulder blades. It stuck in deep enough to stay when she let go, so pretty deep. He was screaming, grabbing at the club and trying to get help. He had let me go and we all ran.  We decided we should call it a day and stayed the rest of the afternoon in the house. We were a little concerned that the guy with the nails stuck in his back might harbor unreasonable desires for revenge.