One of
the odd things I remember about going to to Colorado is that we
wasted a lot of time stopping off at my mom's ex-boyfriend's house.
I know that sounds like it may be a little untoward or seedy but
strangely it was not, we visited with his wife and kids as well. At
the time I thought nothing of a guy, my dad, letting his wife load up
and go to another state to visit an old fling. They were okay people, I guess, but it is hard to connect with people you only see twice in
your life and they were a little on the crazy side when it came to
religion. We were religious but in a more northern way and it was a
more reserved, quite and unmentioned type of thing for us. They were
more of the southern type of religion talking about God and Jesus all
the time and saying loud prayers, which is fine, I don't mean to be
insulting towards them it was just not what we were used to. They were also
really, really involved with Boy Scouts, and once again we were into
Boy Scouts as well but we mainly just went on camp-outs and raised
hell and played basketball once a week for our 'Pack Meeting'. They
were a little more martial about it and were strict on the uniform
and did marches and drills and stuff. The one thing that made me the
most uncomfortable was when they would say prayers around dinner,
which, once again, we did as well, theirs was just a little less
subtle. In our house we sat around the table heads bowed arms folded
and one person said a quite prayer while everyone else listened. They
had everyone stand up in a circle around the table and hold hands and
one of the kids got to pick a song-prayer which they all sang with
gusto while swaying and we just looked around uncomfortably. The
prayer seemed a little non-sequitur to me as well it was called
'Johnny Appleseed' and it was about how by planting trees Johnny
Appleseed was spreading God's love out the across the world or
something. I just remember thinking that this is really weird, and
given what we got up to, that could be saying something.
Sweet, Sweet TANG
As I
mentioned, it was really boring in the house in Colorado. We had to
fill the time while we waited for my grandpa, nicknamed grandpa quack
because sometimes would not talk to us when he got home just quack
like a duck. When he got back from work to turn on his computer,
which we couldn't play with while he was gone, everything smoothed
out for the evening but in the mean times we were left to our own devices. We couldn't go into any
of my aunt's rooms and mess with their stuff, I didn't really want to
anyway, it was all posters and makeup, and hair dryers. The only
reading material was old military history books that were mostly
about the history of the Air Force and one I remember was
specifically about the B-52 bomber. Sitting there during the times
that we had to stay home and wait was awful. My great-grandma
actually lived in the basement of my grandpa's house, and one year my
brother and I went down there and into her kitchen and we found a
really huge tub of Tang, that drink mix the astronauts took to the
moon. I think at this point in my life I'd rather just drink water
honestly, but then it was the only sweet thing in the whole house.
The rest off the food in the house was for grown ups horrible,
torturous and abusive vegetables and fruit and Grape-nuts, and stuff. We found that
Tang and would go down and take the full measuring scoop and pour
that whole thing into our mouths dry and wait for the saliva to
percolate it. It was an intense sugar rush that had us coming back
for more and more and more until my great-grandma realized we had
stolen her whole stash and ratted us out. My mom and grandpa yelled
at us and we had to apologize and the Tang bandits were put out of
business.
Mom Hits a Tow Truck
One
year when we were driving back to Utah trough Denver and Vail we got
caught in a horrible snow storm and there were cars off of the road
all over. Even though my mom was accident prone she was driving while
my dad and the rest of us slept. The visibility was very low and tow
trucks were trying to pull some of the cars out of the ditches and
back onto the road. My mom was driving try to be really
careful when she saw a tow truck in her lane and she thought what
I'll do is, I'll get closer and him swerve around the last minute,
that should be the safest, and there is no way this can go wrong.
That snarky bit at the end of what I claimed she thought was perhaps
not in the original but who is to say? The plan didn't work out, at
all. Luckily the tow truck driver was off the sholder hooking up the
other car when mom hit him and pushed him off of the road. That
wrecked our car so badly that we couldn't get it fixed, of course it
was nighttime, on a weekend, around Christmas, in Vail which is where
rich people go to get some perspective. We got towed somewhere and
my grandpa who lived in Provo, 9 hours hence, drove out there to
rescue us. He picked us up and drove us home and I just remember it
took forever waiting, the 9 hours or whatever for him to drive out to
us and then for us to drive back home it took 18 hours, if my math is
right. We had already driven six or so and we were trying to sleep
wherever we could in different gas stations, waiting rooms where ever
we could lay our heads. I remember it being a really miserable night
and I remember peeing all over the backseat of my grandpa's car. That
is starting to seem to be some sort of trend, maybe like the mighty
wolf I use urine to mark my territory, not physically but temporally.
I think now as I write this and think about my poor parents and
grandpa (PaPa), and wonder if maybe I was not the one who had the
worst night after all.
Car Ride Fights or Walking out the Hate
We always used to get big fights when we're driving to and from Colorado, We would either drive up over the north side through Grand Junction and into Denver and then down in Colorado Springs, that took about 12 hours. Alternately we could drive across the south, and stop by Mesa Verde in Cortez, which is amazing by the way, and and then north up to Pueblo and then to Colorado Springs, this way was about 18 hours plus the six or so for Mesa Verde. We would leave the house really early while we were all still in the drowsy of morning and my mom would try and pound out the miles as fast as she could before we woke up ready to raise hell. We would all wake up and be under the spell of excitement and anticipation for the trip for a few hours and then things would go badly wrong. Someone would get bored and would start a little niggle, little by little the niggle would escalate to a full blown annoyance. That would cause a chain reaction that would end up with two people fighting and then because of the close quarters somebody would get an elbow in the face or something and then it would be great, and terrible. All kinds of chaos would break loose with my mom you trying to drive with one hand and try to punch whoever she could reach with the other. The melee would then spill over into the front seat and people were jumping over the seat, back and forth kicking and punching, catch as catch can. Then mom would be swerving all over the place trying to slap and punch some sense into us. She was always claiming she was trying to break it up but, in truth, I think my dearly sainted mother was hitting the boredom safety valve as well, and if you ask her about it too this day she will giggle a little about it. When it had gone too far and everybody was fighting everybody, trying to punch everybody's everything, mom would stop the car throw us all out of the car drive forward about a mile or two. Until you walked far enough to catch up she would wait for us to whimper and huff-and-puff out all of our feelings of injustice and wait for them to change to the sweet nearly silent panting of exhausted kids. Then properly worn out and calmed down we would load back up and have a fairly smooth ride for a few more hours until the boredom tipped over into the niggle of inevitability. If you were wondering if a mother by herself should drive six kids all day across the country, my answer would be a tentative yes, wholly dependent on her skill at punch-slapping the back seat while still driving safely. So I guess the answer would be no.
Christmas in Colorado
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| Not a bad bit of balancing actually. |
Most of my mom's family lived around Colorado Springs. Almost every year for Christmas we would drive out and visit for a week or two. My dad only came twice or so. That meant most of the time it was just a mom and four, five, or six kids. She alone driving all the way to Colorado Springs which was a 14-hour drive if things went well. Things never went well.
My mom is a crazy driver, with the tiniest of propensities to wreck cars. She has wrecked many cars but on Colorado trips she only wrecked once. With six kids in the car, we got into big fights and that caused some dangerous driving conditions.
In Colorado, we would stay with my grandpa in his house which at the time was full of his mother, wife, and three teenage stepdaughters. They were all grown up, they were all mature, and all much older than us. Which means they had nothing cool and did nothing cool and if it was cool we couldn't touch it. The food was horrible too, healthy whole grain garbage, vegetables, steaks and other grown up food. Boring stuff.
My mom usually had to wake up with us early in the morning and we would go out and play outdoors. We would go to the Garden of the Gods and different places hiking and try to burn us down for the night time. Then we would come home and have to do boring stuff like sit around and talk or watch TV. Lame-tastic. Luckily, something terrible usually happened and that gave us something to do. Nothing Like a little trip to the hospital to liven the mood.
The Grandma Loophole Gift is Mine
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| Fine if you don't want Battle Action Skeletor I Guess I'll keep him. |
Growing up my parents always had us buy my grandma 'Other Mother' presents. She invariably took the present, thanked me for it, gave me a hug, and set it off to the side and never used it. This broke my heart every time I put any effort into choosing her something nice but tastefully within my price range.
Around eight or nine years old I discovered that if she wasn't going to use the present what I could do is buy her something that I wanted. Then when she said thank-you and set it aside without looking at it I would bide my time and I would collect my gift. I figured if she can't appreciate a He-Man doll for what it's worth, I would go ahead and take it back. After that, I always kept the Other Mother loophole near and dear to my heart. Every time I was buying her presents I would try to keep it subtle, but I bought her a couple Gi-Joes some Legos, and a remote controlled airplane. On a couple of those I got a lot more use out of them then she would have herself, quite honestly.
Christmas is Canceled!
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| There may come a year when Christmas isn't cancelled but it is not this year and next year doesn't look good either. |
My dad is the type of guy who loves bottlenecks of all kinds. He likes to stand in the middle of them and disagree. Anytime that he can, he likes to prolong a decision-making process, alter it, or postpone it. Then when no one can do anything until they get his approval he likes to hold forth on some minutia for a bit. He is compelled to ask someone's opinion and then disagree outright with it, every time.
If we were picking a restaurant, he would produce the illusion that he wanted our input and then whatever we chose was definitely not it. That would help him make up his mind about where to go, which was the opposite. He would gather the family together and say, 'Where would you all like to go for vacation?' Like amateurs, we would sucker in and tell him where we wanted to go. He would then say anything but that and pick something that he had already thought of before.
He is so dedicated to his contrarian nature that if you agree with him he'll switch his position until you disagree again.
The one event he loved to rule over more than any other was Christmas. All the time growing up was the threat of canceling Christmas. Threatening kids with the loss of Christmas gifts is an age old manipulation technique but with my dad it was an art. Every year we would do something naughty in the run-up to Christmas. Then he would use that as a pretext to cancel Christmas and to take all the presents and give them to charity. Not charity dad, anything but charity!
Christmas would be canceled and we would all wail, and cry, and beg, and make all kinds of rash promises about how we would never-ever-do-something-or-other-ever-never-again. When he had us right where he wanted us he would back down and be thanked profusely for reinstating the Christmas he canceled.
By Christmas, I mean Christmas Eve. Our family is impatient so we open all our presents on Christmas Eve and then Santa would come for Christmas morning. Double dipping. One year Christmas Eve and Christmas day were canceled for real when a new dryer had an arrow shot through the control panel. When he delivered the dryer, still in the box, he saw the hole in the head plate and had to give the lady a discount for the damage. She wanted a replacement, but he talked her into just taking a discount. He was pretty upset, so he canceled Christmas.
He canceled Christmas Eve and he said it would stay canceled until somebody confessed to shooting the dryer0. I don't think any of us actually did, I think it was one of my friends, but I'm not sure even to this day. I decided to be the martyr for presents sake and on Christmas morning to get the holiday back on track, I said I did it and I can miss Christmas. My dad didn't want capitulation he wanted to disagree so he said he didn't want a false confession he wanted a real one. He kept Christmas canceled until Christmas night and then caved when he saw we could cry no more, and though a veil of tears we opened our presents.
After that he decided to accept my confession after all and made me pay back the difference of the discount. This kind of lesser Christmas canceling went on for quite a few years at different times we had Christmas canceled and reinstated.
Once, my sister Christy actually did something, maybe sneaking out with boys at night, and he canceled Christmas for her completely. No wailing or crying could buy a reprieve. Her birthday is a week after Christmas and so even though she never got to have Christmas she did get double presents for her birthday. That made up for it a bit.
I am not sure if holding the reward of Christmas over everybody's head the best way to run a family. But why risk it? I don't want to see how my kids turn without this vital teaching tool, so I have canceled Christmas twice already. Only kidding, of course, I have canceled it three times.
Killing Rattlesnakes
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| You don't scare me, all I see is dollar signs. |
I told you about bringing a baby rattlesnake school and at the time our town had a lot of like barren ground full of rattlesnakes. There were plenty more rattlers to go around. They were all over in the summer and once my friend and I were out hiking in the foothills when we came across a big rattlesnake that had startled some horses.
The riders warned us that there was a great big snake in the road up ahead. Instead of steering clear we reassured the riders we knew how to catch and kill rattlesnakes and we would be fine. They took some nine-year-old's word for it and rode on. We found the snake, it was about 3 feet long, and we decided right away to kill it. We used the old forked stick trick, pinned its head, killed it with a rock and brought it home.
We skinned it, gutted it, and cut its head off because that part is still dangerous even after they are dead. You have got to be safe. We stretched out the skin and salted it to tan it. Then we dipped the head in lacquer and added a wire so that we could have a rattlesnake head necklace. My dad's friend saw our beautiful hide and rattle and bought it from us for $25 and we later sold the head to a kid in school for 10$ more.
Once we saw the kind of money there was in processing God's creatures into brick-a-brack we started up a little side business trying to become rattlesnake millionaires. This was terrible news for the local rattlesnakes, we went hunting every day and killed about 30 to 40 rattlesnakes that year. We would bring them home skin, mount, tack, the skins then take the rattles and head and dip them in lacquer. We sold them all except what we kept for our personal collections. We never found one as big as the first but we also never got bit and died so it was win-lose.
The next year my friend and I found faster ways to make money so we gave up active rattlesnake hunting. Sure, we would take one if the opportunity presented itself, would be criminal not to. Rattlesnake hunting was a good time and I still remember fondly sending the little bastards back to heaven.
Robbed on Rocks From the Garden
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| Are you seriously telling me that this pile here is not worth 20 bucks? |
When I was young my dad was into making promises. He would promise that if we preformed some sort of task he would reward us, pay us, or match our money for some major purchase that we were wanting to make. Over the years he promised us a dune buggy, to help us build a fort, and at one point he told us that when we turned 12 we could get a real gun like a .22 rifle.
Those were all let downs but the worst to me was when he would promise some juicy piece rate, misunderstanding the scope of the work, and I would work hard based on the promised wage only to have him renege and give us something of much less value. Once upon a Saturday morning he offered me a penny a rock for all the rocks I picked out of the garden and so I went right to work. 100 rocks was a crisp dollar bill and so, to get 20 bucks(my richness criteria at the time) I would pull out 2000 rocks. I wanted to get my 2000 rocks so badly that I dug around in the garden all day until I had a huge pile. 2 feet tall and 4 foot wide by 6 foot long, I think we can agree that is a huge pile of rocks. 2000 rocks on the nose, actually. When my dad got home from work I was sitting there tired but rich on top of my twenty dollar rock pile. I relayed the good news, mission accomplished dad, you're welcome.
Then all the sudden he started getting amnesic about our penny-a-rock deal, he told me he had said he would pay me some but not 20 dollars so he gave me five. I would have stopped a five-damn-hundred rocks for five lousy bucks, I was furious having had 15 dollars stolen from me so I went right up to him and said nothing. I went to my room and cried. At least I learned never to trust him again, that lesson didn't stick and I was burned again and again.
Irrigation Play Pool and Going Under the Road
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| Low rent waterslide. |
Something that you don't see much in civilized cities is open irrigation ditches. I think that is a direct robbery by adults from the joy of childhood in favor of safety.
We had so much fun playing in the irrigation ditch, riding down and making pools dug to the side of the ditch and then lined with a tarp. Wading knee-deep through the water and floating down the ditch, the possibilities for fun were limitless. When irrigation would come every 10 days we would have our own swimming pool. It was a 12” deep irrigation swimming pool, pretty nice. Other kids did not have rich stuff like that. To my knowledge, there was only one family in town that had a real swimming pool so we were in rarefied waters.
We were irrigation millionaires, we were rich, how many millionaires had the fun of an open irrigation ditch at their disposal? Very few, I can assure you, very, very, few. It is their loss. I'm sure they could buy one if they even thought of it, but that is how depraved they are, they don't even know how lucky they aren't. Tragic.
Sometimes we even put tadpoles that we caught in the pool and it would dry out and kill them all. Besides mass frog-icide, we did something very dangerous, I'm still surprised nobody died or got hurt, we rode under the road in the water. As the ditches pass under the roads they went through an 18” pipe that would go from one side of the road the other. Brave kids would get in the ditch water upstream of the road and make their bodies a plug by spreading out their arms and legs then the ditch water would push them down the pipe. Then they would shoot out the other end. Being young, we had no idea how that could go wrong. As an adult I am horrified that we were going underneath the road in a pipe full water where the tiniest mistake would jam us in an underground pipe and drown us.
Maybe ignorance is bliss, it certainly made it more fun.
Good for Everything!
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| Good size, good strength, not a bad little resource for something you find in a bathroom garbage. |
* Warning to all of you that are sensitive to things that are pretty gross, this business coming up here is pretty gross. *
If you go on you have been warned.
Kids don't have an innate understand how gross stuff is. That is why educating children on the finer points of hygiene and cleanliness is at the forefront of secular and religious instruction. If you remember, my mom taught us to dig stuff out of the trash and reuse it. In that context what we did was not bizarre, gross still, but not bizarre.
My brother and I were always looking through the garbage for things to reuse in building stuff. I liked to build cardboard box houses and cut holes out of them and then put in little plastic containers for skylights. I also built portals, windows and guns, lots of guns. When my dad would deliver a fridge we would get a big refrigerator box. I would take old two-liter bottles, cut them in half and then put them through the wall holding them in place with tape. Bam, skylights!
At one point in our scavenging, we found little interlocking white tubes that were perfect for everything. We made bombs with them by cutting the bottom out of shotgun shells and packing the powder in tight and using a fuse from our firework stash to set it off. When we were not making bombs, we pretended they were cartridges for our makeshift bandoleers. We would even, and this is the really gross part, pretend they were cigars, and played it up like 1920's gangsters 'We were wise-guys, See?'.
We felt like we had hit the second hand gold mine. Then my mom saw what we were playing with. She kind of freaked out a little bit which took us by surprise. She ripped them out of our hands and started ranting about how disgusting it was. Our windfall happened to be tampon applicators and we were forbidden from scrounging them ever, ever, again. To her great credit, she didn't tell us exactly why it was so nasty.
Years later I was horrified in retrospect, but yet and still, they were good for all sorts of stuff.
BB Gun Fights
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| Basically useless in a firefight, couldn't even shoot your eye out. |
One of the more ill-advised things we got up to was simulating war by fighting with BB guns. If you don't know much about BB guns what you need to know is that there is a wide range of BB guns. You have your single pump spring action, Daisy Red Ryder, that is your baby BB gun. It shoots so slowly that you can actually see the BB leave the gun and miss what you were aiming at. Being shot by a Red Ryder is more or less like being snapped by a rubber band, It doesn't hurt anything it just stings a little, really bad.
It is is nothing compared to any of the pump-up type BB guns, that come as either pistols or rifles. They can pump up, as the name implies, usually from 1 to 10 times and the more you pump in the more powerful the shot becomes. Up to going through jeans and just into the skin, a ten pump shot will ruin your day.
Further up the line you have your BB/Pellet guns which shoot at near the speed of gunpowder guns and is actually capable of killing small animals. You're going to want to steer clear of getting shot with that one, especially in your tender parts.
To play this game we would set up a war zone and teams in a vacant lot or something where we would have little foxholes dug out and some other war necessaries. It was almost anything goes out there and the only real rule was that no one with a more powerful gun was supposed to pump more than 1 time. That way everyone was on equal footing.
I didn't have my own gun so I was always stuck borrowing the lame one pump little Red Ryder, a stupid gun. Besides being inaccurate and weak, the Red Ryder would misfire about every other time. It was hard to get a BB down into the firing chamber in the heat of battle. The magazine ran lengthwise to the barrel and you had to hold the gun up at about a 45° angle and then cock it. I had about a slim chance that a BB was in the chamber. Occasionally, I would test fired it to see if I got one in the chamber and either there was just and empty puff or out shot the BB. This was not a good test because either way you needed to reload in renewed ignorance.
We would be out fighting, doing military-type stuff yelling things, making plans, traitoring, shooting everything. Every once in a while I would hear somebody scream, a lot. They had been shot with a BB and it they were letting everyone know. If whoever got shot had a multi-pump gun, would start multi-pumping it in direct violation of the accords. Then it was time to flee the comfort of the foxhole while you heard the ominous, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. While it was possible that there were 10 individual guns being cocked in series, the more logical explanation was that someone was going off reservation over there and just pumped their gun a flesh-rending 10 times.
That usually signaled the end of the game and we would all hastily decamp. Sometimes someone wouldn't make it out in time and get shot. The BB would be lodged beneath the skin and they would have to pop it out like a little steel zit. The important thing is that shot or not you could never tell mom or they would do something rash like not let little kids shoot BB guns at each other anymore. Moms hate fun.
My Zip Line
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| This is fine if tou need to add a tiny amount of tension to a belt, but it will kill you if you use it to zip line. |
With my dad's zip line out of commission, there was a danger vacuum in our yard that I was longing to fill. The tragedy of the zip line being cut down because that girl broke her neck fresh on my mind I decided to build my own. I was going to build it from the top of our fort, which was fourteen feet above the ground, to a tree that was about 60 feet away. I was not as versed in the ways of mechanical engineering as I should have been to attempt a project like this.
I thought to myself what are the basics? What is essential to a zip line? How would Frank Loyd Wright design this? Just kidding on that last one, Wright is a hack. I knew this you need a wire, you need a high place, you need a lower place and a pulley of some sort. I just put that stuff together and I would have a zip line.
For my cable, I got a copper wire from a roll of stranded 12 gauge copper wire. Copper wire is generally more known more for its conductivity then its load bearing capacity, which is none. It is the type you would find in standard household wiring. Perfect if you need to run a light switch or a socket but instant death in the load bearing capacity I was using it for. I affixed one end to the tree above the top of my fort and the other to the tree at the alleged landing site.
For the pulley, I used a belt tensioner salvaged from a whirlpool dryer. Once again way off the mark when it came to the required capacity. Did I give it a test run with a weight more or less the same as my own? No, no and heck no. A dry run, in retrospect, may have been the more sound course of action, but then this story would not have a punch line. rejecting the timid path of a more sensible engineer, I decided to jump right into it, literally.
My little brother was at the bottom watching me and I jumped off, putting all my weight on the undersized cable and pulley all at once. I plummeted to the ground. I don't think that wire provided even a nanosecond's worth of resistance toward breaking my fall. I went straight down flat onto my bottom knocking the wind out of myself. I jumped up and rubbed my butt and said, 'Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.'
As soon as I gathered my thoughts I told Matt not to tell mom, which is the main concern of all great engineers. Do you think the Wright brothers mom knew what they were up to? No way, she would have nipped that nonsense in the bud. All great engineers don't tell mom.
I figured that this spectacular, unmitigated and even catastrophic failure was a sign that I should stop building zip lines. Resigning myself to walking around on the ground like regular poor people.
Pine Wood Derby Loser
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| Who of you kids can match the power of this dad? |
The Cub Scouts has a yearly tradition of having fathers build cars to compete against boys whose fathers don't help them make cars. It is called the pinewood derby.
The 30-year-old fathers who build the car for their sons beat the crap out of the kids who built the cars themselves. Then the 30-year-olds are proud of all the hard work they did to bring glory to their kids. My brother and I would build a pinewood derby cars every year and try our best to carve it out on the power tools we had at our disposal. Our poor efforts were much less good both aesthetically and mechanically compared to the cars produced by a neighbor of ours who worked in an auto body shop. For some bizarre reason, his son's cars always end up looking like they came from and auto body shop. which was just a whole lot better than what we could manage, but I digress.
The point is not how great they looked, their cars also performed orders of magnitude better than ours. On the track, there was a clear distinction between the father built wonders and the kid built monstrosities in lap time. By lap time I mean they go straight down a hill better. Some of the cars built by kids were so bad they couldn't even cross the finish line while cars built by a 35-year-old would zip past bringing honor and glory their undeserving and spoiled kids.
Bitter? Yes, I guess I am. In all the years I entered and all the years I help my brother we won nothing. The whole time I thought I was competing against other kids. I didn't realize until I was a little older that there was some cheating going on. Maybe we were just building up mental toughness so when we failed as adults we could take it like 9-year-olds.
Zip Line Assassination
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| Look at these harness wearing safety nerds. So lame. |
My family has a love affair with all things dangerous and borderline legal. By borderline legal I, of course, mean unenforced illegal. When I was quite young my dad built a zip line like the kind you see in an action movies or at a Boy Scout day camp. Somewhere that would require all types of silly legal waivers and safety equipment.
My dad put a telephone pole in the ground in the middle of our yard and ran a cable between it and the large weeping willow tree that was in the front of our yard. To get to the top of the platform, you climbed several steps onto a little un-railed platform. A friend would then swing you the rope with the handle and pulley. All that was left was to hold on and ride to the bottom over a hundred feet away.
Besides your grip, there were no safety devices as such. For those too short my dad added a length of yellow 'do-not-use-for-live-loads' utility rope and affixed a second lower handle. This second lower rope added all kinds of variation in the type of danger a typical rider could expose themselves to. It allowed me to jump sideways on takeoff making the ride swing wide from right to left on the way down. I could also flip upside-down as I rode and hook my knees over the bar like a proto-Cirque du Soleil.
To make sure you are clear on this, I was hanging 12 feet off the ground from my knees, on a little piece of rope which is not intended for live loads. I never had a problem.
It turned out that was only safe for regulars and the yellow rope tried to assassinate a neighbor girl. It was my brother Matt's friend, a girl named Emily, who was almost too scared to go, let alone doing any good tricks. She got talked into going down, but it seems like it's always the scared people that terrible things happen to.
She rode down and the rope snapped. She flipped over and broke her neck on the ground. The ambulance came and took her away and luckily she was able to recover, all she had to do was sit in bed for the entire summer and play video games. After that, our families were not friends anymore but at least they didn't sue which was good.
My dad did take the hint and sawed down the poor zip line, which in retrospect should have never been put up. Especially in a situation where there was almost no parental oversight and a huge potential for grievous harm and death. As an interesting side note, my dad in his older age has become terrified of anything dangerous. He is constantly talking about long-shot-worse-case-scenarios wherein he may have liability for injury or loss.
Dumpster Diving For a Ton of Ice Cream
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| Ice cream is ice cream is ice cream. |
We once became ice cream millionaires by not being too proud to steal expired product from a dumpster. There is a grocery store called Macey's, named sort of like the high-end clothing store except that they specialized in cheap food. Macey's would throw out rotten fruits and vegetables and outdated food a couple of times a week and my mom would take us down to see what was still good.
Usually, we salvaged some apples or some lettuce. Sometimes some nice fruit on the bottom yogurt that was past its sell-by date, but when do you know that a product that is rotten milk has past it's prime?
One day our routine pickings were bolstered by a massive pallet of ice cream that was all being thrown away at once. There were gallons and gallons, 20 or 30 gallons, all sitting out waiting to be plundered. We struck fast. We stuffed the car and drove like the wind to get the almost melted booty back in the freezer.
For weeks, we gorged on ice cream, normally a rare treat. I still remember the feeling of having so much ice cream as one of the best feelings of my life. I was just so excited, I didn't realize until later that it was actually kind of sad that to get ice cream we had to get it out of a dumpster. They do say good things come to those who are not too proud to beg. They say lots of things that can be anonymously attributed and anecdotally considered true.
Fake, Nasty, Pot Pie
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| Hmmm, yeah that would be tasty, but that's not it. |
A big treat in our family was a little concoction known as 'PotPie'. I know you are most likely thinking pot pie is a tasty mix of chicken and vegetables and some gravy in a delicious pie crust. Well, if you were thinking that you would be exactly wrong. Of course, that's what everybody else in the entire world thinks pot pie is but for some reason not in our house.
For birthdays and other special occasions, my mom would make some cream-of-wheat which is not a bad hot cereal. Then she would desecrate it. First she mixed in some eggs and then deliver a glop of the mess onto a plate where they would spread it thin. It was at that point that they added butter and covered the whole thing in a deluge of cinnamon sugar.
Why did my mother and siblings veer off into the realm of culinary abomination? Either they really liked it or where pulling off an intricate and elaborate prank at my expense. Even more disgusting was that some of my siblings liked to let it cool and congeal into a rubbery plateau and eat eggy-sugary slices cut out like pizza.
If I knew that this silliness was about to go on I would rush in and get a regular bowl of untainted cream-of-wheat to eat with milk and sugar as God intended. Potpie was a big treat for quite a few years but to be honest I have not seen it in about a decade and good riddance is what I say.
My Mom Stabs My Hand With a Knife
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| An artist's depiction of what not going to be on time might look like |
As children, we all had chores in a weekly rotation. Someone had to clean the kitchen, which included cleaning all the surfaces and washing the dishes. Someone else would allegedly do the laundry, but I'm not exactly sure what that meant because our laundry was almost always in a huge unsorted pile and our socks were in an unsorted basket on the floor. Sometimes we would get a pile of clothes that were more or less ours on our beds. What doing the laundry meant was doing enough of my dad's laundry to keep him from yelling at us. He always had his shirts hung up and his pants ironed.
The other chores were taking out the garbage, which is easy except when you were almost murdered every time you had to take the garbage out at night because murderers always love to hang out by garbage cans in the dark. I hate That.
The last chore in the rotation was to clean the bathrooms, which was not that hard, we only had one. Well, that is not true my parents did add a second when I was about ten but you didn't have to clean that one because it was theirs and you weren't supposed to touch it.
I myself liked to use cleaning the kitchen as a weapon against the draconian bedtime policies around my house. The strategy went like this, I would try to play right up till nine o'clock and then "remember" I needed to do the dishes. I would proceed to extend that time ever further by going to the bathroom or remembering I needed to do something for homework. If I seemed to be lolly-gagging and prolonging the dish-washing to unreasonable lengths I would feign an indignant huff and say something like, 'Fine, I guess you just don't want me to clean the kitchen then.' If I had worked it right I would be up until 10 without actually ever doing the dishes.
One night while I was doing my dishes/stall plan my mom was walking out of the kitchen and as she did she slid a carving knife across the counter for me to wash. Somehow it hit the lip of the sink sprang vertically into the air and stuck between my thumb and forefinger. I pulled my hand out of the water showing her the knife, but because it was between my thumb and forefinger she thought I was doing the old classic thumb pinch fake knife through hand trick. Then the blood gushed out. I got to go to the emergency room and get stitches which means I didn't go to bed until 12:30 and had a cool story of how my mom stabbed me for trying to do the dishes.
I think we can all agree my plan worked flawlessly.
Making Weapons
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| I see one Bo staff, or two pair of nunchucks, easy. Potential. |
The most consistent pass time we had growing up was building weapons. We were at it most of the time but with special furor after we'd seen a movie that featured hand-to-hand combat of any sort. I'm talking about your Robin Hoods, your Young Robin Hoods, your Return to Sherwood Forests, your Disney's Robin Hood, and the Swiss family Robinson.
I cannot even guess the number of broomsticks and rake handles that we cut up make the various implements of backyard war. One of our favorite weapons, because of its simplicity and ease-of-use was the Bo staff. Known in England as the quarterstaff, which I think is Japanese for 'stick'. Well, maybe more like, 'whacking stick'. We made all kinds of variations of the Bo staff, including ones with nails sticking out. I would misuse a metal grinder to make intricate termite-like patterns on the side, and also make a terrible smell in the shop.
Beyond the Bo staff, we made more complex weapons like nunchucks. These we made by cutting a broom handle into short sections and chaining them together with supplies from the local hardware store. When the chain attached to both sticks we would wrap them in foam and black tape to give that official Bruce Lee look. The last step in this process was to swing them around and try and switch hands behind your back. This ended in a whack to one's head or genitals which signaled the end of the game.
When our crafting skills got better we graduated into making knives. Not little pocket knives, big long beautiful Rambo-esqe survival knives. We found a box or two-foot long industrial saw blades that were just sitting around languishing. We took those layabouts to the grinder to sharpen the tips to a point and the back side into a blade. We left the saw on the back because everybody knows a great survival knife has a saw on the back. Basic weaponry 101 stuff. Then we fitted the non-pointy end with a wooden handle long enough to allow a two hand grip for extra chopping power.
We proceeded to use these new weapons in a reasonable and mature manner, chopping up everything we could find. Buckets and boxes and trees were all chopped and there are still chunks missing out of my mom's porch supports where we notched out a little bit.
When my mom saw the destruction she thought for sure we must be psychopathic. That's because she's a girl and she doesn't understand that in the hands of a man, especially a little man, and knife needs to chop stuff. Plenty were made for all our friends so they could join us in the fun and take a two-handed machete home. You must understand the 80's were a different time and parents were little more conservative than they are today and for some reason didn't want her kids having a 2 foot long two-handed machetes. They told our parents about it and they forbade us from making the neighborhood children any more weapons. I'm glad times have changed and now kids, even young kids, can carry weapons freely.
Drinking Soy Sauce Shots
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| Ah, yes, an excellent year. |
We came up with some bizarre games. The weirdest of all was when we would make a little tent of tablecloths and then play under the kitchen table. We would gather a couple of bottles of the nastiest stuff we could find and set up a little bar. We would have soy sauce, lemon juice, Tabasco, pickle juice and whatever else was in the fridge or cupboard. One person would bartend and make a terrible concoction of what they thought was most repulsive. A straight soy sauce/lemon juice/hot sauce shooter, for example.
Whoever's turn it was had to drink it, which was usually done shot style, straight back and down the hatch. We liked to pretend we were slugging down hard liquor like you always see in westerns or in hard-boiled detective movies. In those shows, the guy would ask for a straight shot of something manly and then drink it, grimace and let out a tortured sigh. A sound that encompassed the unpleasantness of the booze and the relief of knowing alcohol was on the way.
We would drink up and then slam down our miserable cocktail and give our best imitation of that sigh. It got to be that we were drinking eggs and straight liquid smoke, the real hard stuff. I don't remember hitting rock bottom, but we quit, as far as I remember, cold turkey and never relapsed.
I Fire My Mom
One of the major disadvantages to being poor was that my mom cut my hair. My mom, a sweet lady, is not that good cutting hair. She would try and give me a stylish cut, but I always ended up looking like deranged mental patients. I have fine hair, and a crop of bad cowlicks that gang up to make me look like I am not sure how a brush or a shower work. Combine that with the glasses she picked out for me, the thrift store clothes that I had to wear. It was not a recipe for dressing for success with the ladies.
When she was cutting my hair for the last time, she was talking with her friend on the phone. She cut the left side much shorter than the right. I looked in the mirror to see why she had winced and I was mad. I was at the turning point of prepubescent shame and I thought lopsided hair and not my terrible personality was what would sink me socially.
It was the first time in my life that I cared how I looked. While I wasn't super savvy about all things fashion I knew a choppy asymmetric hairline was not going to cut it. I went back and complained, she said she was sorry. She tried to cut the other side which ended up being just shorter than the left-hand side which she had already cut too short. Then one repair followed the next until the upward spiral left me with a tiny mop on top. That made me look more post-op the dead sexy.
Without the weight of the hair, my cowlicks, which were usually just under control, stuck straight up in three places and resisted taming. I tried to straighten them with hairspray and gel. Everything just looked worse because my hair is so fine that hair products do not stick.
I stormed back into the kitchen where she was cleaning up the hair and yelled at her. I told her that she is the worst mother ever and that she ruined my hair and that I hated her. She said she was sorry and started crying and tried to hug me, but I wouldn't let her. She went back to her room still crying while I yelled at her saying she had done a chop job and that I never wanted her to ever touch my hair again. I said that I would save my own money and pay to have my hair cut by someone who wouldn't ruin it.
She got was heartbroken and locked herself in her room while I stood outside banging on the door saying, “Chop Job, Chop Job, Chop Job” and yelling and screaming about how much I hated her.
I calmed down but was scared about the ridicule I would get at school. It turns out it didn't ruin my life and I'm not sure if the haircut was even noticed by anybody. I think once you are so far below the bottom rung on the social ladder that one more goofy thing makes no difference. My mom never cut my hair again. My sister did for a few years and then I went to the 5$ haircut pros.
Rattlesnake to School
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| It's okay, I have a forked stick. |
One week I caught a rattlesnake in my travels and kept him in a glass aquarium that I purchased from a friend for the young snake's housing arrangements. I didn't tell my parents that I had a pet rattlesnake because I knew they would have some kind of irrational response to the whole situation steaming from ignorance and fear. I figured a little more ignorance would save them a little more fear.
I thought that the kids at school would love to have a look at a real rattlesnake. I brought the aquarium to school in a wagon covered with a blanket and parked it by the coats for safe keeping. When It came time for the class to shown and told, I wheeled it to the front, whipped off the blanket and told everyone I had brought a rattlesnake to school. I was going to take off the lid and pick the little guy up so everyone could have a closer look. The teacher forbade me to do so, in the most strident tones. I told her it was okay because I brought a forked 'snake stick' for pinning down its head and rendering him harmless to pick up. I explained that if I held him tightly behind the head everything would be just fine. She must not have been trained in simple herpetological techniques because she was not persuaded by my erudite argument.
She told me to leave the lid on and that she was going to call the janitor to take the snake away. I was disappointed but when the janitor took the little dude away in his aquarium. I assumed, I now realize naively, he would be returned at the end of the day for me to take home.
They just took him outside and killed him, just like that, and threw away my aquarium to boot. I felt like crying when my teacher broke the news to me. I was out a snake, an aquarium, and my piece de resistance. I didn't cry for fear of mockery, but I did on my way home with my blanket in my wagon.
Dad's Rage Hitting
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| Ammo for raising kids with some dang respect. |
My dad was more of a rage thrower than a rage hitter. Not a man to limit his options, he would still lash out with a 'pop on a noggin' should he get the feeling. Many times in the morning he would be on the phone conducting some business, blocking the only hallway in the house with his body. He would stand there in the exact center of the house and expect total quiet. He often had a plastic cup handy and when we would goof around and he would fire it off and try to hit one of us in the head with it. He did about half of the time. He followed that up with a stern face and some snapping.
My dad liked to use down-home colloquialisms to describe how hard he was going to hit us when he slapped us in the head. Southern classics like, 'I am going to thump your melon' and ' I am going to put a knot on your head so big Oral Roberts can't pray it off'. In case you are one of the few unfamiliar with the major evangelical preachers of the middle 20th century, Oral Roberts was an evangelist with healing powers that were quite good for praying off knots on people's heads but his skill was just less than my father's in administration of such head trauma.
You can take the boy out of the south. . .
He employed one other odd form of discipline. In our mobile home, a short wall separated the kitchen and front room with the sink on one side. If we were fighting in the living room, he would grab the sprayer from the sink and spray us and the carpet and the furniture down. That usually stopped us, but it did soak everything in the process.
Mom's Rage Hitting
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| My mom loved to use one of these, off-label, for a little child rearing. |
I already covered my dad's systematic execution-style spanking technique but what was far more common was rage hitting. This style of discipline was my mom's preferred method but my dad wasn't too shy about dipping into the 'smack-it-home' school of child rearing.
My mom had a short temper and my brother Matt and I loved to tease her and push her over the edge. When she was mad about something she would grab one of her favorite whacking implements and then try and lay a little hurt on our bottoms. The problems with her discipline were twofold. First, she had a poor understanding of simple physics and didn't understand which materials and objects are optimal for inflicting pain. Second, she was incredibly weak.
We had no fear of her whack game when we would do something naughty. She would loose her cool and pick up a bamboo back-scratcher, hair brush, fly swatter or some such nonsense and take a few swipes at us with it. Her hits were always feeble which would make us laugh, which would make her try harder. Then many times she would hit us so hard or so many times with her weak implements that they would break. The fun was over and she would threaten to tell my dad and get our butts the proper attention they needed.
Dad was stronger and had a magnificent grasp of the pain inflicting efficiency of a leather belt. We had no desire to upgrade. When it came to that, we would start either repenting or pretending that she had just laid the most painful beating on us that we had ever felt. It worked sometimes, other times we were too far into the hilarity of the situation and couldn't sober up in time to save ourselves a real butt beating.
Unjustly Put to Bed
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| You cannot go to bed when it looks like this outside, it is wrong and borderline criminal. |
One night in the summer, when it doesn't get dark until about 10, my parents went out over night and left us with a mean and stinky old lady. They misinformed her that we would be in bed by 8:00 p.m. Bless her poor addled mind, she took that as gospel. So at 8:00 on the nose she told us to get in bed and be quiet. We told her that was more of a guideline than a rule, and it was summer, and it was still light outside, and we never went to bed this early. She still made us get into our rooms. After the complaining, I decided just to walk out and go back to the computer, what was she going to do? If you guessed hit me in the head with a cane, you win. With my pride and head wounded I went back to my room and tried to lay down in bed but other kids were outside playing and it was so light outside.
Beyond defiance and sulking, my only weapon was insulting her. My sister and I opened the door to our bedrooms and yelled mean things at the crazy old lady and then slammed the door hard. She told us that would stop or she would stop us. That just made it more fun to yell about how her hair was yellow and she was stinky and mean.
She did follow through on the 'she will stop it' threat with a little more cane time and then a trick I had never seen before. She took a short piece of rope and made a loop out of it and put it over our doorknob. Then she threaded a broom handle through the loop and spun it until the loop cinched tight and the broom handle was tight across the door making it impossible to open from our side. It seemed that besides being mean and odoriferous she was wise in the ways of mobile home incarceration. It was checkmate, she had won, we laid down our arms and the rest of our bodies in somnolent surrender.
Cane whacks and imprisonment notwithstanding, my parents were somehow still mad at us for being mean to the babysitter. We were punished and the babysitter never came back, but my mom learned the broom handle door locking trick and used it herself in the future.
Racist Dog Owners and How to Choose Teams
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| We had to change to tiger catching at some point but I don't know how they are supposed to pay the 50$ per day fine. |
There was quite a bit of casual racism in my town growing up, which was odd in that there were not a lot of races. The populous was white with a few Hispanics.
We picked teams at school with the old, 'catch an N-word by the toe' version of Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Moe. No one thought that there was anything wrong with it, not the kids or any of the adults in earshot. I was never corrected, not once. In our defense, we had no idea that it was such a derogatory term let alone what that word meant.
It also didn't help that we had terrible adult examples. I knew of at least two black dogs in town named the N-word. Any time something was poorly assembled people of all types would refer to it as N*****-rigging. There was a constant supply of Polish, Mexican, Black and Jewish jokes. I am not sure why we thought they were funny because they were based on stereotypes of people we had no contact with at all.
It wasn't until I went to Jr. high in the next town over that I started to understand how racist so many of the kids and adults I grew up with were. Once on the bus there was a black girl, the only one in the school, sitting two rows behind a boy who told a joke about why there were no black people in the Flintstones. I just wanted to crawl under my seat in associated shame when he realized that she could hear him and was crying. The girls on the bus ripped into the kid for being a jerk and he apologized over and over. Girls our age becoming sensitive to racist remarks is what stopped the racist jokes, at least in public. If you wanted any chance of dating one of the classy girls racist humour or remarks just wouldn't fly.
Menacing the Babysitter with a Butcher Knife
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| Abandon hope all ye who babysit here. |
One memorable altercation involved a replacement babysitter and a butcher knife. We had already been babysat several times by a neighbor girl whom we liked, but one night she couldn't make it so she sent her little brother instead. He thought he was king-boss-of-the-world and slapped my brother in the head when he disobeyed. My brother informed him that for his crimes he was going to die and ran to the kitchen to get a butcher knife.
The boy chased him down the hall trying to stop him but Matt won the race to the kitchen. Matt brandished the knife and the boy was standing behind the short wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. The kid was yelling for Matt to put down the knife but Matt was hearing none of it and jumped up on the counter to come and get the boy. It was then the ersatz babysitter made a terrible tactical decision and ran behind the wood stove and into a corner.
Matt, Christy and I thought it was hilarious to keep him trapped behind the stove by menacing him with the knife from the left and then the right. We laughed as he alternated between threats and pleas trying to get us to put down the knife. We chased him back and forth keeping him behind the stove with only the chimney for protection for at least an hour.
Like many good things, this one came to an end when my parents came home and were livid. They didn't even care about our side of the story, they paid him extra, apologized to him and his parents, and spanked us all quite a bit.
My Parents Die, Upside-Down in a Ditch
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| Yep, that's them, they died that way several times a night. |
I lived with the constant fear that something horrible was going to happen to anyone who was out of my sight. Once my parents got caught in a blizzard in Yellowstone Park and I was certain they were never coming home again and after that I would always imagine them in peril.When they went on trips, or out on a date, I was fine while everyone was up and playing, but when it got dark and everyone went to bed I would start to have terrible fantasies about them dead.
When they told me what time they would be home, I would kneel backwards on the couch looking out the window at that exact time waiting for them to drive up. If they were five minutes late I would imagine their car wrecked into a ditch and them bleeding to death. Between 9:00 and 9:12 they would have died in a thousand horrible ways. The fact that they never died for real never took the edge off for me.
Buzzy Lamb and the Breathing Pipe
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| This is what I should think of when I hear the term Buzzy Lamb. Not horrific decapitation and childhood horror. |
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