There is another park out by where my grandparents lived
in the Imperial Mobil Home park that has a river walk path.
Sometimes when we would come and visit them we would walk along the
river path that had a tunnel to pass under a railroad track, and
underneath the freeway, and underneath another road and come out at
the other park which had a replica frontier fort, complete with
cannon. One time and while we were going down there we found a spot
where somebody had dumped off a couple of bags at quicklime that had
formed into quicklime rocks in the rain. We didn't know what they
were but soon we found out that if you got them wet they would burn
your skin really badly. So we found a long old abandoned sock to hold
our new treasure. You know? Come to think of it we were always
finding clothes all kinds of places. For instance out in the woods
you might find socks or underwear, and it seemed like once a year or
so some one would find a bra, and it was almost always an enormous
one. We would encounter all kinds of clothes that we thought made
for good discoveries, but now to my more mature and clothes-buying
mind I wonder the chain of events that lead up to leaving clothing in
the woods. Never mind, I don't want to know. Notwithstanding its
origin we put put the quicklime into the sock and then dipped it in
the river to turn up the heat, and by heat I mean caustic chemical
burny-ness. Then we went back to the play ground park where we
started chasing kids around giving them slaps with the quicklime
sock and then refreshing it in the river for more skin peeling tag. I
think we played this game until it got dark and we had to go back to
my grand parents house but I would love to know how many kids went
home with unexplained chemical burns to parents who wanted to know
how in the world their kids lost their shirts trying to wash them off
in the river. We hid the sock so we could come back and extend our
quicklime experiment, but when we finally got back someone, a Luddite
no doubt, had thrown it away.
