Go Mom Say Damn! Go Mom, Go Mom!

Around our house my mom and dad used the words 'hell' and 'damn' like they were 'and' and 'the'. Like 'and' and 'the'. The kids, however were generally not allowed to curse unless it was in the context of a good joke or in the case of my mother to repeat back what she had just said. For example, if she would ask us to, 'clean up our damn clothes' we could ask, to be jokey and sassy, 'all these damn clothes?' without fear of reprisal. Repeating my dad's swears to him was right out. You could, of course repeat back my dad's swears if you felt like you needed a real thorough spanking and you couldn't figure out how else you could accomplish that. We knew from an early age that we were not supposed to swear in our own home much less in public but if mom or dad were not around we were known to let slip on occasion which many times shocked our friends and cousins in our religiously conservative community . One time, a neighbor kid was over helping build the fort and heard me say 'damn' when a nail got bent and he was visibly shocked. He asked if we were allowed to swear at our house and I said not technically but we were not really punished either so, yeah, kinda. He said that his older sister had been punished earlier that week for saying 'crap'. Now that amazed me because 'crap' was not even a caution word at my house and could be used freely.

When we got a little older my brother and I invented a little game that we liked to play with my mom every time she got really angry and yelled at us and swore we would run over next to her and start dancing the running man or something similar by her. Then we would start chanting, “Go Mom! Say Damn! Go Mom! Say Damn!” like she was a super star, Vanilla Ice or something. She loved this game even though she would try and hit us to try and get us to shut up, sometimes she would even invite further dancing and chanting by telling us to shut the 'hell' up. Go Mom! Say Hell! Go Mom! Good times.  

Sheldon Will Beat This Hard Part For You

All of the pleasure of delivering papers for only a quarter.

We never owned a video game console but my brother and I really wanted a video game fix. So we would either take money we had earned or steal quarters from my dad's change holder in his truck console and head up to a video game arcade that was built on the back of the laundry mat and a restaurant that could never stay in business. Now days one can reasonably expect  top-notch gaming experience from a home video game system for not much money but back in the day the arcade machines and the arcade versions of games were much more technologically advanced. This was during the 8 bit gaming days and this place was chock full of all the latest and greatest 16 bit games, Paper Boy with a real-ish bike handle with a trigger on it for throwing papers. Actually, that is not much like a real bike handle at all, come to think of it. Still cool, but maybe not authentic. It had the new Mario Brothers game, a 16 bit offering called 'super' Mario Brothers it later became one of the most common video games on earth because it was bundled with the 16 bit Nintendos but at the time those graphics and game-play looked pretty sweet. They had Spy Hunter which had a futuristic airplane like yoke with buttons for everything from loading into a moving semi-truck to oil slicking the opponent, and it had a gear shifter fro low to high and a gas peddle. Awesome. We would take our stolen loot of quarters and wander around watching other people play and then deciding on the game we wanted and either getting in line and playing or just popping the quarter in. These games were incredibly hard and designed to give the advantage to the quarter earner not the quarter spender. I hated to see a quarter wasted on just dieing, lucky for me there was a scroungy little video game prodigy who was always at the arcade willing and ready to offer his services. He was always hanging around coaching anyone who wanted his advice or not, through the more tricky regions of the the video game landscape. His name was Sheldon and he knew all of the power up and extra life locations on every game, if you needed a game guide he was there. If you had gotten really far on Super Mario Bros. but you were on the fourth world and were, by your own poor eye-hand coordination, in deep trouble. He would magnanimously play through the level for you even. He would even get you tons of lives, this was always a gamble but one worth taking with Sheldon at the controls, trying to 'turtle tip' to get you all those lives lives. Turtle tipping was a game exploit that would score points over and over by striking the same enemy turtle over and over in rhythm trapping it just perfectly to allow the player to get an extra life after the tenth hit without touching the ground and then one additional life for each hit after that. It was like printing your own money.Turtle Tipping! Once he got you a few hundred or as we called it 'infinity' lives he would loosely offer to hand back the controls. He did this verbally while he was still standing squarely in front of the machine eyes locked on the action and hands deftly executing moves. His offer to return the controls was always coupled with a grave caveat that it was only going to get harder from here on in and that if I wanted to beat the game I should let him continue to play. I often did let him keep going just to watch the game get beaten again. Sometimes I would take it back and see he was absolutely right it was harder and I would die an infinity times but that is not bad value for a purloined quarter. 

Basic Blues

My dad was a firm believer in computers, we had one as soon as a family could have one it was a TRS80. Which was a computer that had its processor built into the keyboard. A cartridge could be pushed into the side, if you were rich enough to have a cartridge. The main method of storage was a tape deck that recorded the data as what sounded like a fax machine over the speaker. To record a program that you wrote you literally pushed record on the tape deck and the spindles would advance as the data was sung in sweet-sweet machine language song into memory. Then you played the tape back to the computer when you wanted it to run the program. The monitor was a television and because we had only one television that sometimes caused a bit of a kerfuffle. I would want to program my computer for hours at a time and them save the program and then play the program. To a nerd that time is fast and delicious but to a average bystander it looks lie a unwashed geek with his tongue sicking out is monopolizing the one technological respite from you life of drudgery. The TRS 80 had per-programmed games that came on a cartridge. Like I said, we never had one of those but we had a friend who had a massive 28” TV with a cartridge game for their TRS80 which concerned itself with the troubles of, according to the cover art, what looked like was some sort of adventurer that went through caves maybe. It was hard to verify any of the cover art conclusively by watching the game but it was a video game and that was cool enough for me. My friend as it turned out was not a very considerate friend and he almost never let me play but he would let me watch him play. When I did get to play he would loudly insult my abilities by telling me I sucked anytime I would die in the game and force a derisive laugh at my feeble attempts at competence in the two minutes I got to play the game. It was degrading but he was the rich kid with the cool stuff and sacrifices had to be made. He was actually my friend for several years so I will tell you more about him when we are not so engrossed in this TRS 80 talk. The TRS 80 we had was programmed in Basic 2 which is a computer programing language that is good for not that much. My dad bought me a programing book that would let me write fun games for myself once I mastered the ones that they had in the book. The problem was that I was not a terrible careful programmer and on the TRS 80 when you pressed 'enter' the time for repentance was past and the 200 lines of code you had previously written were just as corrupted as the last line which contained a typo. You just had to type 'NEW' to dump the memory and start over. The worst though was one time I stayed up most of the night programming a cool sounding game called 'VoCAB' which I thought meant it was some sort of cab driving or cab racing game. I mean, that is not ideal, but sounded like a really good time after programing the only other game in the book called 'Fox and Geese', that was just a checker board with one fox piece represented by a square and 8 geese pieces represented by 8 other squares. That game required either one very lonely player or two human players to play a incredibly lame game that cost me six hours and 300 lines of code. 'VoCAB', as you may have guessed because you are not nine years old and know what that word is short for, was a game concerned almost entirely with vocabulary flash cards. You may have thought that I would have caught onto that somewhere early in the process because I was writing so many words and definitions into the code. But I was so locked in I was just reproducing what was on the page like a game wanting robot. When I saved the program to the tape and then loaded it up and saw what I had wasted all night on, I broke down and cried. So loudly, I gather, that it woke my mom up and she told me I had done a very nice job and that she would love a game like that. I was not mollified because I wanted to help a eight bit hero navigate perils not learn what some stupid word meant. I didn’t ever get a game proper for the TRS 80 it was much later when I finally got a computer that I spent my money to get a game on. 

Tadpole Deathwish

One Saturday in the early summer when I was eight my brother and my best friend Justin got a hot tip on a little pond about 3 miles from our house that was said to be chock full of tad poles. We decided that it bore some investigation, I mean, who among us can resist the lure of the tadpole El Derado? Not I. We decided that it would be safer and a shorter route if we followed the train tracks to the south side of town that was we would cut off about three-quarters of a mile. We would also not run into any strangers, which in the children's pantheon of dark gods were the most dangerous and evil. We walked up the tracks for about an house and did indeed find the fabled pool, nearly black with precious, precious, tad poles. We filled up the containers that we had brought and scrounged around for more to make the trip even more worth-while. With our cans and jars full of beautiful baby frogs we headed back down the tracks in high spirits. There are a few places along the track that the rails pass through small hills that were dug up and stacked to the side so that the path was level. When we were walking through one of these hill that was about a quarter mile long we heard a train which we thought was a ways off, judging from the noise. It turned out, however, that it was not very far off at all the sound was just dampened by the convolutions of the track before the train entered the little valley we were walking through. We didn't realize our mistake until the train was only a few hundred feet away and moving fast so we ran as fast as we could up the embankment. That is when I realized that I had left a coffee can full of tadpoles in harms way. Against the protestations of my brother and my friend I ran back down the hill and grabbed the can from the side of the track seconds before the train past. The train past so closely to me that the wind flipped me over onto my belly and I crawled out of the way. It only took me about two second to realize how stupid it was that I ran back down to get my can. We walked the rest of the way home in a daze thinking what if I had been a few feet closer or a few seconds later. Tadpoles didn't seem so important anymore and I am not sure if I have ever caught tadpoles again. 

Crawdadding

One of the places that we would go Water Weenie-ing was a local lake name Scofield reservoir. It is very high in the mountain and extremely cold in the water. My dad and I would wake up early and go fishing and then when it got warm and the fishing dropped off we would head back and pick up the rest of the kids and start knee boarding and try to get Weenie-lashed. One day when we were picking up the family we saw a Vietnamese couple with a trap that looked like an upside-down umbrella catching thousands of these little lobster looking things. I went and looked at what they were doing and found out that the little guys were called crawdads and that the lake was overrun with them. The state was actually planning on poisoning the whole lake in the coming year because the crawdads were burrowing into the damn at the end of the lake and critically weakening it. They also killed Rainbow Trout witch is a sin against sportsmen everywhere. I told my dad and family to go on ahead because this was much better then getting whiplash and then being ejected into ice cold water. I went to the camper and got some chicken and a net and set up shop. Most sportsmen can tell you that once you are catching anything the people who are no good at it will crowd your spot as closely as is possible without starting a fight and try to get your seconds. That, of course, meant that I was going to pull up close to the Vietnamese family and to thank them for their generosity in sharing with me how to catch crawdads I would get so close as to hinder their operation. I put my chicken on the rope down and it was immediately swarmed by crawdads, I pulled it up slowly and netted off three of them and then it occurred to me that I had no where to put them. Excitement has trumped common sense and basic planning more than once in my life but in this case it lead to some serious pain. I had been taught how to safely pick up the crawdads by grasping their backs but I had three and even though I had only taken me 30 seconds to catch them they were precious to me and I was unwilling to let one go. I picked one up in my left hand and then tried to pick up both of the others with my right; this was not a wise plan. The one I had tried to pinch between by middle and index finger was not held so securely as to prevent him turning right around and pinching a small and tender bit of my flesh in his claw. The pain was intense and I took it stoically, wait a minute that's not right, what is the opposite of stoically? Oh, yeah screaming and flailing like I was about to die, that is closer to the truth. Enough flailing and screaming and crying and the crawdad was thrown off. The Vietnamese peanut gallery was laughing so hard they could barely keep from falling into the lake themselves. The grandpa, who spoke no English, called me over and was trying to pull it together when he picked up a crawdad and let it pinch his hand and demonstrated that if you place your hand back in the water the crawdad with almost instantly release and swim away. Good to know, even if it was a touch late. Lesson learned and a bucket acquired I went on to catch hundreds of the little dudes and when my family got back they all joined in until our five gallon bucket was almost full. We went back to camp and my dad cooked them for us and my mom melted some butter for dipping. They taste a little like spicy shrimp and they tasted extra good to me because there was a little bit of pride and a little revenge in the seasoning. 

The Water Weenie

Truly a thing of beauty

One toy that lasted for quite a few years and got plenty of on label and off label use was the water weenie. It is a long tube with two stabilizing pontoons that you inflate and then ride on while it is toed behind a boat. It was supposed to be a nice family ride for kids and adults together but my dad liked to give our little bodies the stress test with it, and we loved going a long for the ride. The plan was that we would be towed out to where we couldn't hurt ourselves or others in the event, I mean when the event, of our wild ejection occurred. Then my dad would spool out plenty of tow line so he had some material to work with then he would get us going in one direction and then turn so quickly that it released tension on the rope. We would slowly start to drift to a stop while he brought the boat around in several tight circles putting slack in the rope and a drastic change in direction. Then he would hit the throttle in the opposite direction of where we were pointed and try and get to Mach 1 before he hit the end of the rope. This little dance took about a minute and in that time you had to wait and practice your hand and thigh squeeze in anticipation of the massive jolt that was about to come. The rope that was pooled in circles around the weenie would start to tighten and then the last twenty feet would pull out of the water so quickly it would sizzle as the water was forced out of the rope. Then Wham! Your whole body accelerated to ten or twenty miles per hour in less then a second and you either flew off or rode it out because after the initial snap the weenie was incredibly easy to ride. The victims would be picked up and the survivors got to ride another time until they also were ripped off. As far as off label uses go we would sometimes fill up the weenie and ride it on the trampoline or jump onto it from the tramp like a cowboy in an old western onto his horse. The very funniest use for it though was discovered by accident when the weenie was half inflated and our over amorous dog Beau tried to make the half flaccid weenie his girlfriend. He would jump on the mostly limp nose cone and get right to work on the lovemaking and my brother or I would jump hard on the opposite end instantly tightening the nosecone and assaulting our dog's private parts. He would be thrown back and be confused for a little bit, look around and then remount the now limp nose cone to attempt to finish his consummation. We laughed so hard at this that we were nearly crying and Beau just seemed happy to have a girlfriend.

Peeing Outside

I mentioned that the bathroom and the outdoors were roughly equidistant it is actually the fact that most time the outdoor was slightly further. Well, worth the trip I would say. Sometimes when my brother and I were playing in the house and we had waited until the very last moment as kids sometimes do we would run past the bathroom and to the laundry room and out to the back door to let loose in nature. Some women, and inexplicably some men even, don't understand why a person would pass up a perfectly good bathroom to pee outside. To that I scoff, derisively. To a individual properly equipped there is no more liberating feeling then to stand in the great outdoors and commune with nature, pants down and ever mindful of the wind. My mom was not so big a fan of the practice and tried many times to clampdown on the method. She felt, and there is no accounting for how some people were raised, that it gave people the idea that we were not civilized. It is only the pervasive fear of arrest that keeps me from doing it more as an adult, so whatever lesson my mom was trying to teach wasn't learned.

Behind the Bookcase

Before my dad added on to our mobile home my brother and I shared a room at the middle of the house which had a huge bookcase in it. The room was only about eight foot square and this bookcase was about 6' long and 18” deep and fit into the alcove created by the closet. Once while we were banished to the room for some superfluity of naughtiness we emptied all of the toys and books out of the bookcase and pulled it about a foot away from the wall. This created a secret 6' by 1' room behind the bookcase and I loved secrets and rooms so it really was ideal for me. Matt and I brought blankets and pillows and a few books and toys back there and hung out. The problem with secrets is that it is not sufficient to have them, you have to have the secret and someone has to know that you have a secret. Then, in a perfect world, they have to be agitated that they don't know what the secret is. No one knew we had a secret so we got bored of having it and moved out of our new digs but we left the book case out from the wall. I don't know if it was Matt or I who first came upon the idea of saving the arduous thirty foot journey outside or to the bathroom by just popping behind the bookcase and having a pee there. Well, it was not all that long before somehow my mom discovered we had installed a de facto urinal in our room and she was actually quite upset about a ruined bit of wall and a corner of carpet she said was 'destroyed'. Destroyed mom? Isn't that just a tad melodramatic? If we through out everything that got pee on it in our house we would have to live in the van which by your definition is ruined too.

The bookcase was moved to another room. 

Chilling at the club house

My grandparents on my dad's side lived in a private gated community. A really swank joint with a clubhouse, swimming pool and private park I am talking about a little place called the Imperial Mobile Home Park. Anytime we went to visit my grandma for extended periods of time or had a family get-together my grandma would reserve the clubhouse and fit the whole family in at once. This was easier then trying to do it at their mobile home because there were 20-30 of us at any given time. Most of my dad's brothers and their families were usually there and some second cousins and their families. So there was plenty of kids and that was awesome for us but for those still anchored in southern decorum it was a living nightmare. We would run around the one big meeting room and jump on the couches and would play tag or just scream as children do.

Best toy Ever

My favorite part was some faux finished octagonal end tables that had four doors on the side and enough room in the middle for a kid to climb right in. I think all of the cousins loved that so beside the wear and tear inherent in having a little hell spawn crawl through the furniture there was the additional damage of a few of the spawn fighting over it. We must have been banned from that glorious thing twenty times a party but the allure was worth the risk. My grandma was always trying to organize us into some ridiculous game that she invented, she was not a student of game theory so they were always badly balanced and organized. So we would get bored and wonder off and she would tell us all to get back until someone was able to run free and then only the pious would remain to salvage the scraps of the game. In fact the clubhouse had a pool which was open approximately never, but when it was open we used to go over and get yelled at by my grandma for an hour or two as we tried to swim. She always wanted us to play in exactly the way she formulated in her mind beforehand, however she never shared these rules us we had to determine them by error. So is like a game of punishment mastermind. You would do four or five things in combination, get in trouble but you were not sure for what, and then you had tried different combinations of things to see you find a common thread. She did teach me how to tread water which for some reason she called sculling I think it is the same thing. A lot of parties a lot of fond memories from that clubhouse it's also nice to know that my grandparents are rich enough to live in a place that had clubhouse. It makes you feel good to be better than other people.

Is Your Mom A Sheep?

My dad ran his appliance sales and repair business out of our house so many time customers would just drop in with a question or request but my dad was never home. That meant they would usually talk to my mom which was useless because she preferred not to sully herself with the details of the business. The other problem was that my mom had a sacrosanct two hour siesta time in the early afternoon and no one violated that time if you did not want to die. Actually, violating nap time was the one thing we were most consistently punished for, and it was big time trouble. One day an old man without his dentures came looking for a part for his dryer but without teeth he was incredibly difficult to understand. He was also an old time cowboy so he had that drawl going on and that did not help. When he knocked I went to the door and he asked me if my 'Dab' was 'aroumb', I told him my dad was at work and that I could talk a message.

He told me he didn't want to “leabe any gob dab messadge, 'cause he don't returmb dem.”

True enough sir, but I would like to get back to playing so how can I get you off the porch? That last bit is what I was feeling if not thinking. Then he asked me where my 'Mob' was. I told him she was taking a nap. He was incredulous and asked 'Your mob is a sheep?'. Sensing a magnificent setup for a touch of smart-assery I responded to his question with a question, “Is my mom a sheep?'. Obviously frustrated he repeated more slowly, 'is – your - mob - a - sheep?'

I told him no she was not a sheep but she was taking a nap. That did the trick and he went on his way. My brother and I spent the next couple weeks asking each other if our mom was a sheep. It is actually still a pretty good family joke and anyone of us will know what you are asking if you want to know if our mom is a sheep. 

I Hide The Evidence

Yes Mother, Yes Mother, Four bags full.

I mentioned before that we had a rotation of chores growing up that we would have to do for a week and then switch. Many of our time sensitive and special priority requests to my parents, in stead of being answered was simply thrown back in our face with a silly question like, 'Are your chores done?'

Seems simple but there was a barb in there, it was a trick question! Whatever you said they would shoot back with, 'Well, there is your answer.' Tricky right? It almost made it seem like that if you were not allowed to go sleepover at your friends house that it was somehow a reflection on how you discharged your duties. Rude. One day I had a huge pile of laundry to do and some friends who were heading right out and I knew if I asked I would be tripped up on the no chores equals no play shenanigans my mom loved to pull. I devised a plan that would have me out the door in no time flat, I got four big garbage bags and filled them to bursting with the huge pile of clothes that was there for the sorting. I went out back and opened up a hole in the skirting around the trailer and stuffed the bags in. My plan was to go and play and then come home fetch out the bags and do the thing right. I went and asked my mom if I could go and as was her wont she asked about the laundry I told her I had it taken care of, which you liars and English majors will have noticed is not a lie. She had the temerity to come and check, as if there was reason to doubt my profession of dutiful service; the nerve. I was nervous and she was actually a little surprised to find the laundry was indeed no longer in the laundry room and assuming, like most sane people would, that the only thing someone would do with approximately four huge bags worth of clean laundry would be to sort, fold, and put it away she let me go. I had a good time came home late and forgot about the laundry for several weeks. Then when everyone was missing quite a few clothes and no one could figure out how roughly the amount of clothing that could roughly fill four large trash bags could just go missing it dawned on me that I could be the culprit. I went and snuck the bags that had stayed mostly clean under the house and brought them back inside to be rewashed and then my sister would have to sort and fold them because that was her job, and one must do their job.  

Skateboard Road Rash

My brother and I were the type of kids who were always looking for ways to take our hobbies to the next level of danger. In my mind I would work out elaborate fantasies about how cool it would look if we added some other thing to the mundane thing were were currently attempting. Something that seemed to me at the time like a good idea but about the time a sizable portion of my skin had been relocated to the pavement was towing a skateboard behind a bike. We had a ski tow rope that we took from our boat and we had ties it onto the seat post of my bike. My brother was in charge of the peddling and it was not easy to pull another kid on a skateboard on the kind of roads that we had in Santaquin the surface was rather rough. I tried riding behind wake board style by the irregular lurching of the bike and the skateboard across the road made it impossible for me to stand. Then I hit upon a tragically simple idea why not lay down face first on the skate board and let him pull me on my belly? What I had not remembered is that half of the time when I was pulled off of the skateboard I was able to jump off and run a couple of step to keep from falling. A skateboard is also not a vehicle really designed for rural roads. That is because they have about one centimeter of clearance and therefor, any rock larger then a centimeter with stop the whole board as quickly and as surely as if it had four wheel breaking. The other problem, that I didn't think was a problem at first was that laying on the board made it possible to stay on and my brother was able to get me going about five miles per hour in our church parking lot. For a few amazing second the rush of the road under the board and the whip of wind around my face felt like success. Then I hit a rock and the board stayed and I went, and that felt much less like success and more like being ran over a cheese grater. The rode ripped the sleeve and side off of my shirt and I skidded to a stop with quite a bit of my on the rode and a fair amount of the rode in me. I limped home bleeding and crying and My brother came home beside me walking his bike and carrying the skateboard. I had to soak out all of the gravel that was imbedded in my arm and side and then my mom picked out most of the rocks and bandaged it up the best she could. I took over a month to heal because the scab was so big and all over it was massively painful to dress, undress or sleep. That is the last time I ever did something that dumb. . .until the next time.

Riding Bikes Doing Jumps

This is exactly the type of thing I imagined I was doing. 

On any given day the very most common thing we did besides building forts, was riding bikes. For anyone familiar with BMX bikes knows there is only one way to ride them, hard and over jumps. I wrote BMX back there in that last sentence but I was exaggerating, we never owned actual BMX bikes we owned used knock-off BMX bikes which probably single handedly accounts for why I never learned how to do a totally sweet front-flip on a half-pipe. They say it is a poor workman who blames his tools, I think the adjective 'poor' in that aphorism is supposed to refer to the skill of the craftsman, but I like to think it is reflective of the workman's socio-econimic standing. Then it sounds more like a justification then a dig at the person's character. Getting back to the matter at hand there is two ways to ride hard; riding fast and doing tricks. Riding fast is exactly what it sounds like but in a relativistic sense in that fast to a 8-year-old riding a knock-off BMX bike around his block is not very fast in an absolute sense. It felt awesome to go all out wind in the hair and pumping away on a un-geared set of peddles, and then the pièce de résistance , jamming back hard on the peddles to break and, bike gods willing, skid the tires. A beautiful thin line of black rubber was admired by all the other kids and bike riding skill was directly correlated to its length. Next in glory after skidding came riding with no hands especially if you had the skill to turn corners and break without having to touch the handlebars. The move that made a young boy a god among men was popping a wheelie, and if you wanted Santaquin bike immortality you rode that wheelie. I could skid and ride mostly strait with no hands and I could momentarily lift the front wheel of my bike off of the ground. Shame. After riding hard you did jumps and we spent a lot of time as children seeking out or building some really sweet jumps. We would go to an abandoned lot by ourhouse that had a little circuit trail and would take shovels and dig a pit in the trail and take the remaindered dirt stack it up and make a little jumping hill in front of the pit we just dug. The idea being that if all went well you would ride up the hill get sweet air and clear the pit with no trouble. That did happen on occasion but mostly the rider would dribble of the end of the hill well below the necessary velocity for takeoff and the pit would become for the young dirt bikers what the La Brea tar pits were to Stegosaurus. At least the dirt was forgiving other jumps we tried were off a set of steps by the church that went up three steps parallel to a ramp and then they just dropped off about two feet. In my mind I would ride up the ramp and launch super far into the air and land all awesome hopefully while girls were watching. In practice, and I must be clear I have no photographic evidence of this, the move looked more like a rather timid kid easing his bike off of a two-foot tall cement ledge. Girls were never around. I don't know if I ever did a proper jump where both of my tires came off the ground and it looked cool and I landed it like a two-wheeled gymnast but I spent a lot of time trying.

Lady

Before I was born my parents had a dog who went crazy when they started having babies and started pooping in front of my infant sister's door and then ran off. My mom was allergic to cats so we never could even play with a cat and come home all hairy without her almost dieing. So a cat was right out. That meant that even though I deeply and truly wanted a pet I was relegated to watching other boys have great dogs which they could brag about. In the trailer-park that bragging was generally about how their dog had maimed or killed someone. At first blush this seems like something other people would have heard about but when a bluff was called one time I remember the kid saying that the dog did indeed bite a robbers leg off but that the cops told him not to tell anyone. Oh, man, awesome! I wanted a dog that could bite a whole leg off and the cops would just say, ''good dog, good dog, who bit bad man's leg clean off? Who did? Who?' and pat him on the head. That junkyard-type-dog dream was never realized but our neighbors the Shepherds did give us a puppy when they moved. I was eight and we had moved across town so we had the room, not that we needed much for that little girl. She was a spunky little cocka-poo named Lady that was the best dog ever. She was such a sweetheart around the family, and she was just absolutely psychotic and fearless when it came to defending us from danger. Like many little dogs she had no idea that she was tiny, or her limitations. If she sensed danger she would fearlessly bolt into action to protect us from much bigger dogs or even just a nebulous sense of danger that may be in a closet at 2 am. The shear shock of seeing a snarling little ball of hate many times took the bigger dog off guard and they would make an expeditious retreat.

One day after we had her for a few years my family was going to a car auction to pick up a new ride and I was overcome with a very strong feeling that I should say home for some reason. I was inside reading a book on the living room floor when I heard a horrible whimpering cry from the back of the house. I ran out and saw lady with her intestines pulled out fighting with two of my neighbors blue heelers that they used as cattle dogs. I chased them off and even with her guts out Lady wanted to press the fight but I caught her up and took her inside and tried to wrap up he guts as gently as I could in some gauze. I wanted to do something else but in those distant dark ages there were no cell phones and I would just have to wait for my family to come home. So I knelt down beside her with my hand on her side and stroked her head and cried and prayed and plotted a painful death for those bastard dogs who did this. It got dark but I never got up from lady's side to turn on the lights so the house was dark when my parents finally came home. When I saw their headlights I ran outside and told them that Lady was dieing and that we need to go to the vet. My mom and dad came inside and we picked he up in a blanket and went to the vet who told my parents that she needed 600$ worth of surgery. This was in the 80's when my family was struggling to make ends meet and six hundred dollars was a huge amount of money. My dad told the doctor we would have to let him know in a little while but that he was taking the kids home in case she needed to be put down. We went home and he started to try and break the news to us but we broke down first; the whole family was crying and begging and saying we would earn back the money we needed to pay for the surgery. He was trying to explain to us the sacrifice that $600 represented but we could only think about how much we loved that dog. We cried and begged and offered to forgo birthdays and Christmas for the year and our allowance and to sell our toys if we needed to. After we had plead all we could pleed and promised never to ask for anything else in the history of the world he relented and called the vet to okay the surgery. She had the operation and got all the insides back on the inside and came home later that week she had a limp for a very long time and had to have a head cone and antibiotic on he wounds for a long time but she was alive and that is all that mattered. She was our dog for six more years and then she got in another fight with big dogs and while it was not as bad as the first she still needed medical attention. At that point we decided that she needed a safer home so she went to live with by grandpa in Colorado. He had a fully fenced yard and was single at the time so his was a good place for lady to grow old. She lived until she was almost 20 and then died quietly. My dad didn't hold us to our bargain and we got Christmas and birthdays again before 'never ever again' as the contract stipulated. 

Battle Shipping and Sub-Marines

After the trip when we were driving back we were basically in the get home quick mode but we did stop in Mississippi to tour a battleship and a submarine. I was totally enraptured with all kinds of martial technology at the time so it was a great stop for me. My sisters and brother did not seem to share my enthusiasm and after we had toured the battle ship they were ready to go but I insisted we check out the sub. I was fascinated by the  size of the battleship and its impressive guns but I fell right in love with the submarine. It was so technological and sleek, everything was as cool as it could possible be the controls the engines the periscope which really looked like they do in the movies. It was awesome. I was not impressed by the lack of privacy and the tiny bathrooms but I loved how everything was exactly placed and intricately integrated. I spent the next two days of our ride home drawing submarines and designing one of my own. It turned out that I may have not fully grasped the difficulty of the technological challenges the fine engineers of the military sub had overcome but the seed was planted and it was sub or die. I almost got my wish but that is a story for another day.

Disney Land is Empty

We drove down to Orlando check out Disney World which is not usually my dad's scene because he has a lot of hate in his heart about places that are full of people. To avoid the crush we were going to go in the middle of winter in the middle of the week and to cap our trifecta is was raining just a little bit. We pulled up and there was no one in line the parking lots had maybe 200 cars in them and it looked like a ghost town. So we run up got in and there was almost no one inside either. We ran to the first ride we could see which was a stupid spaceship simulator so we pressed on. The next ride was Space Mountain and that was much muchly better and there was no one in line there either so when we rode they had taken down all of the barricades and we could just run right back and ride again. This free for all lasted until about noon when we had ridden almost everything in the park including The Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World. They were terrible but at least we didn't have to wait in line. In all honesty I think Johnny Depp deserves even more credit then he got for his depiction of Captain Jack Sparrow because that ride really is dreadfully boring. When I say we all rode the rides I mean my older sister my brother and I because my little sister was too small and my mom had too watch her all day. There were a couple they could ride like the magic tea cup or some low-rent carnival refugee ride. We had an awesome time and by the time the crowds really started filling in in the late afternoon we had our fill and were ready to go. I mistakenly thought that was what Disney Land was like for everyone. After talking to many people though it turns out we were the luckiest kids on earth. It is interesting to me though how many people sugesst getting on more of the crappy rides by fraud. I have had dozens of people suggest either faking an injury so I would get to move up in the line or take a mentally handicapped person with me to skip up in the line. I would be happy if someone wanted to take a legitimately handicapped person to Disney Land for the joy of it but to butt in line strikes me as dishearteningly cynical. I have been back as an adult and I think that it is the single most overrated thing in the whole of existence, how's that for cynical?

White Springs Fall In

I am not going to drink my own uncle's pee. I won't. 

Once we got Florida one of the first things we did was to go by my dad's cousin's family's amusement park. 

If you have never been to the south the one thing you must know is that everyone is a cousin to everyone and they all know how they are all related. This is because they have kept the gene pool relatively parochial, with no need to mix with northerners. This amusement park was modest and abandoned but at one time had a roller skating rink a swimming area in the spring and slides and a diving board. There were also pinball machines and a dance for or as the hillbillies liked to call it a 'juke joint'. It was called White Springs the first time I went my cousin told me it was more like white trash springs. Being from the racially homogeneous and harmonious west I had never heard the term white trash ans assumed that he was referring to it having a lot of garbage around. We were there in the middle of the winter so no one was swimming and my siblings cousins and I we running around on the equipment and in the roller skating rink and down by the stream that ran off from the spring. My cousins all started jumping over the stream and my dad yelled down to us to not jump and to run back around because it was time to go and he didn't want us falling in a getting wet. I was, as many nerds are, overly optimistic about my physical prowess so I decided to thoughtfully decline my father's request and go for it anyway. It went badly. I jumped about six-inches short of terra firma and landed instead on a patch of moss and slid as quickly as gravity and my momentum could manage face first into the bank. From there I went ahead and fell into the stream proper and got soaked and a bloody nose as well as a respectably thorough spanking for my troubles. I have since decided to always look before I leap and then don't. In later years white springs was closed to swimming and is now used by a bottled water company as a 'source untouched and protected for millions of years'. Lies. I know for sure that I have peed in it, and I think it would be safe to assume that most of my kin did also. To be clear, the befoulment of this pristine source was more recent then the millions of years claimed on the bottle.  

Locked and Latched and Day Glow Pink

Hats like this. Not this nice and brighter pink but like this in that it is a hat that is pink.

To ensure a safe and uneventful trip my dad had a couple weird rituals that we were required to do before we could leave the camper to venture forth. Before we left we went by this t-shirt shop in the town next to ours and bought these florescent-pink-foam-front-mesh-back-one-size-fits-no-one hats and six extra large T-shirts in the same gawdawful hue. We then wrote our name and contact information inside the hats and cinched them down tight to try and get them to stay on our heads. The shirts were either much to long so they more resembled house dresses or when we tucked them in for that more dressy look it looked like we were trying to smuggle inter tubes in our pants. Every time we were going to get out of the camper we all had to put on our hats and knee-length dresses and stand outside for inspection to make sure we were all up to dress code. As much as I despised the uniform I do have to admit as a parent myself now it would be hard to lose a day-glow pink kid. Before we left an attraction we would all have to 'go try' in the bathroom even if we didn't feel the urgency yet. This was a labor saving tactic for my dad and his potty cleaning duties. When we got back we had to take off our uniforms and put them in the back closet of the camper and them everyone had to yell their own name to my dad and mom in the cab to make sure we were all accounted for. This may seem over cautious if you didn't know that my mom had left kids places more then once. The last chore before we could get going was to lock and latch the back door to make doubly sure it was safely closed and would stay that way. Then my dad or mom would yell back, 'Locked and latched?' Whomever was on door duty had to yell back, 'Locked and latched!' That and only that if you yelled back yes or yep they would just repeat the question. Once we were all in and settled then we could start fighting again.  

Using up all of My Money Before the Promised Land

Have fun dragging all that delicious food down into your hole, sucker. 

I've never been very good at budgeting or keeping my money where it's supposed to be, I think it started at a very young age when we were going out of Florida, My dad had a certain amount of money for each of us to use on the trip he had this in his keeping so it would not be lost. We started out with 40$ apiece and we were allowed to access that money whenever we wanted and I wanted it at every gas station and vending machine exactly in the order that they came into my line of sight. Every time my dad would say to me, ' this is your money and you are free to spend it but when it is gone it is gone and you will miss out on better things.” Yep, yup, uh-huh – if you are done I would like to purchase this delicious thing that I impulsively desire. My brother and sisters would save up and watch me eat my bag of Skittles and say they were planning on getting something cool from Disney Land or Sea World. I told them, like the wise old grasshopper from that old story that now was the time to play. Like the stupid ants from that same story they kept restraining themselves and storing away their resources for the winter. Suckers. Well, about the time we hit Georgia my glucose bender had wiped out my forty small, and I was starting to think that Aesop may have intended the fable so as to cast the grasshopper's lack of forethought as some sort of cautionary tale. I wasn't too worried because we arrived in Florida the next day and if there is one thing southerners know how to do that is provide food to visitors. I said yes to some Pee-Can Pah, and other delightful caloric enticements. The crushing reality of my plight never sunk in until we were in the parking lot of Disney world in Orlando and my brother and sisters were being handed their money and I was not. I threw myself on the mercy of the court, I cried, I pouted, I begged and my dad had the nerve to remind me that I had knowingly chose my fate. Yeah-buts fell on deaf ears. I had to go and enjoy Disney World stone cold flat out broke. It was okay as long as we were on rides but at lunch when I had to eat a cold bologna sandwich while my siblings luxuriated in the fried goodness of a corn dog I felt as if my plight was more then I could bear. Then came the unkindest cut of all souvenirs. I had to avert my tear filled eyes. Did this teach me a valuable lesson? I don't think so.  

Head Through the Hole

I mentioned before that we passed a lot of the time in the back by fighting. We would try and nap and read and pay games but there is only so much camper time a boy can take before he can't take no more. Then a brother or sister or I would start to pester someone else to get some excitement going. Then someone else would join in and the melee would ensue. Then someone would get hurt too badly and start to yell and scream or the queen mother of all kid-sins, go tell. My dad would yell back at us to knock it of or he was going to give us something to cry about. We were not wise so a word was never sufficient and we would push our luck right past the point at which he would ultimately take action. When my dad decided it was time to lay down some law he would yell for whomever was responsible in the back to stick their head through a hole in the bottom front of the camper that matched up with the back window of the truck and tell him the story. He would listen to both sides and then decide who needed their 'melon thumped' and then tell that person to put their head through the hole. 

 "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" 

You had to kneel on the floor of the camper to line your head up to put it through the hole. He would then reach over his right shoulder with his left hand as he drove with his knee and grasp the hair at the back of your neck. Then he would say something like, ' I Don't want to hear anymore fighting.' and then give a crisp knuckle rap to the top of the offenders head. It was best to take this medicine without instinctively pulling your head back because the window of the truck and its mating piece in the camper were both lined with ribs of extruded aluminum that would wreck your face if you drug it back incautiously. The pain was great but the indignity was greater so there was a fair amount of wishing hateful and painful misfortune on my dad as I whimpered in the back after justice had been served. The problem was it was evidently not anywhere aversive enough because I sometimes would get several whacks a day. Live and don't learn that is what I say.  

Potty Time! Ya'll sit down, Ya Hear?

My line in the sand.

My dad was naturally in charge of taking care of the toilet facilities so being the cry baby that he is he had all kinds of rules to make his life less miserable. The camper was equipped with a chemical toilet that held a few gallons of excreta and a blue fluid that did something magical to the poop juice. It had to be taken out and emptied about once a day as my dad had two tanks on the truck and would only stop for fuel if it was absolutely necessary. That meant there was lots of pit stops taken on the fly in the back by the kids. He did ask the we kept the number two saved up as much as possible to be deposited at a KOA or a gas station if possible, emergencies excepted. He also demanded that everyone sat down to tinkle which as an manly man of eight I took as a deeply personal insult. I had been equipped from the factory to urinate standing up and it was like spitting in god's face in disrespect for that magnificent bestowal to condescend to pee sitting down, even if it was in a moving vehicle. Everyday when my dad had to come in a pick up the toilet he would see that some mysterious sprinkle sprite had left pee splatters on the seat, and handle, and wall, and floor, and quite irrationally blame me for the mess. I would assure him that while there was definitely urine on the every-damn-thing that I was confident of my aim and it must have been him or my brother, then six, that had done it. I even once suggested it may had been a particularly rambunctious female who could be guilty. He wasn't in the mood to listen to calm logic and was cranky about having to dump out containers of suage without having the outside coved in it as well and said he would unleash the angels of death, hell and destruction on my bottom if the pee ever found itself on the wrong, specifically out, side of the toilet. I still never sat down to pee but I would swab the decks with a little toilet paper after I was forced off my mark by forces beyond my control. A man has to hold on to his dignity in whatever way he can Viktor Frankl did it by remaining true to his core beliefs in a concentration camp and I did it by peeing on the seat. 

Cab-Over Luxury

Lets discuss what a cab-over camper entails so you can live the experience as we vicariously travel down the long road to Florida. First off there is a twin size bed over the cab surrounded by windows that all have curtains and a plastic vent in the roof for ventilation that is opened with a crank. On the lover level is a kitchen, closet, bathroom, and table. The table turn into a bed at night and the cupboards above the table turn into the third bed so there were three beds for six people which meant we all shared which was generally okay until it was potty time in the middle of the night. My dad would get down from the from bed and either have to come up and over my mom or just shake the whole camper while he made his way to the back. The cupboard turned bed was very close to the roof and the inside person was in a deep dark place that was impossible to get out of without waking everyone up. It was also tortuous for me because I only sleep five to six hours a night and I would wake up so very bored and be on the dark inside with neither book nor game for distraction. Like a claustrophobic dark living hell of tedium. The kitchen has a tiny sink and fridge and a small prep area so my mom would generally kick us out to go play while she made our meals. Most were sandwiches and such but every couple of nights she would do a little something special which many times was rice covered with this two part simulated stir-fry kit that had a can full of mushy stuff taped to a can of crisp stuff that you mixed together right before you poured it on the rice and added crispy noodles. It was my idea of some really fine dining but that may have just been relative to cold bologna and government cheese sandwiches. That was basically our sleep and it situation for all of our trips but especially prolonged for this one. 

The Alamo

Take the Tour!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYfjq3ZYZbA

Our next stop was in the great state of Texas which my little sister once so wryly described by saying that, 'Texas proves our God is an angry God and doesn't want us to be happy.' We stopped into San Antonio to take a look at the Alamo. Everybody supposed to do that at some point in their life, if they love America. The problem is there is not so much to see at the Alamo. I you where to have driven to San Antonio just to see it, I think you'd be a little disappointed. If you have ever talked to a Texan, and believe me, you will have known if you have because they are constitutionally unable from mentioning it in every other sentence, they will act like they are somehow participants in the victory of the Alamo. What they often fail to mention is that they were not, in actual fact at the scene, and secondly that it was not actually a victory but a defeat. Texans are however, correctly proud of a state anti-littering slogan that they will compulsively recite if given the opportunity; that slogan is, of course 'Don't Mess with Texas'. Another prominent fact that most romanticizers of the Alamo forget is that Texas was fighting for independence from Mexico because slavery was illegal in Mexico and Texans were worried that if the Mexicans occupied the area they may not be able to keep their slaves. I had heard stories about the Alamo and read books and had seen Pee-wee's big adventure so I knew my Alamo, of so I thought. It is a adobe fort with wooden doors that is not very large and there are thousands of bullet holes through everything. There are a few displays and they have spruced up the outside a little but there is not much to it. The problem was that my dad had blocked out a certain amount of time, something like three hours, which was two and a half hours too long. He had talked up the Alamo and therefore was incapable of admitting that it had been oversold and that we should just wrapo it up and head on down the road. So he made us slog though every possible time conuming display, tour and plaque. There were a couple of cool cannons outside but they are not for ridding as a park ranger reminded us once or twenty-teen. I thought I would be all set if I never came back but when I was twenty-five my wife and I were in San Antonio and she thought we should go see it. I told her it was in a bad part of town and that it was boring but nothing worked and I had to go back, but with no pride on the line we were able to leave in a reasonable amount of time after we asked all of the rangers where we might find the basement.

Carlsbad Caverns

 Our next stop was at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico which in my opinion is way better then that other southwestern hole in the ground the Grand Canyon. The caverns are huge and have been fitted with steps and ramps and lights to make it passable for old ladies. That is the problem is that they made it accessible to old ladies and we spent the whole day behind old ladies butts which is no way to enjoy nature. My sister and brother and I would try and rush ahead and there the old ladies would be blocking the way so we would run back my parents and then run back across the distance to the old ladies. The old ladies got mad at us and told us to quit running around and that they were going to tell on us to the rangers. When we got to a place to pass we ran around and Christy told them that we liked the view better without their fat butts in the way. My sister's impudence scared me because I thought the old ladies would really report us to the cave cops. After that run-in I kept well ahead and tried to avoid the old ladies at all costs. I also touched one of the formations which was also off limits so I figured I needed to lay low until the heat blew over and therefore spent much of my time in one of natures great wonders looking out for the Five-Ohh. I was not arrested or tried for my crimes.  

Four Corners

Even though this is basically all you will see don't lie and brag you have been there. That takes away from those of us who have put in the time and effort to really see it. 

 The first stop we made on our trip was where the corners of four state lines converge. That is really it. It seems that with 48 states down here that it would happen more often but it only happens once in the whole U.S. So they built a visitors center and a little monument to the whole beautiful occurrence in the middle of the high desert. There is not really much scenery and not much to do but you can run between and touch simultaneously four states at once. Which I always have in my metaphorical back pocket in case anyone gets all high and mighty about how many states they have been in simultaneously I'll be able to at least match their best number. I am pretty sure that it was not on our way so my dad had to plan for and execute a detour to take in the grandeur which is arbitrary lines coming together. That is how this party, which is the trip to Florida kicked off.  

Road Trip to Florida

A cage for carrying 4 kids and their overwhelming boredom for thousands of miles.

In the late 1980's my parents decided to load up the four of us and take an epic trip to the homeland of my father's tribe, Florida. Not Miami or Orlando or anywhere of interest, hillbilly swamp Florida, Where it rains every day and the people still think they didn't loose the civil war so much as were sold out by coward generals. It is the part of the south that makes you wonder if the north fought a little bit too hard for that particular chunk of ground. But blood is thicker then gasoline as they don't say, so we were off on an epic road trip. They were, and still are - by most accounts, keeping Florida on the other side of the country from Utah. That meant we were in for a very long drive. We had an old pick up truck a cab over camper and nothing but time so we headed off into the sunrise on our trip. The trip was so long and eventful I will have to break it up over a few posts so as not to milk it dry in one fell swoop. My dad really likes to drive and will do anything to be behind the wheel putting down miles. So all we had to do was entertain ourselves for 8 hours at a stretch until we needed gas, He was from the 'ram it home' more then the 'stop and stretch' school of travel. One time he went to New Zealand  and drove thousands of miles there, which is a harder trick in New Zealand. Usually one could pass time with a nap or a look out the window, a game I enlivened by picking a bug or rock chip and pretending it was a reticule and aiming at and shooting everything. After that was used up I would start to annoy one of my siblings, just to have something to do. Then we would fight something would break or someone would cry and it would be over for a bit and we could nap or look out for a bit more. 

We Sing About Sexual Coercion as a Family

According to song all you need is one of these and a girl who cannot swim. 

My mom had worked as a camp councilor when she was younger and it seems like that developed in her a lifelong love of goofy songs. We had a goofy song song book that she would play songs from while we stood around the piano. We sang about Mother Hubbard throwing her dog out the window. We sang about a boy who disregarded his mother's advice and got kicked in the face by a Salvation army lass:

. . .One night he went out with his new-found friends to dine,
And they tried to persuade him to take a drink;
They tempted him and tempted him, but he refused and he refused,
Till finally he took a glass of beer.

When he seen what he had done he dashed the liquor to the floor,
And he staggered through the door with delirium tremens;
While in the grip of liquor he met a Salvation Army lassie,
And cruelly he broke her tambourine.

All she said was 'Heaven bless you!' and placed a mark upon his brow,
With a kick that she had learned before she was saved;
So kind friends, take my advice and shun the fatal curse of drink,
And don't go around breaking people's tambourines."

     The song that we put on for public display was a tale of sexual coercion gone wrong. It went like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUUUvGMl4Yk&feature=related . We sang that song for a talent show at church complete with canoe, paddle, and moon props. It was fun to share with others not only the, nearly, perfect set up for sexual coercion but also the most expeditious escape given the circumstance, all through a fun song. It is not what you sing it is how cute it is when you sing it that counts and my mom has always been notoriously bad at understanding the meaning of lyrics. 

K-mart Abandonment

My new home.

My mom, like most parents, soon found that threats of abandonment are about the only way to get kids moving. She used to threaten to leave us about 10 times day. She would claim that if we didn't get in the car she would leave us home, then if we didn't quit fooling around she would leave us at the store, the gas station, the wherever we were lolly-gagging. I remember being a little worried but mostly not because I didn't think she would really leave. However, one day at K-Mart I was in the toy section giving all off the G.I. Joe and He-Man toys a proper inspection and she threatened to leave me if I didn't come with her but I was in some sort of toy induced hypnotism and while I did hear her, I was helpless to follow when so many toys still needed a good looking over. My mom went and checked out and headed to the car, loaded in the other three kids, who, in those days were all piled in the back. She asked my sister if I was in the car and she said yes and they were off. This was about the time I realized I had not been nagged in a while and ran, in a panic, around the store looking for my mom's distinctively fluffy hair and hair bow. The only real problem was there were lots of moms with that same look and I had a couple of false positives as I continued to get more and more scared. I then ran outside and saw that the car was gone and just lost it. I was crying and running back and forth in front of the store trying to see the car but it was gone. A lady saw my distress and I sobbingly told her that my mom had said if I didn't stop looking at toys that she was going to leave me. Then she left me. She took me into the store and they called the police who got there in a few minutes and started asking me questions about my mom and where we lived and what our phone number was. About this time my mom had realized that she did not, in fact, have a full compliment of children. She was on the freeway and it was about six miles between exits and then six miles back made it a little over 20 minutes before she was back. She then had to explain that she did threaten to leave me for motivation but left me on accident. Relived that it was merely incompetence and not child abandonment that was the cause of all the hubbub they police turned me over to go home. The next time she told me she would leave me I knew she just might.

Barkies

In the movie 'Better Off Dead' a character complains about the size of the town they live in while he is buying several cans of whip-cream saying it was so small you couldn't even buy real drugs. Santaquin was not that small. However, my sister and brother and I couldn't buy real drug or cigarettes so we made fake cigarettes from various weeds and herbs and whatsits all rolled up in paper a lot a bit thicker then your standard rolling papers. We had quite a bit of mint and onions growing untended in the front of our house and my sister would roll up a fat grass/mint/onion joint and light it up. It did not flare up and then die down to the gentle ember of a more commercial cigarette because the guts were too wet and the paper was too thick so t just burned on until it was extinguished. Then she would breathe in the smoke and see if it had any effect. In case you were wondering why onion and mint have not caught on really big as flavors for cigarettes it is because it is noxious and foul. She tired a few different recipes but I quickly soured on the enterprise utterly convinced that I would be found by the cops and arrested for the possession and manufacture of simulated drugs. After the first flush of excitement my anxiety kicked in and I went inside the vacant house in the front of our property and hid while occasionally looking out the window to see exactly how naughty my sister was being. Maybe that is why later in life she picked up smoking for real and I did not. I should go around to schools and tell young kids about how onion/mint barkies are a gateway to real cigarettes and that is why big tobacco want them to try barkies. So, constant reader if a older boy or girl offers you a piece of newspaper rolled around some weeds and entices you to light it on fire and then put it out and then inhale the noxious smoke – Just Say No!