Peeing the Bus and the Walk of Shame

 When I was an 11-year-old cub scout I got to go on my first over-night camp-out in our neighbor's bus. They had a really large family and they had converted an old school bus into a camper but it was no longer running and it was in their backyard as a scout refuge from the parents. It was really exciting for me to go hang out with the older boys especially because one of the guys was a huge Eddie Murphy fan and had listened to his Raw and Delirious albums about a million times and could recite the whole show with a pretty good imitation including the braying laugh. I didn't know who Eddie Murphy was but if a 17-year-old boy thinks something is funny it carries a lot of weight in the circle I rode with. There were about 12 boys that were there at the campfire listening and watching a recreation of a sketch comedy special and we were all laughing so hard that we were about to cry. When it was time to go to bed we all piled into the buss that had about 20 beds built into the walls and back and laid in our sleeping bags talking until 2 or 3 in the morning. I was the last one to go to sleep and when I was heading off to the land of Nod I had the distinct need to void my bladder. I also had the overwhelming dread of going out into the strange night. I compromised, and by compromised I mean caved in fear, and decided to try and sleep with a full bladder. In a not in anyway surprising turn of events I peed the bag or maybe it was peed the bus, anyway I urinated on my bedding. I woke up very early, I think it was around 5 a.m., I bundled up my bag and gear and walked the half mile home. As far as I know, and given the propensity of young boys to jump on the bully pile should the opportunity arise, I would have known; no one ever knew. When they asked me at church why I had left so early I told them I had a really bad headache and decided to go home. I think that was the last time I ever peed the bed at all, let alone on a group activity. Only took eleven years so that is not bad at all.   

Quin's Dad Calls Me a Poo Poo Head.

 Quin's dad did not like me, he thought I was in the wrong social class for his son to be associating with if he was going to be popular and successful. He would actually tell Quin really hurtful things about me while I was standing right there in the room. He would say something like ,”You should get better friends because no one likes Nate, he is a Poo-Poo head.”. He would even do it in a funny voice so the other kids would laugh. I thought it was really mean then but now I think that a guy in his middle thirties trying to drive off an undesirable friend by calling him a Poo-Poo head is really sad. But he wanted so badly to be cool and he wanted his kids to be cool and I was not cool and that drove him to do petty things. Soon after he started his propaganda campaign in earnest, Quin started telling me he was too busy or he didn't feel like playing. One time he actually told me that he didn't want to play with me because his dad said I wasn't cool. Even then, I tried a few more times because we had been good friends for two years but we never played again. They moved to a nicer town the next year and I only saw Quin a few more times. Well, his dad's plan worked and Quin was not tainted by association with a scroungy nerd. The only problem was that it worked too well and he started hanging out with the coolest crowd of all, the party crowd. He got big into that scene and died in an accident while under the influence. I didn't go to the funeral but I have visited the memorial tree they planted by a local pond.   

My Dad Yells at Quin and Makes Him Cry

 We almost always played at Quin's house because he had better toys but it was also because my house and the chaos of the place made him uncomfortable. One time I coaxed him into having a sleepover and we had a special treat in store, we both got to sleep out on the hide-away bed in the living room. Well, in a mobile home there is only so much space for stuff to happen and the hide-away was right in the middle of the public space and right at the end of the hall that lead to all of the bed rooms. We, as boys do, goofed off and had been warned about goofing off and that always makes it much funnier. When something is funnier you laugh more and the process quickly falls off the cliff. When you fall off the cliff of hilarity you plummet quickly into the abyss of 'I've-told-you-ten-damn-times' which is a dark and foreboding place where someone not familiar with the place may be disoriented and scared. My dad was prone to go all the way with his anger even with friends in the house and coming from such a docile home life Quin was poorly equipped for that level of verbal violence and threat. He got in his side of the hide-away about 30 seconds into the rage and covered himself completely with the blanket and I hadn't noticed until my dad went back into his room but Quin had started crying. I tried to talk to him a little bit to let him know that my dad would not really kill us he was just really tired and wanted to sleep. He wouldn't talk to me and just cried and hid his face in the pillow, We fell asleep and as soon as he could, about six in the morning he took his clothes and sleeping bag and walked the half mile home. He never came back inside my house. He would leave if he saw my dad or if my dad came home and our friendship was never the same again. I even made him a spear with his name on it and a cool design I had carved into it to smooth things over but he had to give it back to me because spears were not allowed in his home. I had that heartbreak of knowing we could never go back but wanting it to be the same as it was.  

Dead Cat Knowledge

Speaking of my inability to keep my mouth shut when I have nothing to say, I should tell you about what I knew about dead cats. When I laid down the skinny on former felines it was in the same kitchen talking to the same mom that I expounded my wisdom about the U.S. pound of asparagus. You know? I was just thinking I was always trying to impress this woman maybe it was one of those pre-sexual crushes and I just really wanted to have her like me. Anyway, we were talking over some of her after-school baked goods and she mentioned that she had seen a dead cat that was on the side of the road and that it was quite bloated. She wondered out loud what causes dead animals to puff up like that and I thought this was a perfect chance to impress this woman with my knowledge of everything. I came up with some true-smart-facts right on the spot and began to hold forth not just verbally but with a diagram I drew. I told her and the other kids that the reason an animal will be bloated after death was that they died of a punctured lung and as the breathed their last breath they filled up their body cavities to bursting. I used my nonexistent skills as an artist to draw a diagram of what would happen complete with the outline of a animal, a rudimentary lung and arrows showing what was happening to the air. She had actually known the actual answer the whole time and was just stimulating thought with her musing so she could tell the right answer as a teaching moment. She either mercifully or cruelly waited for me to be all the way finished with my cringe-worthy monologue on perforated lungs and then told us why it really happens. I am not sure if she was super impressed with how smart I was, or just really impressed. To this day I still shudder at the shame of laying down made up wisdom with a diagram. With a damn diagram.

Asparagus, One US Pound.

I have spent much of my life trying to appear smarter and more competent then I actually am. I started this ruse early and have stuck with it because why abandon a sinking ship? One of the techniques that is my stack and trade is using unnecessarily complex language to throw people off the trail of my marginal knowledge. The idea is to cause insecurity in the audience with jargon and thus keep them from asking any questions that might reveal the man behind the curtain. This works sometimes but sometimes my bluff is called and leads to some cringe-worthy back and side tracking. One time Quinn and I found some wild asparagus on the side of a ditch and collected a whole lot of it. When we got back to his house I wanted to demonstrate my vast knowledge to his mom and kept saying that we had probably collected one or two U.S. Pounds of asparagus. I mentioned this unit of measure many times in the course of our brief conversation. It was U.S. pound this and U.S. pound that until she finally asked me if there was some other sort of pound that I was worried she would be confused with. I was embarrassed to have my bluff called and I guess I still am. The sad part was that beyond that exact situation it didn't make me reconsider my know-it-all-ism and I still never fore-think my faux pas just regret them. They say consistency is key to something well I am well on my way to whatever that thing may be. 

I Think That Hole Was There From Before

 Although they had a nice idyllic life that I coveted it didn't stop me from spreading a little of our families patented chaos wherever and whenever I could. Whenever someone was over at our house they got a heaping helping of it, if they wanted it or not but in the field the chaos came in doses and generally when I was able to suggest some ridiculous course of action because we had been left without adult supervision. It was on such a day that we were sliding down Quin's carpeted stairs which was not that crazy as far as those things go and we had actually done it before. Where it got crazy was that I applied the full engineering power of my young mind to deliver greater speed. The main issue with building speed was that the stairs were built so that at the end of their fourteen tread decent the terminated first into a three foot landing and then into a wall. We had started the sliding using sleeping bags but I felt that the flexible cloth bag was leaving to much gravitational acceleration on the table. I started to work out a plan whereby our vehicle would have enough rigidity to span at least two steps so we could eliminate the energy wasting bumping. The physics was sound but there are times when it is better to have an understanding of all the consequences and not just the considerations of the proximal problem. Maybe I was a little like Robert_Oppenheimer in that regard, very little like him, very very little. Anyway, I went outside and found a two-by-four that was four feet long and with a saw I rounded the front making a passable if thin ski. After I had my ski I set about making it faster by nailing a two foot wide piece of cardboard to the bottom. Then I nailed two boards crosswise to make some nice seats. It was truly a engineering wonder built for speed at all costs. We went back in to give it a test run which I did all alone with my feet out in front to break my decent before I hit the wall. It was fast and smooth and descended at a magnificent rate. It was all I could do to stop myself as I came to the bottom. Bolstered by the success of my brilliant design I invited my friend and his little brother on the next trip down. My friend sat on the back rung seat, I sat on the front and his little brother, about four at the time, had to sit on my lap so he was in the lead. We balanced on the seats and Quin put his feet up on the cardboard and I butt scooted us to the stair-top precipice and we were off. Success can be measured in many ways, in the sense that we descended the stairs faster than ever before the ride was a great success. By the criteria that no one's head went through the wall at the bottom of the stairs I would have to, in all fairness, admit it was less then perfect. When I applied the breaks at the end of the ride I had failed to calculate the extra passengers and Quin ran into me and his little brother flew forward off my lap and out of my arms and his head penetrated the sheet rock wall in a perfect circle. I thought he was going to be badly injured but he just pulled his head out, which was mercifully unmarked, and cried a little out of shock more than pain. We had dodged a bullet in avoiding maiming a little boy but we were still left with the problem of a six inch round hole in the wall about eighteen inches off the ground. We masterfully covered our sin with a poster of a Lamborghini that we taped over the hole. We thought we were free and clear because at that age we failed to reason out that his mom or dad would most likely find it extremely odd that there was a poster on the wall where it didn't belong that was mounted six inches off the ground. Finding such a placement curious they may preform the rudimentary investigation required to see that it was there to cover a hole in the wall that was definitely not there when they left the house. I don't know exactly how it played out because I once again took the better part of valor and discretion-ed my way back home with all possible haste. The ruse was uncovered fairly quickly and I was not invited to be at my friends house when parents were gone ever again. Honestly, that was not a bad decision and I didn't begrudge them their judgment.  

Quinn G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier

The stuff of catalogs for the likes of me. The U.S.S. Flagg was when the science of plastic became art. 

I didn't have any friends my own age. My brand of nerdy condescension didn't seem to attract a lot of peers to my inner circle. I mainly had older friends and younger friends with whom I could be a leader or follower. One of my early regular best friends was a boy that lived a few blocks away named Quin. His dad was a small-time up and comer who was always angling for more money or influence with side businesses and perennial bids for public office in our small town. His mom was a beautiful and sweet stereotypical fifties wife living a few decades to late. She was the sort of woman who had the kids to school, the beds made, laundry done, cookies baked and dinner on the table at 5:30. It was so radically different than my home life that it was sometimes disorienting and confusing to me but I loved it. I loved that the house was clean and organized and that Quins mom was always interested in talking to us and helping us do projects. She also was a firm believer in afternoon snacks of the baked variety, that was a dogma I could get behind. Beyond having a super stable and normal home life quin had great toys that I coveted dearly. He had video games, erector sets, and best of all he had a G.I. Joe aircraft carrier that was about two feet tall and four feet long. All of that magnificent plastic joy all in one place was my idea of heaven. When we were playing I would generally try and direct the attention down stairs to the play room that had the G.I. Joes but as with many people who have stuff quin was bored with the opulence and wanted to play something else. Sometimes in anticipation of playing with the aircraft carrier I would bring my G.I. Joe collection with me. I only had one Joe so I could bring over my whole collection in my pocket and get him into the action which must have been such a treat for him.

Baseball Cards

 I didn't play baseball. I am, in point of fact, not coordinated. Every year baseball would come around and it seemed like everyone else was playing I even went to a couple of games to watch my friends. Beyond my ineptitude, I had the little problem of my parents never wanting to sign me up for something that may require a little of their time. Every time I would ask to play a sport or some other extra curricular activity my dad had a little set speech about who was going to pay for it and how was I going to get rides to and from practices and games and that we didn't need to put a burden on the whole family just so I could play a game. That went on until I was old enough to just ignore him and make my own plans. By that time I had no interest in baseball so America's pass time was past time. Notwithstanding the fact that I never played baseball, and I still to this day have only been to one baseball game from beginning to end, I collected baseball cards. There was a bug going around the boys in the school when I was in third grade and we were all going to make it rich buying, sorting, and reselling baseball cards. I had no idea who played or what was a good or bad card but everyone was doing it so I would have been a fool to let this once in a lifetime investment opportunity pass me by. Every week when I got my allowance I would pop into Mendenhall's market and make a purchase of some Tops baseball cards. I would enjoy a little stale gum while I sifted through some enigmatic faces and statistics. I began to pick up some names from classmates so that I could fake some knowledge. Right now I only remember Nolan Ryan, Kirby Puckett, Darrel Strawberry, and Mark McGwire, but I am fairly sure more than those four were playing professional baseball at the time. Someone would bring a book to school that listed all the prices for different types of cards and we would all crowd around talking about baseball cards and how much money each of our collections was worth and what it would be worth. I loved the idea that every day I had the chance to open up a pack of cards that would have some rare and valuable card that was worth a thousand dollars and I could buy a car if I wanted. Unfortunately, I never hit pay dirt and and just had a shoebox with some cards with pictures of men I had never seen play a game I didn't really understand. It was a small price to pay to feel like I was one of the guys and to have something in common.  

Air Hockey

 I think that it must have been some sort of trick of genetics that made my dad and several of his brothers constitutionally unable to resist the overwhelming lure of coin-op games. I think only one was able to resist having one in his possession and that was probably his wife’s doing anyway. My uncle Barkley had a Donkey-Kong Jr. and a Pack Man game at least. My uncle wade had a game where you picked up actual physical toy cars with a claw and put them in a hopper to be recycled, exactly like a job you may get if you were to drop out and use to many drugs. My uncle Bill had at least two dozen pin-ball and novelty games he kept in his house and in the shed. It was something they needed to have like other men would regard food and shelter. The addiction has largely passed but at one time my dad had a inoperable French foreign legion game that used a full-sized toy rife to shoot at stereotypical Arabs. So we would just pretend to play that one. He also had a Pirate themed pin ball machine that awarded the most points for flipping the flippers. Not a hard strategy to master as my little sister discovered when she beat us all. Finally, we had a coin op full sized air-hockey table without paddles. We only played these games when someone came over and wanted to go up in the front house and give them a shot. We would have to improvise paddles with the air hockey so we usually used an over turned cup which being poorly suited for the task usually broke fairly early on in the game and would have to be replaced. My mom was naturally thrilled at our breaking all the cups so we were banned from the practice and eventually we lost interest in trying to play with other makeshift alternatives and the game was used to store parts on top of and underneath and then eventually given a quite burial at the landfill.  

Hating on Brittin

 The exact reason why we hated Brittin I don't remember, maybe it was a product of the grubby kid neighborhood zeitgeist, maybe we were just jerks. He really was a rich kid but, he was not ostentatiously wealthy and so I don't remember hating him for that. His family was and is worth millions and he has gone on to be a doctor but they were always very friendly and down to earth so I am trying to remember why we started hating him so much. It wasn't that he didn't share he was the first kid who ever let me play as much Nintendo as I desired with scrupulously fair turns. So that wasn't it either. One day though he was walking with another friend and a group of us started berating him for killing little birds. I think that to a boy each of us had partaken of this little peccadillo but for some reason in the road this one summer day we decided to really go after Brittin for his gross sins against nature. The conversation devolved into a scuffle and one of the younger boys and Brittin actually got into a little fight. After that for about a year we would insult Brittin and make fun of the size and shape of his head and his love of hunting, which we all pretty much shared. This went on for a little bit and then it was over and he was good again and we remained on great terms all through school and after. It was just a pecking party like from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', we just got the notion somehow and all went after one kid and tried to peck him to death. To his credit he never tried to get us back and forgave us when it was over.  

Kevin Has Nice Things, I Hate Him

 There was a boy down the road that was my age but he was a spoiled brat. He was clean and fussy and organized and not the sort of folk that we had congress with. Matt and I were friends with many of the kids in the neighborhood but Keven and his brother were always right off the list. They were not allowed to come to our house if their were no parents around because it was not safe. Kevin and his parents obviously missed the critical life lesson that the less safe something is the more fun it is. One of my regular neighborhood friends was starting to hang out with Kevin because he had all kinds of really good toys. We are talking rich kid stuff here, G.I. Joes, He-Persons, and the purchasable set pieces like bases and such. The only toys we had were by the piece and generally altered, I mean some really great after-market customizations that were lost on those plebeian sons of Santaquin. Our commodity was chaos and adventure, that was not the tribe Keven had been raised in so we had mutually exclusive and somewhat hostile camps of friends. So when one of my good friends started dabbling I felt like it was a threat and wanted to bring Kevin down. Anytime my friend would mention Kevin I would mention in passing some subtle jab at his character. Something like, 'I think Kevin is a stuck up snotty piece of crap.' Subtle stuff to sow seeds of doubt. My mom heard me constantly taking whacks at poor little Kevin and told me to be nice to him. Well that is when the awkward happened and Kevin called to see if I could come over to his house and play. I asked my mom if I could go and she said, 'I thought you said that Kevin was stuck up and you hated him.' What? When? You are crazy mom. She said I could go, I walked down to his house and immediately knew I was in the wrong sort of place when they made me take off my shoes when I came in the door. At that point in my life I had never been in a home that required this kind of protocol so I was embarrassed about the mismatched state of my socks. I feel it should be common courtesy to warn someone before they come over if you are shoe-taking-offer household. We went down to Kevin's room that looked like a toy store because he like to keep many of his toy's posed either in there original boxes of in front of them. I had always been impatient and would rip open a toy I had bought on the way from the store to the car. The only problem was he wouldn't play with them or even let me hold them and that is what I felt toys were for. He suggested we play some Atari. He had the console and the TV in his own room and now we were warming up to some common ground, a video game will bridge the gap nicely. He had the controllers disconnected and in another box which he unboxed but to my confusion only got out one of the controllers. He put in a game and inserted his controller and I asked why he didn't get out the other one and he told me it was because he didn't want other people to play because they did it wrong and the might mess it up but I could watch him play. Which I did for a lack of dignity that still stings to this day I should have told him to piss right off and headed home but I stayed and watched him play for almost an hour. Then he told me I had to go home, and I did. I never went back to Kevin’s house even though he invited me several times but I did ease up on insulting him behind his back. It is just simple logic that a guy who would want me for a friend is at minimum a superior judge of character. They moved away in a couple of years and I ran into Kevin years later in high school debate and beat him soundly.  

Buying Cheep Nice Clothes and Having them Ripped by 'Rich' Kids

At this time in my life, going into fifth grade, I started wanting to be cool. Cool, I think is a combination of nature and nurture, and being a child of nerds who was intermittently home schooled I was naturally a shoe-in. One thing I had deduced with my not inconsiderable powers of cool observation was that all the cool kids had cool clothes and I didn't so in a all time classic misunderstanding of cause and correlation I decided to get some cool clothes. The big problem was that my parents did not share my aspirations in the sense of financially supporting them. I saved up my own allowance and money I earned doing jobs and selling stuff and at the end of summer made arrangements with my mom to go shopping for school clothes not at a thrift store. My mom took me to a stylish department store she knew off called K-mart. She was right on the money too, the place had really nice clothes that, in my opinion, looked really, really cool. One little ensemble that looked really good to me was a two tone green stripped shirt and short matching set with orange trim inside the sleeves and cuffs which was designed be rolled over to create a nice contrasting color band at all of my limb-holes. It also had a surfing related screen printed image and copy that made the whole thing pop. A classic sharp look that would hopefully insert me seamlessly into the jet set of my sometime elementary school. The plan was sound. Except it was smothered in it infancy by some rich kids. The saddest part to me in retrospect was how very lower middle class the kids I thought were rich were. Some kids from across town by which I mean four blocks away, the town was very small, invited my friend Ben and I to play some football. The new clothes were working already, these were cool kids and they wanted to play with me. My plan was working. We went over to the new elementary school and there were a lot of bigger boys there seventh graders and stuff which made me a little nervous but I was there to make entry into the upper-crust of Santaquin society so playing football with seventh graders would just be the price I had to pay. We chose up teams and I was chosen last as was my tradition, so I wasn't jumping off completely from my old life. Baby steps. We got ot playing and everything was going fairly well and then a seventh grader kid tackled me by grabbing the precious collar of my new shirt and it ripped wide open. It tore almost in half and was barely hanging on me. The boy thought tearing my shirt off was the funniest thing he had seen all day and he and his friends were laughing at me and misfortune. It took all of my powers of self control to not break down and start crying as I gathered my tatters in my hand and walked home. When I was out of range then I started crying. I tried to mend the shirt but given the severity of the damage and my rudimentary understanding of sewing doomed my efforts. That may have single handedly derailed my efforts of being cool in the fifth grade. The shirt was central, that shirt was the key. But I had to have my mom buy me regular nerd clothes because my money was all gone. 

Helping you Play Solitaire

I can help you if you want, or if you don't want it makes no difference to me

 When we got our first IBM compatible personal computer running the Windows operating system it was basically an expensive solitaire machine. My dad for years judged a computer's processing power by how quickly the cards would spill off the deck after he won a game of solitaire. The computer was down in the family room and when someone was playing solitaire it usually was not long before a friendly helper would appear behind their shoulder. Sometimes it would be more than one solitaire coach calling out cards that could be played. Queen to King, Queen to King, Queen to King move the Queen to King. Okay, now flip a card .Six to Seven, Six to Seven, Six to Seven, good. It actually started out as legitimate table talk for a one player game but after a while my brother and I would over aggressively and quite vocally suggest moves and then ridicule the player if they didn't make the move we suggested. All in the fun of bothering someone to entertain ourselves. It worked.

Gun Wound to the Head

It's not a bad gun it just did bad things.

 My dad is a gun person in fact of possession more than in use, but a gun guy nonetheless. He owns about twenty different guns and literally tens of thousand rounds of ammunition. He used to go shooting with his friends and his boy scout troop and we could come along. Many times we would get involved in a shooting contest with the older boys and mostly hold our own. We mostly shot .22s either in the 10/22 rife or the Rugar 22 pistol which is a semi-auto that works differently than most semi-auto pistols. In many pistols the action and the barrel both move to allow room for the spent shell to be ejected and the new on to be injected into the firing chamber. The Rugar only moved the back part of the action back and forth and the barrel remains completely still. That means that is moves farther back because it is not double acting. This actually does matter in context of this gun wound to the head story. We were out at the gun range by which I mean the gravel pit. Everyone was trying to hit eggs to see who was the best shot and Matt and I were trying to teach the older boys a lesson. When Matt was up he started out good shooting fine but to better his aim he started moving the gun just a little closer to his face with each successive pull of the trigger. After one shot we heard him scream and blood was running down his face so we naturally thought that he had been hit with a ricochet and was dieing. Everyone ran over to him and my dad looked him over and saw that somehow he had a nicely rounded half-moon wound right between the eyes and that blood was pouring down each side of his face. It was quickly deduced that he had been struck by the back of the action as it ejected a shell and that he was basically okay just a little bleedy and rattled. I was really glad that he was okay my heart sank through the ground when I thought that he had been hit with a bullet and might die.  

Guinea Pig Assassination

Majestic, regal, and five bucks a pop. 

 I had very few pets growing up and the ones I did have were usually family pets. I changed my no pet policy when I was talking to a guy at the pet store who told me that a breeder could sell Guinea pigs for five dollars a piece. With visions of my vast guinea pig fortune impatiently waiting to be made I rounded up a cage and feeders and then invested twenty dollars in a boy one and a girl one. Well, they took their dang sweet time making me a guinea pig mogul. It started to seem like they were going to cost em more then they were going to make me. I should have been leaving the lights dim, playing some Barry White and putting just a touch of a tastefully expensive wine in the water bottle. Then again I could have also just let nature take it's course but I was impatient and a few months to a little boy seems like an eternity when my little five-buck-a-pop miracles were waiting to be born and sold. Finally, after three weeks I noticed that the female was pregnant and we were on our way. It took two months for the babies to come out and the whole time the mommy and daddy wanted to be fed right out of the profits I hadn't got yet. The babies were born four of them and I was ready twenty bucks was practically mine. I arranged for my mom to take me back to the pet store but she said I had to wait for the little pigs to ween. Why does everyone hate the honest business man? All I wanted to do was take some un-weened infant guinea pigs and sell them for top dollar and my mom, the freedom hater, said she wanted them not to die. So, I waited. They were off the teat in three weeks and I loaded them up and took them to the pet store. The owner, who was surprised to see me with pigs to sell. said he was speaking hypothetically when he said someone could sell guinea pigs for five dollars each, not making a verbal contract and purchase order for as many as I could breed. Well, crap. Now besides not having 20 dollars cash I now had six of these hungry little cusses to feed. I kept the mommies and daddies separate after that just to keep love making to a minimum. That arrangement went on fine for a time and I actually got to like the pigs as pets with the profit motive removed. Then one day when my little sister and my idiot cousins came over to play while I was gone they got all six of my pigs out and were playing with them. When I got home all six were missing and the girls had no idea where they could have gone. I looked all over the house and even outside. I held out hope that the fat little pigs could run and play in the wild and form a colony but I never saw one develop. After a few weeks I finally came to grips with the fact that they were probably not coming back and took their cage out and was opening the five gallon bucket I used for a food container when I discovered what those little idiots had done with my pigs. All six were suffocated and rotten inside the sealed food container that I had not looked in because they had not needed food since they went missing. It was horrible they were sticky piles of half rotted mush and the stench was overwhelming. I was furious so I went and gave my dimwit sister a whack in the head for killing my pigs and a few proxy whacks for the moron cousins that were out of range. I buried the pigs and cleaned out the cage and moved on but I had a lot of hate in my heart towards my cousins for a long time after that.  

Spray Painting Wasps

One of the unintended benefits of hoarding a lot of ridiculous stuff, as my father loves to do, is the amazing number of nooks, and/or crannies that are created in the process. Our property was lousy with them, you couldn't swing a cat without knocking into some nook or cranny. The upshot there was that there were a million little places for a wasp to build a big papery nest. We would be fiddle-farting around looking for something to do and stumble upon a huge basketball sized nest of of the winged cusses, and the afternoon's activities would be sorted. We would usually start the extermination effort with a simple rock assault, anger the wasps and make a hasty retreat. The other option was to be multiply stung. If you ever are confronted with the run/multiply stung choice; go with run, it is hands down the better option, true fact. Once they were riled there was little option but to escalate the battle into chemical warfare. We would gather rubbing alcohol, various solvents and whatnot and make bombs out of them either by soaking a tightly rolled rag and trowing it or filling balloons with it. Sometime if your bomb missed you could still agitate them enough to see what was thrown and go to sting it and spell their own doom. By far the best weapon in this periodic war was spray-paint. Our friends and us would take it in turns to climb up close to the nest to be in the periphery of their attack zone and wielding a pair of spray paint cans wait for the Top Gun-ish dogfight to begin. The wasp would swing in for an attack and the spray can warrior would try and intercept the attacker with a stream of paint. If the wasp was hit she would be changed into a little statue and be frozen in time as a little white or blue or chrome monument to her bravery in war. After hours of this there would be thousands of little statue-carcases and we would be ready for the coup de grace. The nest would be out of defenders and be ready to be torn down and burned or stomped to bits. Now that we don't offer this fine service, my father has to rely on the petrochemical industry to rid the yard of these pests, I am aware that we used chemicals as well, but as artists not heartless brutes. If you ever are confronted with the option of spraying wasp killer on a nest or painting them into statues, go with statues it is hands down the better option.

Try Try Again

After my first plan to obtain a wild bird to split its tongue and teach it how to talk was cut short by a raging alcoholic that wrung its neck I devised a new plan. I was going to take a idea I had seen on a cartoon and take a stick and a box and put some bird feed under it and then when a bird walked under the box I would pull out the stick. Like a pro. It quickly was apparent that I was fruitlessly trying to mimic engineering used mainly for comic effect with little real world success. Every time I pulled the string the birds would fly away effortlessly in the second it took the stick to fly free and the box to start to drop. Overcoming problems the way I do, I decided to dig a hole and use a slab of cement for my dead fall and it would drop so fast the bird could not escape. The careful reader would have spotted that the term typically used to describe this type of trap had 'dead' right in the name. That simple observation eluded me and I waited for my first customer who would be caught and become my best friend who could talk and preform awesome parlor tricks. The birds came to eat and I sprung the trap and that 'dead' part of dead fall proved to be prophetic in the least surprising turn of events in history. So I was there with a crushed bird crying a little when my mom came out and decided that I wasn't feeling badly enough and it would be a good time to take me down another peg. She told me it was evil to kill animals for fun, as if it had been my intention to kill the bird. I told her I was trying to catch and train it and that I had no intention of killing it but she didn't care. She even threatened to make me eat it so it didn't go to waste. I decided that all was not lost and told her I could get some flesh beetles and skeletonize it and that way I could build a skeleton display so the bird didn't die in vain. That made her think I was some sort of psychopath mass murderer in training and she emphatically forbade me from desecrating the body of the poor fallen bird. She made me bury it and never trap birds again. I didn't respect her wishes and I actually caught a bird the next day but wild birds are not really good at being caged and it beat itself to death against the walls of my cage. That broke my heart and then I stopped. 

Trying to Catch and Train Birds

One of my friends when I was younger told me that if you split a birds tongue that you could teach it to talk. I did not know what split a tongue meant but I knew what birds were so I reasoned that I could start there and then figure out the rest. I devised all sorts of stratagems to capture a wild bird. But the one I settled on was to borrow a friend of mine's pump up pellet gun and shoot one with a tranquilizer dart. The main flaw in that plan was that I did not have a tranquilizer dart. So what I did was I bought some pellets and epoxied a needle to the front of it because a tranquilizer dart has a needle. At the time I was unaware that the needle on a real tranquilizer was hollow and filled with tranquilizer. I guess I assumed that the needle did the work by stunning the animal or something. I made up a about ten of these ammunition and then sterilized them in alcohol to make sure and minimize the risk of infection. Then I went over to my friend Chris's house. He was only vaguely my friend but he did have a pump up pellet gun and parents that would not ask too many question so the situation was ripe for our friendship to blossom. I went over early in the morning and we headed out along the canal where there were lots of birds and I tried a few shots with my ersatz tranquilizers it turned out that they did not have exactly perfect ballistics which is odd because I very carefully glued a needle to a pellet it should have flow true and strait and brought down my quarry with ease, exactly like it had in my fantasy about this very thing. All ten did not work or even come close. So my plan shifted a hair to the more dangerous. My new plan was to take regular bb's and shoot the bird, nurse it back to health, and then find out about the tongue splitting thing. The first part of the plan, namely shooting and injuring a bird went off without a hitch. Then we got a shoe box with grass in it for phase two; the healing. That part did not go as smoothly and the bird was making a lot of noise. My friend's dad heard it and asked what we were doing with that damn bird. We told him the plan and he decided to end the experiment at phase two by breaking the birds neck with his hands. I was really sad but at least I was able to realize that maybe Chris and his family were not a good ideological match for me friendship wise.

Enos's Penises

 When we were little my mom and dad went to a seminar put on by a guy who made is own extreme weather survival gear. It was an inner and outer shell made of the same material as pillow cases are made of and the fill was 2” mattress topper foam. A the seminar the man claimed that he had worn this gear into the arctic and had deliberately jumped through the ice into the water. He then climbed out and spent the whole night with no fire or shelter in his wonder suit and he was comfy as all get out. When they got back my mom was on a mission to make a set of these suits for my father and herself. They were huge and ill fitting and once even slightly wet were extremely heavy and cold. Which means the guy either made his much differently than the plans he provided or he was a liar. He was a liar. The upside was that we had these great 2” thick foam scraps that were laying around in the utility room and Matt and I discovered that if you poked a wire through the foam, a 2” long piece in the shape of whatever you stabbed though would pop out the other side in a comedic way. For some reason, probably because we were 7 and 9, we thought that it was hilarious and we named them 'Enos's Penises' because it was funny and it rhymed. We had poked through about a hundred of these funny little rascals and were laughing every time when my mom came in to see why we were having so much fun,which my parents had learned from experience was usually either expensive or immoral. My Mother felt that our diligent manufacture of Enos's Penises had compromised the insulative value of a 30 dollar piece of foam and spanked us both. Maybe she was really mad at the man who convinced her to make those ridiculous suits, because if she would have taken the time to make a single Enos Penis she would not have punished us but reveled in one of live's truly simple pleasures.

My Dad Offers us Ass Cream

My dad was one of those dads who had virtually no time for his kids. I played basketball from middle school through high school on city and church teams and I cannot remember him coming to a single game. I debated for two years in high school and went to college on a debate scholarship and he has never seen me debate. I wrestled for one year in high-school on a whim and he never saw me take a beating. I rock climbed recreationally and competitively for four years and he did see me do that once by accident because he was driving up the canyon we were climbing and I happened to be doing a route on the road. And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon. I think it was the older kids he ignored because he went to every one of my younger brother's football games. I am not bitter though I am just telling you that there was not a ton of parental support. He did however love to show attention on other people's kids. He would talk with them help them with projects and be extremely generous with treats and the like for neighbor kids and kids in the church youth group. There was a ice cream truck that drove around Santaquin playing a royalty free version of 'It's a Small World After All' on a non stop 30 second loop and when it came by, and we had someone to impress over, my dad would buy all of the other kids an ice cream. My friends got particular pleasure from his southern accent, which they thought was hilarious, and that was combined with the fact that he was offering to buy them all an 'Ass Cream Cone'. My friend Gabe in particular spent the rest of our time in jr. high and high school impersonating my dad and telling me, 'Nay-Than, Ya'll Go an' Get You an Ass Cream Cone'. This was literally done at least a couple of times a week for years and years. 

Pommel Horses and Podiatry

 There is only one way through a mobile home and that is front to back in a strait line. If you are having a touch of the cabin fever and want to run around you have the choice of up the hall or down the hall or if you are feeling daring, both. One of our favorite moves when we were well clear of parental oppression was to use the hall from the back bedroom to the front as a runway and the arm of the couch at the end of the hall as a pommel horse. We would get a run as fast as we could down the hall jump and handspring to a front flip over the armrest and land on the cushions. We were perfecting the art one day going for one-and-a-half flips and round-offs and grannies when tragedy struck. Well, it stuck me, or more accurately it was laying there and I impaled myself upon the tragedy. A toothpick had been left on the floor somehow and had worked itself into a nearly vertical orientation. After a great run-jump-trick-dismount series I was turning to run back when it went deeply through my heel and broke off inside. You may be asking yourself what is it with this kid and the wood breaking off inside his body, good sir or madam constant reader, I have no idea, no dang idea. My brother and sister tried to help me pick it out but it had broken off and was drawn in about ½ an inch and it was really painful. When my parents got home they took a look and quickly determined that it was in need of medical attention and my mom took me into the E.R. For the ten-umpteenth time. The doctor asked ridiculous questions about how it came to be that I had a toothpick jammed all the way into my heel, like he was surprised that something intended for your mouth would somehow be perfectly positioned to go deeply in a bare foot. He had to numb up and then cut back my foot meat until he got to the actual bone and then he got to the end of the toothpick and pulled it out stitched it all back up and sent me home. This was a useless injury, it hurt incredibly badly, everyone who has never had a foot injury think it sounds minor, most people blamed the victim – including my dad. The unkindest cut of all you don't ask? Well, I will tell you the scar is on the bottom of my foot and completely un-show-off-able. Oh, that and it hurts whenever the air pressure changes. My advice is to just skip it as the upside is miniscule and the downside is significant. But do what you want, you will anyway, but a word to the wise is, in this case at least, most likely unnecessary.  

It's Hammer Time – Through the Door!

 Having many times reinforced my brother's response to provocation I decided to use the simple 'flee' plan of action and leave talking out of the mix. Cowardice has always been a two edged sword for me, while it has kept me out of a lot of unpleasant confrontations; it has also kept me out of a lot of in-my-best-interest confrontations. Fighting with my brother usually fell into a rhythm that you could almost write as a poem. A bad poem that you would right in English class, but a poem is a poem. It would start out with a minor provocation. Usually when one of us was bored or feeling cranky anyway and wanted to mix things up just for the sake of it. Then a little low level tussle would begin, a little pushing a little wrestling. Then the tempo would build and someone would be holding too hard or a nose would get bonked and then we would move to the third act, climax. The fight at this point would start to be the kind where any advantage would be taken to inflict pain. I was a big fan of the sleeper hold and leg scissors combination, as was Matt. Who ever got that move in first would usually win either by submitting the other brother, waiting it out until a parent broke it up, or knocking the opponent-brother out. One day though Matt went off script and decided to just overpower my choke and leg scissor with rage and then try and kill me. Once he was out of my unfinished finishing move he ran and got a roofing hammer that was always in the utility room. I once again opted for the better part of valor, as was my custom, and ran to our room and slammed the door and tried to hold it shut. What my magnificent run away and hide plan lacked was a solid door. Mobile home doors are made of cardboard on edge in a lattice and two as-thin-as-is-physically-possible pieces of plywood which gives them no rigidity and almost no resistance to a roofing hammer. Most of the time that is no big deal because who is running away from someone who is using a roofing hammer? I was, that's who was the tangent to long and you forgot? Matt came running half a second behind me with the hammer and struck the door. The doors weakness became my salvation because when he hit the door it offered so little resistance that the hammer went right through and out of his hand and into my side. You would think the shoe would be on the other foot but it was not he was still so mad that I didn't dare release the door even long enough to grab the hammer and offer a counter attack. My mom finally came and broke up the fight and saw the hole through the door and was a little upset for some reason. My dad spanked us both for fighting and ruining the door. The door however was not repaired and we just covered it with some posters. Over the years in different fights that hole in the door would allow a weapon especially a long stick to be poked in to jab a door holder that you wanted to stop holding the door. It eventually got worked into about a 10” hole and then the door was replaced. I kind of feel bad for people who didn't have hole in the door to jab weapons at brothers or sisters who wouldn't let you in to beat them up if you were really mad. Sometimes it is hard to explain why God distributes his gifts so unevenly.     

Little John Learns The Hard Way

 Well, I might as well tell you that I was easily influenced by movies when I was young. When my brother and I watch a sword fighting movie, we would pretty quickly knock together some passable replicas and get to work trying to have an awesome looking sword fight. We watched a movie called 'The Young Robin Hood' about a boy who uses crude medieval peasant weapons to defeat evil in the form of the sheriff of Nottingham. We were so riled up my the possibilities of defeating evil with weapons we could manufacture that we got right to work. I made a 'quarter staff' which is a middle English term for your-mom's-broom-handle. Matt made a bow out of a curved branch and some string and an couple of arrows from some dowels my mom had graciously used as stiffeners in her curtains but no longer kept strict count of. They were of a size that perfectly fit into a pencil sharpener that we had mounted to the wall of the utility room for just such a task of putting a point on a dowel. Maybe it wasn't just for that, but it worked. Then I, outfitted with a stick just like Little John and Matt outfitted with Robin Hood's iconic bow set off to find evil. We looked for some of the back yard neighbors but they were not to be found. Then we looked for a kid named JD or JT who was supposed to be fairly evil, also no dice. We practiced our skills with our weapons a little bit but what we really craved was battle to test our new powers. I got too bored and decide to give Matt a little practice whack with my quarter staff. He felt like that had not been a good idea and chased me around threatening to do me grievous bodily harm. I once again took a page out of Merry Men's book and ran to a really big tree that was in our front yard climbed up to a crotch that was 8 feet off the ground and began to mock my pursuer and try and poke him hard in the face with my stick if he tried to climb up. I was sitting up in the tree laughing at him with my legs hanging down but out of reach when he threatened to shoot me with his bow and arrow. I knew from my previous attempt that using the bravado bluff did not work but I decided to see if that was really true and I told him that he didn't dare shoot me with his bow and arrow. He dared. He 'oh yeah-ed?' me, notched and arrow and shot it into my calf from about 10 feet away. The arrow was well aimed and swift and stuck deep into my leg. That hurt. I cried and screamed until my mom came out to see what had happened and the whole time Matt was 'I told you so-ing' me in various ways. When my mom got to me she helped he out of the tree and pulled the arrow out of my leg. Luckily we had not developed the technology of barbs and it pulled out fairly smoothly. I was whimpering and demanding justice when Matt came around unrepentantly telling my Mom some crazy story about how he was hit hard with a quarter staff. Somehow my mom interpreted that as me starting the whole thing and getting what I deserved. I think we played Robin Hood more times but I don't remember turning the weapons on my brother ever again. I definitely never tried to bluff him again seeing as how the first two times turned out so poorly. Oh, and I still have a perfectly round scar halfway up my left calf.  

Matt Calls my Bluff

This is not me.

 My brother Matt and I fought quite a bit when we were growing up. He was just a little less then two years younger than me and we were often in conflict about chores, or toys, or clothes, or friends, or we would start out just fooling around play fighting when one of us would accidentally go too far and then we would seamlessly transition into real fighting. One night, while my parents were off at a political rally for some nut job or another who wanted to be president, they left us in the capable hands of my 13-year-old sister. We had started a fight early in the evening and it had been steadily escalating into a more and more violent confrontation. Eventually, I had pushed Matt passed his limit of regular fighting and he had picked up an aluminum baseball bat and was chasing me from the back of the house to the front. I slid to a stop on the linoleum of the kitchen, trapped in the corner by the front door. Now, I am, for the sake of clarity, forced to make an aside about the types of films my dad liked to watch. He liked to watch Clint Eastwood movies and also hard-boiled detective movies. In those movies, if the bad guy’s henchmen threatens you with a gun or knife you just bait them by telling them that they wouldn't dare and that they do not have the guts to try it. In the movies it always works, the henchmen having his bluff called instantly gets a look of self doubt and the makes a fatal mistake by letting his guard down in his moment of indecision. The problem was, I was of the opinion that would work in real life and it actually has worked for me on occasion, this was not that occasion. Back to my situation in front of the door. My back is to the door and Matt is standing three feet away on the living room carpet menacing me with an aluminum baseball bat indicating he may have an off-label use in mind. This is when I decided to give the old Humphrey Bogart a try and call his bluff. I started telling him he was a pussy and that he didn't have the guts, and he didn't dare to take a swing at me with the bat. Unlike the incomparable Mr. Bogart’s enemies, that crumbled at the realization that they were, in fact, weak and unable to follow through on such manly tasks as hurting or killing; Matt seemed to take my taunting as a challenge. He got an 'Oh really?' type look on his face and then proved he was indeed capable of pushing though the magnificently crafted wall of self-doubt that I had verbally crafted. Almost instantly after my belittlement he swung the bat and hit me in the knee and I dropped. To his credit, he only gave me the one swat, more as an educational exercise then anything. He just wanted to make sure that I knew that he was not the type of person who would not use a bat on someones leg, especially after they questioned his bravery to do so. I writhed around on the ground crying in pain and Matt stood back a few feet asking me if I had changed my mind about whether he was brave enough to hit me with the bat now. I didn't dignify his comments with a response other then to whimper out a threat that I would tell on him. Which I did. You think that would have been enough for me to realize that the bravado bluff did not work on Matt but it didn't and I tested it again.  

Cross-ties and Gravel

Like Bug Hunting Goldmines.

On our new property there was already a dilapidated house on the front of the property and we parked our mobile home in the back. That meant that we needed a drive way from the front to the back because our house was pretty close to the exact center of our city block. My dad ordered in a bunch of gravel and made a drive around drive way like a rich person would have with room to turn compleately around in the back. To keep the gravel off what passed for a lawn around our place he bought a truck load of railroad cross-ties which are timbers used to support railroad tracks. They are about 8 feet long 8 inches square and absolutely soaked in creosote. These oily mostrosities were lines up on both sides of the driveway and around the parking areas. Gravel is more of a temporary parking solution but my dad has replaced the gravel every year for nearly thirty years now. This drive way arrangement afforded us a few benefits growing up. First, we had ready ammo in case of a rock fight. Gravel can be picked up by the handful and thrown shotgun style sometimes while yelling 'shotgun style' in case the assaulted were unsure of the technique you were using to pummel them with a handful of little sharp rocks. The second benefit of gravel was that it made a great sound when my dad or mom pulled into the driveway splashing a spray of rocks. It was an early warning system that allowed us to stop doing whatever naughtiness we were up to and make a run for it. The cross-ties settled into the dirt on either side of the driveway and provided perfect habitat for rolly-polly's, crickets, millipedes, worms, slugs, centipedes, and sometimes, if the little boy gods were smiling on your endeavor, salamanders or even a snake. We would flip over one tie after another and see what we could catch and make a day of it. We could also rotate a cross-tie into the driveway as the perfect support for a jump. You know? For doing jumps. When I went away to college I came home one day and the cross-ties were gone and only the gravel remained. It probably always will nine feet deep and compacted by thousands of passages. 

Everything is For Sale

While my dad was a way at work in those days before cell phones and business would come knocking at the door so to speak my brother and I learned to take advantage of it. When someone would drop by and need a part for their washer or dryer we would go out to the shop and see what we could find them. This was not out of duty it was for the love, of money. We would get them the part and sell it to them hopefully for cash but if a check was going to be issued we would ask that they just wrote Our last name on it and nothing else. It was payday. We would take the spoils usually 20-30 dollars and go to the one place in town that catered to hedonistic tastes of a couple of pre-pubecents. I am talking about the local greasy spoon, The Santa-Queen. They had it all hamburgers, shakes, soda, and video games, others came and went but Street Fighter was the one that kept us coming back. We would order up some food and shakes and stake out a couple of bar stools that we could slide over to the game. We would cash in 5 or 10 dollars for quarters and get to work on giving everyone in the world of street-fighting a beat-down. The people not playing could just watch or head back to the table to make sure the shakes didn't get too melted. We would spend hours and hours there until the windfall fell. Then we would walk or ride our bikes the six blocks back home feeling good about life. I am not sure if we were supposed to have learned that sales is the easiest job on earth or that crime does pay but either way, lesson learned. 

Press-ganged

Come here and help me move this greasy transmission in your school clothes.

One of the consequences of my dad running his business out of our house is that we were press-ganged into work, a lot. My dad would not stop with the family if their was a neighbor kid who was not quick enough on his escape when he saw my dad's truck coming down the drive way then he was compelled by fear of my dad and his load voice to work until he worked up enough courage to make and excuse and break free. This drudgery was in stark contrast to my home's usual policy of laissez-faire-free-wheeling-danger that was generally in effect. We would be tooling along with ten kids over at our house getting up to some sort of tomfoolery, then without warning my dad's truck would give off its distinctive rattle and he would turn down the gravel drive way. We would all spring into a unrehearsed conceal and disperse drill that had developed instinctively in the behavior of my dad's kids and the regulars. If we were in the house everyone would duck under the huge driveway facing picture windows and army crawl until they were out of sight in the hall and then either hide in the bedrooms or get out through the laundry room and the back door. Rookies in the house would not be sure what they were doing but if you see five other kids hit the deck and scramble there is a little piece of lizard left in the hippocampus that releases chemicals that will propel you in the direction of the fleeing herd while your adrenaline fuels the escape. Once my friend Joe, in his first time avoiding the press-gang, blindly followed my brother and I into the room instead of outside which is where veterans preferred to flee because it gave them all kinds of options to get home. My dad came in and caught us in the room and Put us to work while Joe stayed hidden in the closet for a long time because he was still in there when we had finished the chore about an hour later. I don't know what he thought would happen to him if he just made a run for the door but he obviously thought it was not worth the risk. The whole drill was much simpler if it was preformed outside because if we were building something behind the house we could hear and flee before my dad knew what was happening and the fort being of the far back of the property gave us vision and a head start. However, we always had to catch my dad before he got back to the fort because he very rarely went back there and when he did it was universally bad for us. He was a vicious building inspector and would require all or most of the fort to be torn down if he ever saw what kind of deathtrap we had built. In my mind a little forced labor was better then pulling down the fort we worked so hard on making.

The Good Dog Dies

After she went blind Mindy was as sweet as ever but she was having trouble adapting to her handicap and sometimes she would misjudge distance and run into things. One night I was at our church youth group meeting where we were learning a dance for a road show. I was dancing with a cute older girl and was thinking my life was pretty great. About an hour into the practice my brother Matt came in, obviously shaken, to tell my older sister and I that Mindy had died since we left the house. She had been chasing a car but because she was blind she ran in front of it and was run over and killed. My stomach sank and there was a lump n my throat but I was one of the youngest kids in the group and I didn't want to start crying in front of all the older kids. I told my brother to go home and I would be home in a little while. I got my coat and stuff together and headed home. As soon as I was outside and in the dark I started to cry and cried the few blocks home. When I got home my brother was mad at me for not caring that Mindy died. He thought that I was unaffected when he told me about her death but I didn't want to tell him I was embarrassed to show emotion in front of the older kids. We argued for a little while about whether or not I really felt sorry. Then we got to work and dug a grave for Mindy under the big horse nut tree up front. We put her in the ground and buried her and cried for our good sweet dog. 

Mindy the Good Dog

My brother was always a dog lover, more so then the rest of us I think. After lady went away to live with my grandpa, not a euphemism, I really didn't care either way if we had a dog. He actually went to the effort of requesting and re-requesting that he be allowed to have a puppy. My parents gave in and got him a lab mix that he named Mindy. Mindy was a good dog. She was gentle and playful and fun. We would throw things and she would bring them back. That seems like what a dog should do but that is not what our other two did so it seemed like a luxury. She was smart and easy to train, and just about the most perfect dog a couple of boys could want. That is why she could not be long for this world. My mom took her to the vet for routine shots and to be spayed and when she got home she started acting weird. She got really sick and eventually went blind because she had caught parvo at the vet and after she was recovered she was still a sweetheart but she was severely handicapped by her blindness. Her earnestness and desire to please in her diminished state made us even love her more.  

A Story I Forgot to Remember

Don't these look like they could lay eggs in your brain and only be beaten back by Vin Diesel? 

This story really belongs in the Florida trip but I didn't remember until two days ago when I was reading a book about animals with my boys and I saw a picture of horseshoe crabs. For the record the horseshoe crab looks like a drawing from a medieval naturalist book where they hear about something and then just draw some crazy pictures to try and match the verbal description. They look like giant alien bugs and I mean that in a very good way. During the trip we went down to Panama City which is on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Florida in the winter is nice but it is still winter and in our mind we had been hoping for some sunny fun on the beach but it was just cold and windy. That was not the deal breaker though. When we got there the beach was covered with the horseshoe crabs washed up on the shore and rotting in the sun. I guess they had been breeding and dieing there in a deliberate effort to ruin our trip to the beach. The other major problem is that there were millions of jelly fish all over she shore an din the water as well that had blown in in a storm. So we walked around in the piles of rotting sea life and picked up a couple of the shells from the crabs and then figured it was too cold and we needed to head home. Once we had the shells in the camper my mom decided pretty quickly that her budding naturalists were not allowed to bring half rotten meat inside of shells into the vehicle. She threw them out. She must hate science. Rude.

We Invite Everyone!

Around the time I was nine years old I decided to throw my mom a surprise birthday party. I only told my sister about it and we wrote down a few of the things that a party needed. Cake, Ice cream. . .done. We couldn't afford Ice cream or make a cake so we worked out a plan where we could get the guest bring the party and themselves and kill two birds with one stone and ask that stone to also clean and gut them for us. I got on the phone and invited all of my aunts and uncles and told them to bring some cake and Ice cream and to come down to our house for a party for my mom's birthday. I only gave them about three days notice but they all said they would come the forty miles to our house that Sunday. My grandfather, grandmother and adult mentally handicapped son were also on board so the guest list was starting to look like about thirty. I knew about cake and ice cream as objects and concepts of refreshment but not as a quantifiable, consumable commodity so I woefully underestimated the amount of refreshments that thirty guests would need. I also had not considered the logistics of consumption and made no provision for plates and utensils for thirty. Come Sunday we were coming home from church walking home with my mom when she noticed about six cars in the driveway. She was definitely surprised. In fact, her surprise bordered on panic when I told her what I had organized for her. We lived in a mobile home which has about enough room in the kitchen and living room for about 12 people. That left us approximately 18 short of fitting everyone in. My aunt had brought one 9”round double decker 'ugly cake' that if it was cut really thin could feed 12. Once again 18 short. We had no where enough cups, forks, or plates and I had not actually thought of any sort of plan as far as activities went so everyone was just milling around hanging out. My mom was running around trying to get seats and plates and treats for everyone and it was not working. All the kids were fine we just ran off and played so I was not sure how the rest of the party went but after everyone went home I was strictly forbidden from organizing anymore surprise parties. Fine. You're welcome.