Like many child hood toys, one of the purposes of our fort was to
show it to other kids and make them jealous. True to the maxim that
you always want what you cannot have, the Attaway cousins liked
coming over to our house because we had a huge yard that we could dig
in and build on and throw fruit at each other on and run around and
hide in. One of my cousin Blake's favorite activities when he came
over to play was buildign on and hanging out in the fort. We would go
back there and build for hours and hours and then we would go beg to
sleep out in the fort. Now the fort was not exactly built to code, it
was more of a Frank Loyd Wright type structure that was long on
concept and short on execution. We generally had a vague plan in our
heads and then built out sticks as far as that plan required using
the minimum amount of material. We would then put on decking material
like a piece of plywood and then walk out on it and see where it
needed supports. We did this in a safe way by holding a branch
overhead while we would walk out on and see if our minimalist design
would hold our weight. Where the design was squishy we would pop in a
cross member or a diagonal support and repeat the process until the
fort was firm. Then we would put up four corner pieces and cap them
with boards tying it all together. That box frame would then get a
large sheet of the lightest paneling we could find and that would be
nailed on with the absolute minimum number of nails it took to keep
it from falling off. You did not lean against the walls as they had
more of the structural strength of the paper screens in Japanese
houses, you would have shot right through and fell to the ground. The
reason for all of this under building was simple, we bought our own
nails and wood and on our budget less was definitely more. One day
when Blake was over we build an entire 8' x 8' loft with walls ten
feet off of the ground using our 'build it-check it-firm it up'
methodology. We were so excited about finishing such a large project
in one day that we decided to sleep out in the new room. We rounded
up all of our gear and got out there to stay up late and tell jokes
and stories. About midnight the wind started blowing like it wanted
us out of the tree, and it just about got it newly anthropomorphized
wish. The panel walls started falling off as the tree churned in the
wind. First the East wall came down and even though we were well
aware that it offered absolutely no protection from falls there was a
psychological element to not having an opaque but useless barrier to
falling right off the edge. We rotated our bags so that the toes
faced the newly most dangerous edge and we tried to ride it our but
then the south wall fell off and the platform was pitching quite a
bit in the storm. At that point we decided to discretion ourselves
into a chance to build again another day and retired to the
marginally better built mobile home that was at least on good old
terra firma and less likely to collapse violently and kill us
both. It was still fun and we put the walls back up the nest morning
because if there is one thing we didn't do is let a little
demonstration of the utterly tragic potential of our undershot
building methods stop us from sticking to it.
Running into Scooter Bandits
In the common area of my cousin's condo there was a band of older
boys who would drive around on motor scooters and try and run the
little kids over. They had been doing this for a while but they
didn't know there were some seasoned fort-war veterans in town
visiting and defeating tyranny was our stock and trade. They were out
running kids down and we had collected some weapons and ropes and
organized the troupes. Our first plan was to have two kids stand
across a narrow alleyway with a rope and a bait kid, my fast running
cousin Brent, would get them to chase him and then after he came
passed my cousin Blake and I would pull the rope tight and executed
the classic clothesline maneuver. It worked really well and the
scooter villain was caught directly across the throat and went down
in a heap screaming as his scooter crashed into the wall. He was a
little put out by our exceptional use of a timeless piece of
anti-motorcycle gang technology for some reason. It was probably
because he wrecked his scooted after being clotheslined off of it but it is
impossible to know because he was so intent on giving us all a really
vicious beating after that so we never had the chance to ask. He ran
Brent down and was punching him but Brent just kept laughing harder
and harder the more he was punched. At that point many of the
neighborhood kids were emboldened by our attack on the scooter
bullies and they all started throwing rocks and sticks at all of the bullies as they tried to run us down in the courtyard. By brother Matt smoked
a rock right into the kid who was beating up on on Brent's face and it made
a delicious smack on his head. He let Brent up to attack whoever
threw the rock but there were too many missiles incoming at that point
and every time he decided on a target he would be pelted by all of
the non-target kids. It was truly a great moment in the history of bully
table turning days. It got dark and we all had to go in happy and
victorious with threats of death, mauling, and dismemberment echoing off of the walls. What did I
care about retribution? I didn't live there. That constant reader is what Douglas Adams termed the S.E.P. or someone else's problem. Not unlike the Kurds in 1991 those kids were left to fend for themselves.
I Lose Another Man's Knife
Once while I was staying over at my cousin Blake's house for a week
in the summer he had a Boy Scout camp out that he was supposed to go
on. I had camped out a lot and we did that kind of thing for fun
because we had few other options but these guy had good toys and
video games and still wanted to camp-out for some reason. I was
Blake's shadow for the week so it was arranged that I should go along
with them camping up the canyon and going fishing in the river. I was
nervous because in my home Boy Scout troop the older boys were pretty
vicious. As it happened these guys were actually very cool and
thought I was funny, which only serves to demonstrate their
intelligence and good taste. We stayed up late telling jokes and
funny stories until the leaders told us to go to bed. The next
morning we all went fishing, but these city-fied kids didn't know how
so I showed many of them how to get their poles set up and how to
present the bait. I didn't have a pole of my own so I was borrowing
one of the leader's poles and I got his lure that I borrowed badly
stuck. The water was shallow so I thought I could reach down and
retrieve the lure. I could reach it but it was badly hooked through a
snarl of some kind of rope. I went and asked the leader if I could
borrow a knife to cut a rope loose, I failed to mention that this
rope was under two feet of water. I went back and laid down on a log
that was laying by the river and opened the knife and followed the
line down with my hand to my armpit. When I tried to cut the lure
loose the currant caught the knife and it came out of my hand and my
heart froze as I panicked. I felt around for the knife in the
freezing water for what seemed like an hour. My shirt was soaked and
I was about to cry when the leaders found me. They were just relived to find me because they were worried I had
fallen in and was lost. I had spent so long trying to recover
the knife that no one knew where I was and they were starting to get very nervous. The leader was able to pull
his lure free but he was not able to find the knife. I guess he
saw I was already torn up enough about loosing his knife that he
didn't scold me at all. He told me it was okay and that he needed
a new one anyway. I am glad there are men in this world that will
take a boy that they don't know fishing and when he losses their
knife they don't make a fuss. The only problem is that there are not
nearly enough.
My Shameful Baseball lies. Of shame.
I don't play baseball. I have never played a real game of baseball
but that didn't stop me from pitching a perfect game in RBI baseball
with a sidearm pitcher named Bret Saberhagan. In the game he has an
awesome sidearm pitch that was just about impossible for that poor 16
bit processor to keep up with. I was over visiting my Attaway cousins when I preformed this feat of vicarious
baseball prowess. I was so excited about all things baseball that somehow I got it
into my head to lie about my own real life baseball skills to my
baseball all-state cousin and his mother. They we sitting on the couch with me and I began to weave fantastical tales of my baseball glory and heroics. As you might have
guessed the amount of baseball knowledge I had gleaned from the
Nintendo game was not enough to fool the actual baseball players for
long. Or more accurately, at all. I told them that I had once been caught in a pinch play. They
had never heard of that because it is not real and so instead of
saying just kidding and backing out there I tried to firm up my
position by describing what a pinch play was. I told them it was when
a runner was pinched between a ball carrier and a defender on base
and forced out and made a pinching motion with my thumb and
fore-finger to illustrate the principle of the pinch. To their credit
they were polite but I am pretty sure they knew I had never played
baseball and that they were even more certain that the play I described was
not really part of the game unless you were an un-athletic nerd who
just pitched a perfect game on RBI baseball got excited and tried to
tell a story. They let it go and never brought it up again. Good for them, good for me.
The Cool Cousins
There were some cool kids who had to be our friends no matter how
lame we were and that was our very cool, athletic, good looking and
rich cousins. All of their names start with a 'B' which would be cute
if there were two or three but there are nine. Blake, Brooke,Brent,
Bradley, Britney, Bridger, Bennett, Branson and Bailey (nick-named
Bo-bo's). There were only the first three for a long time until my
cousin, their mother, got married and added the other six with her
second husband. Blake was a year older than me but we were good
friends and Brooke was my age but she was a girl so virtually
invisible as far as I was concerned. Brent was a year younger than me
and was mostly Matt's friend. We would see them at all of the family
parties for life events and holidays but usually once a year my mom
and dad would go on a long trip and instead of leaving us with
psychopaths we would stay with our cousins instead. It was awesome
they had good toys that we had free run of, they had video games that
they shared freely, they had great food it was perfect. By great food
I mean that they had cheese we could eat and they had cereal, sugar
cereal. We would have sugar cereal on occasion but it was usually
only on the weekend and then it was the cheapest huge bag of Sugar
Smacks knockoff cereal. At their house they had a couple of name
brand cereal choices that we could just choose and then pour a bowl
and eat it and then if we wanted a second bowl, now this was really
awesome, we could just have one. We played in the common areas of
their condo and their cool friend had to play with us. It was so much
fun that I looked forward to it all of the time and loved any chance
I had to go play at their house.
Rich Stuff. Kind Of.
Do you want to know how rich we were? Ya well no matter how you
answered that question I will answer and the only way you can avoid
it is to stop reading. But don't because then you will never know if
I meant that question ironically or if I was about to revel the
secret of our fabulous wealth. I meant it ironically. There. What I
was going to tell you about was how my dad bought us a house boat, same
as rich folks will have. Well, like rich folks in the sense that they
share a similar name and they both float. Ours was a little more
petite and a lot more fixer-upperish but a boat is a boat. The boat
was about 20 feet long and had an 8' x 8' cabin that needed new decks
and new paint. We put some very nice green all weather plastic carpet
on the deck sand painted her white. The motor was overhauled and we
were off to do some factory fishing but with a twist, Matt and I
could sleep in the cabin while my dad and his cronies hauled in the
catch. It was some of the most fun we had ever had out on the water.
When the boat was dry docked in our side yard it served as an awesome
prop and set for some buckling of swash and to sleep out in just for
the fun of it. Which is why it had to go. My dad likes to keep stuff
around that we never use but the second we showed an interest in
something he loved to rush out and sell it. The house boat was only
ours for one brief season and then it went on to the great beyond of
all things beloved by the Gause children. I can only hope that it is
dry rotting in someones side yard right now. That is what I choose to
believe to cope with the pain of loss.
Jungle Burning
There was a overgrown abandoned lot near our house that we called the
jungle. It had a couple of circuits with jumps and bumps for bike
riders to use. The only really major drawback is that there were
older boys who would use the secluded parts of the jungle for
naughtiness and danger. We would often find a little nest of
purloined beer cans, cigarette butts and skin magazines not very
well protected behind a hand painted sign that said 'NO
Trespissing!'. We were terrified of the boys who were hardcore enough
to steal and drink beer so we left these little nests of sin alone.
The lure of the jungle paths was stronger than the fear of the boys
so we went there many sunny days to ride and pretend to jump. One day
when we were out there an older boy named J.T. or J.D. was playing
with some gas pouring it on the ground and then lighting it on fire.
Good clean fun in its own right but it seemed to us that J-whosit was
forgetting some of the basic safety rules of playing with
accelerants and we decided to head on out. You can probably judge by
the level of danger that we thought was acceptable based on our
previous escapades that this must have been some dangerous stuff
indeed. A few minutes after we got home we heard sirens and there was
an immense amount of smoke billowing out of the jungle. We went back
to the corner of the block where we could see what was happening and
the fire department was trying to keep the blaze contained to the
abandoned lot and the paramedics were taking J-something out in a
stretcher badly burned. We heard it through the neighborhood rumor
mill that he had either intentionally or accidentally poured gas onto
his leg, the fire had burned over him out of control and badly burned
his leg and chest. He had to get skin grafts and lay in bed for
months and months. The really sad part to me was that the jungle got
burned down and denuded it didn't really have the allure and charm of
its previously shadowy and obscuring undergrowth. I may have gone
back there to ride bike once or twice but the burn down was about the
end of the jungle and I's relationship. I didn't really ever come in
contact with J-fiddly ever again except to see him in passing now and
then but he didn't seem to have any visible scars from his little
personal conflagration.
A Country of his Own
Soon after I turned 11 Mark and his family moved a few cities away. I
say cities meaning clusters of houses on a rural road out to when you
could hide a body and no-one would ever know. His family moved into
the third cluster of houses about 14 miles away. It was a much nicer
and larger home with an up and down stairs. They had room for all of
their kids to have a bedroom and a place to play. When they first
moved out I went and stayed over a few nights and we explored the
area. When school started 14 miles was just to very far away for a
sixth grader to manage and we fell out of regular contact and then
lost touch all together. I would see him every couple of years but
there is nothing like having your best friend live across the street
from you and that was gone for good. When I went to visit the first
time he told me that he was designating his new house and property a
sovereign country a loophole in the united states tax codes and laws
that then allowed the and owner to not pay taxes and to disregard any
and all laws. It turned out that his information was not entirely
accurate and that it was still illegal to use fire arms and
explosives even if you were on free soil. The government also still
wanted to charge tax. They must not have known about Mark's
sovereignty doctrine and its various legal implications because he
got into some sort of legal trouble and trouble at school and had to
transfer out of the regular high school to a second chance school.
Landmark High was usually a pit stop on the road to dropping out but
Mark did quite well and was even on student council. I have run into
Mark as an adult but there is too much water under our various
bridges and there is no connection left. He did still own ninja stars
so not all is lost.
Then Justin Will Have to Do
 |
| Quick, I need my best friend or a relative of his to sleep in this thing . |
Mark had a younger brother who was a bout a year older than me and
while we were never hostile towards each other we never really
clicked either. We had such vastly different interests and
personalities that we could never get a friendship off the ground.
When I turned 11 I took my birthday money to the Army Surplus store
and bought an orange pup tent that smelled foul and was a pain to
assemble but I loved it dearly. I went home and put it up and
discovered that the 'two man' descriptor may have been a bit
generous, even 'two boy' may have been pushing the boundaries of
truth in advertizing. To be fair there are all kinds of sizes of men
and this tent may have been sized in a region where great warriors
are only 4' 11”; I am speaking, of course, of France. I brought out
my sleeping bag and got a fire pit ready and then ran over to see if
Mark wanted to come and see my tent. He had the nerve to not even be
home, not even a little bit. I was so very excited that I asked in
Justin could sleep over in stead he decided to and his parents said
it was okay so he loaded up a sleeping bag and walk across the street
with me. When we got to my house we went in to get some snacks and
other provender and my mom sleuthed out that the boy with me was in
fact not Mark but Justin and asked why he was over. I told he the
situation and she protested that Justin was not my friend. I lied
that he was kind of my friend and that since Mark was gone and a tent
needed some breaking in that this beggar was not going to choose and
Justin was just going to have to do. We had this conversation with
Justin standing awkwardly near the door holding a wadded up sleeping
bag. We ended up getting out there and having a pretty good time
telling the same old jokes and telling some possibly exaggerated
stories. Justin went home in the morning and even though we went to
the same Junior high and High school we never did anything together,
actually we barely even acknowledged each other in the halls at
school. I guess it's like they say one night as a replacement best
friend does not a bosom buddy make. You know? Sometimes the most made
up at the spur of the moment aphorisms are the most applicable.
The Jokes
 |
| This is the root of some evil. |
These two guys decide they would like to have some nachos but they don't have any money so they hatch a plan to steal the chips and cheese. The first guy steals the tortilla chips without any trouble but his partner in crime comes back with some Swiss cheese . The chip thief straitens him out and tells him to go and try again. The cheese thief goes back to the cheese store and waits outside to snatch a cheese bag from an old lady and run back with the loot. This time he got some mozzarella and chastened he heads back for the third time when a black man comes out of the cheese store our villain snatches his bag and runs back to his friend who tells him he got it wrong again. The robber is indigent because when he snatched the bag the man he stole it from yelled, 'That's nat cho cheese boy!'
Skillfully told to a couple of eight and ten year old boys this joke absolutely killed. Most of the others were heavy-handedly scatological or simply relied on the shock value of a swear as the punchline. There was also a massive amount of Polish jokes and there were guys who would memorize thousands of them and recite them Ad nauseam. I remember people describing a person as 'a guy who knows millions of Pollock jokes', as a compliment. It seems like sometime between when I was a kid and my kid's generation the story joke style has faded from use. While they are still around I rarely run into a guy who knows a bunch of jokes like I used to.
Fishun. With Lurrs.
Something that many poor people have in common is they like to fish and Mark
and I were no exception. Fishing can be a relatively low cost and
very time consuming and you can eat the results of your hobby. This
is not true in golf and other rich people pass times. There were
quite a few fishing holes within striking distance of a couple of
guys with only bicycles for transportation. We would load up our gear
and precariously balance a tackle box and a fishing pole on our bikes
and head up the canyon, to the reservoir, or to Spring lake or
sometimes even take the 12 mile trip down to Burraston
Ponds all in the attempt to pull a little fish out of the water. When we
got there we would each try the most ridiculous things to tempt a
fish, we had not learned that it is the fish who should be impressed
with our presentation not our friends. We had garish orange and green
flies and massively oversized lures that rarely caught fish. It was
always fun for my brother and I to hear Mark describe his lure
because he pronounced it 'Lurr'. We would bait him into using it as
often as possible and subtly tease him by repeating it back it what
we thought was the more correct 'Loo-Ur'. Once when we were having a
particularly bad day fishing up the canyon and had spent all morning
and most of the afternoon trying without success to tempt a trout out
of the icy waters Mark finally caught one. There is nothing so
insufferable as the one fisherman who caught a fish in the company of
three that didn't. He kept the fish on the hook and walked over to
where I was still trying my very hardest to catch one and prove my
worth as a human being. He held it up and talked and talked for what
seemed like hours about how he rigged his line and how he presented
the bait and how he fought the fish. Fighting the fish was an obvious
lie because the stream up the canyon is only about ten feet across
and when you catch a fish you pull it strait up and out. He talked
and talked and kept that fish hanging in the air from his bent pole
while he lorded his superior fishing skill over me like a fish on a
line hanging from your best friend's pole. As fate often has it in a
full blown gloating situation the tables turned and turned quickly.
Right then I caught a fish about two inches longer than Mark's, which
he chalked up to his coaching by saying ,'see when you do it like I
tell you you catch fish.' As we climbed the hill to go cook both of
our fish he slipped fell on a rock and broke his pole. I didn't say
anything but I was glad that damn fish could not be held in the air
anymore.
G.I. Joe Comic and "Real" Ninja Weapons
Mark had it all, he was living the young boys dream of having his own
lockable fort/room and it was full of all kinds of really great stuff
that his brothers and sister were not allowed, by reason of a lock,
to touch. He had stacks of G.I. Joe comics which we would sit in his
closet room for hours reading and discussing. I would have questions
about the motivations of the ninja's in the G.I. Joe universe,
because they were always doing crazy and anarchistic things. Whenever
I had questions Mark had answers he was filled to the brim with
knowledge about all of the coolest things and had an unbelievable
amount of knowledge about the inner working of the secret order of
assassins known as ninja. He would tell me all about how Storm Shadow
and Snake Eyes were only bound in loyalty to the ninja code until
Snake Eyes betrayed the ninjas to be loyal to the Joes. Storm shadow
was still just a hired gun and if someone paid him more he would turn
on Cobra in an instant. I was so taken in by the ninja mythology that
it took over as my fantasy of choice for when I was going to have
revenge on all the tough kids who bullied me in my life. Beyond just
supplying my with the ninja mythos and imagery of the ninja Mark had
real ninja weapons. I hope that you, dear constant reader, know that
all of these uses of real and ninja should in retrospect be put in
the wink-wink ironic quotes, but that is not how it felt at the time.
Matt and I had always made weapons but our were homemade and shabby
and the ones that Mark had were manufactured in a real ninja factory
apparently located in China. He had ninja stars, butterfly knifes, a
samurai sword and nun-chucks. They were awesome to behold and to
handle. The samurai sword was not sharp but Mark assured me it was a
traditional sword which had at one time been tested in the barbaric
traditional ritual of cutting a prisoner right in half with one
stroke to prove its edge. Awesome, double-plus awesome. I even got to
try out the nun-chucks and they were awesome to but had a tendency to
whack me in the side of my head or in the crotch when I tried to get
all Bruce Lee. We spent hours playing ninja and acting out our ninja
plans which included a lot of sneaking and hiding and attacking
dummies we had made from refuse. When we had to come in at night
because it was time to settle in for bed Mark would keep the ninja
stories and factoids pouring in all night in between those malformed
racists jokes. They were not just good times they were the best of
times.
Living in a Closet
The house that Mark's family lived in was quite small it had three
small bedrooms, a kitchen, and living room all in about a thousand
square feet. There were six people in Mark's family. The parents got
one room, the only sister got the other leaving the third for the
three boys. It was not a large room to begin with the necessities of
housing three boys it was full to the brink. To get the room and the
privacy a 14 year old boy demands Mark cleared out the 4' X 8' walk
in closet and put a mattress on the floor and left all of the shelves
for storage. This might sound sad that he had to live in a closet,
but it was nothing of the sort, it was the most awesome space I had
ever seen. I had shared a room my whole life as well and I thought
that any little piece of privacy was well worth whatever it cost in
square footage. Mark had lock on the door and when he left he could
lock out his brothers and sister who may have dastardly designs to
purloin or soil his toys or comic books. We could also lock it from
the inside and for young boys there is no greater thrill then
exclusivity, especially if you can lock out girls. We would go in to
Mark's closet room with some penny candy and ten cent candy lock the
door and sit around talking about ninja fights we had been in, and
won and about super cool things his cousins or this guy he knew had
done. We would peruse his G.I. Joe comics and tell racist jokes that
we did not understand because we had never met any of the races
involved. We would tell jokes that were incredibly long with minimal
payoff but what is time when you are 11? It is not like we had
anything else to do.
Keeping the Baby Up
Mark's family had a few other weird ideas that puzzled me a little
bit. One that I was not sure was scientifically sound was that they
would keep their newborn baby boy up and try and not let him sleep
all day so he would sleep through the night. Many times when I went
over there they were jostling the baby or bouncing him to keep him
from falling asleep. Both of the parents would spend hours a day
doing this which made me wonder if all the time they were saving
keeping the baby up might be wasted keeping the baby up. The baby
grew into a toddler in the time that they lived next door but I never
did learn if the sleep deprivation torture worked
Lock up the Fridge
While
Mark was unique he was not living in a vacuum and his family, while
maybe not so intense, were just as idiosyncratic. They always had
some weird scheme and theory about anything they encountered. They
were an example of what I have found with many people of less than
average intelligence in that they attributed grand and expansive persecutory motives to even the smallest
misfortune. If they were disciplined at work it was not for the
simple fact of their misbehavior it was always that everyone at that
job hated them and the boss was always looking for any little reason
to fire them, They believed that the government from the city on up
was taking personal discriminatory interest in their family and that
was just about all I remember them talking about, The teachers and
principles at the schools were in on it too giving out bad grades
because they hated those kids so badly. The parents had so deeply
ingrained this world into their children that the kids and the
parents we just as suspicious of each other's motives. They we
constantly formulating exotic plans to safeguard they meager
possessions from external defilement and theft but just as much time
was spent defending against internal threats. One of the most bizarre
safeguards I remember was that they had added a hasp to both doors of
their fridge and there was a keyed padlock on each. They told me it
was to keep the kids from eating each others personal food and to
keep all of the kids from eating in between meals. Every time I was
over for dinner they would unlock the fridge and everyone who wanted
one could have one 8oz. glass of milk and what ever was for dinner.
After dinner was cleaned up the locks went back on the fridge until
the morning meal. The only other time I have seen a lock on the
fridge like that was at my maternal grandmother's house a few months
before she was forcibly removed from the home by adult protective
services because he paranoid schizophrenia had made her a danger to
herself. I guess we live in a society that thinks that if you put a
lock on your fridge you are some sort of weirdo, and they are right.
Mark is One of God's Prototypes
When
my brother and I watched Napoleon Dynamite for the first time we
laughed so hard we could barley breathe. Our wives were looking at us
like we were partially retarded but that was probably because they
had never known my friend Mark. Almost all of Napoleon's mannerisms
and affectations could have been lifted whole cloth from the life of
my longtime best friend and next door neighbor Mark. His family moved
into the house almost right across the street from us when I was in
home school in the fourth grade. He was about three years older then
me but also being educated at home which meant we had lots of time to
practice making ninja weapons and going fishing during the day while
the other kids were toiling away at school. I was instantly taken in
by marks vast knowledge of guy he knew about where he used to live
that had single handedly beat up six muggers. Another guy had killed
a man with his bare hands with a super dangerous fighting move they
had taught Mark but made him promise to keep secret and never to use
unless he was in mortal danger. Mark made lots and lots of paper
ninja stars and little grappling hooks from yarn and three paper
clips bent around to do the job just right. Mark loved to fish and
had almost caught every single record fish, or at least that is how
the story went, I never saw an exceptional fish with my own eyes.
Beyond record fish he even had a ready supply of cousins who lived
in a far away land, cousins in far away places seem to be the fibbers
stock and trade. One of these cousins had caught a catfish out of a
river by his house that weighed 4000 lbs! Now that seems unbelievable
in the most literal use of that word, in the sense that it is not
possible to believe that story, but at the time Mark had all the
details and I believed every word. He spun a tale of his cousin using
a whole rabbit for bait on a hook made out of rebar, coincidentally
made with rebar in almost the same way Mark made three pronged
grappling hooks out of paper-clips so it was easy to see how it would
be done, with that miniature analog sitting right there. He tied into
this fish using thousand pound test line on his pole and even at that
astronomical and possibly non-existent strength of line the battle
was by no means in hand. His cousin had to fight for 18 hours strait
and then the leviathan swum under a huge boulder and locked their
battle in a stalemate. I was worried but Mark already knew where the
rest of this story was going to go. He told me that his cousin tied
off the line and ran to get some scuba divers to free the line which
he did in no time, as you do. The scuba divers did not believe that
there was a 2 ton monster on the line but they agreed to go and free
his precious rebar treble hook. They should have believed because
their cavalier attitude nearly cost them their lives when they didn't
take proper precautions and approached the unnaturally large beast
all higgledy-piggledy. They soon learned of their mistake and just
escaped with their lives. Mark said when they came up from their
first dive one was completely white and catatonic and would never
dive again but the more stalwart of the duo soldered on got the
problem solved and the fight between man and fish was rejoined but
this time the line was tied to a backhoe, the only thing strong
enough to rest the king of the river to his terrestrial doom. I was,
naturally, very impressed and wanted more details but Mark was unable
to give me specifics on many things just that it was the biggest
catfish ever caught in the world. As you might expect the main stream
media has buried the story and that scandalous rag The National
Geographic claims the largest catfish ever captured was in Thailand
and weighed 646 pounds. Mark ought to set them strait, or at least
have his cousin do it.
I am not good at Bas-Relief
 |
| I want it to look just like this. I need some dangerous stuff. |
I am prone to pursuing unrealistically ambitious
ideas that pique my interest. When I was 12 we went to the state fair
and I saw some pumpkins that were beautifully carved in bas-relief.
Some great artists had done some amazing work rendering people and
scenes into the flesh of their vegetables and I wanted in on that
glory. It was almost Halloween anyway so when we got home I set about
securing my pumpkin canvas upon which I would carve my immortal
masterpiece. I went and bought a fairly large pumpkin from one of our
neighbors and then got all of my most sharp and dangerous tools to
render my work with. I had all of this set out on the kitchen table
because that is where all of the juicy projects happened in the
house. While I started to carve and realize that bas-relief carving
was probably harder than drawing, a skill at which I am crap. I tried
a couple of starts but was mostly just getting frustrated and
depressed when my little brother, ten years by junior and therefore a
little toddler wandered in to help. He was nosing around and picking
stuff up and I had told him not to several times.
 |
| One of these bad boys right here. |
While I was trying
one more time to get started on a beautiful object d'art he picked up
one of those orange utility razors and in one quick motion slid the
blade all the way out and then instantly drew it across the palm of
his hand cutting himself to the bone. My mom rushed him to the
hospital where he had to get several stitches to close up the gaping
wound in his hand. Somehow, my mom and dad felt that my little
brother, their charge and responsibility, had his hand badly cut by
reason of some sort of negligence on my part. I got into big
trouble, never got to finish my nascent masterpiece and had to chip
in on the hospital bill to boot. It turns out I was my brothers
keeper and I didn't do that good of a job.
This is Why We Can't Have Nice Scouts
My parents never signed me up for sports or activities outside the
house. This was because my dad said it was a waste of my mothers time
to have to ferry us back and forth. The one extra curricular I was
allowed was cub scout so I really loved going to den and pack
meetings because an adult had to pay attention to me for a couple of
hours. I took full advantage of their good will and generally pressed
the fun right out to the limit and often times right on past the
limit. My first scout leader lady was a sweet local mother whose sons were
all big into scouting and so she volunteered to be a den mother. She
had us learn to play 'I've Been Working on the Railroad' on homemade
kazoos constructed from a comb and a piece of wax paper. She taught
us how to make a tin-foil dinner and cook it. She taught us how to
make a 'buddy-burner' which is a huge candle used for cooking that is
made out of cardboard and paraffin wax. We used our buddy-burner to
cook food out in our fort so that was ultra-convenient. One time she
had each of us come to pack meeting with a game in mind that we could
teach all of the other kids to play. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby at
the time and on one of his albums he describes a game called
Buck-Buck. I think now with the wisdom of age that Buck-Buck was not
a real game but a pretend game used for comic effect. The game was
purportedly played kind of like 'Red Rover' but instead of running
though the enemy line you had one team all kneel down on all fours
and the other team send a guy one at a time to run and jump on the
backs of the other team and try and crush them to the ground. If they
hold up you loose the guy but if they break down you take one of the
broken players home to your side. In Mr. Cosby's account they are
loosing the game badly until they bring out their secret weapon Fat
Albert. When I explained my game at pack night some of the adults
were skeptical but they allowed it to start so I divided the boys
into two teams and the first team all knelt down to get ready to try
and hold up to the coming abuse. Contrary to the image I got of the
game being fairly evenly matched between holder-uppers and
breaker-downers the breakers had the distinct advantage and there
were several injuries in the first round and the game was called off
when a boy started crying because he had been jumped on by a 120
pound kid who delivered all of his weight onto the small of the smaller boy's back. My leaders had to learn the hard way that you do not ask
me for advice on how to do something or someone was going to be
severely injured. Ita was a good lesson to get out of the way before
they let me organize something life threatening.
Home Schooling Redux
I was back to home schooling for the fourth grade which meant I was
back to not doing much at all. I spent a lot of time building the fort and using power tools to build a few things but the days were
unstructured and I was usually always looking forward to the school
day being over so I could go play with my friends who were confined
to the regular 8:30 to 3 grind. I read lots of books, mostly world
book encyclopedias, and wrote some pretty weird reports which were
generally my speculations on dinosaur physiology or about air force
jets. Instead of looking up some information in a book I would sketch
out the foot bones of a sauropod and then a elephant foot and then
write my completely speculative ideas about the different anatomical
variations evolved to support extremely bulky animals. I was not
really learning anything because my information on the subject was
always incomplete and my report was always unfounded personal
conjecture. I had reports of the same style about how helicopters
work, and the nature of the human psyche. There is one weird one
about human cognition which involves a two way conversation between
the conscience and sub-conscience mind of a person involved in an
accident. My mom would read these and save them and I have a couple
still in scrapbook she has to this day. Besides those things we would
go to the natural history museum and the field house which we called
the run-around-place. I fell like my schooling, or lack thereof was
instructive in alternative was as Paul Simon once sang, ' My lack of
education hasn't hurt me, I can read the writing on the wall.'
Base to Mobile, Mobile to Base.
My dad was on the cutting edge of radio technology for the mobile
operations of his business. He installed a two way radio system so
that my mom could rat us out when were were being naughty. Not
really, the system was supposed to be for him to get information and
messages from our house about his business and there was even a way
to patch a phone call out to him on his mobile radio years before
cell phones were common. In practical use it was mostly for my mom to
tell on us or to use as a prop to threaten to tell on us. The
funniest thing was that my dad was supper paranoid about radio
protocol and would loose his mind if you did not operate the radio in
the way he had laid out in our standard operations instructions for
our family. When we used the radio transmitter which was supposed to
always be turned on when he was out of the house we were to press to
button and say, 'base to mobile', at least twice. After we had said
'base to mobile' we had to wait a little while and then we could
repeat it if we felt so inclined. If he was available he would call
back, 'mobile to base' two times and then we could talk. As a form of
supplementary discipline my mom would walk over to the transmitter
which was situated in our living room on a table by the hall and say
she was just going to have to call my dad. This little trick would
usually cool our jets a little and we would knock off the trouble
making. If we were feeling particularly saucy a simple threatening
motion toward the mic was not enough to tamp down our youthful
exuberance and she would make an initial 'base to mobile' just to let
us know we were seconds away from being told on. If we didn't
straiten out what ever shenanigans we were up to by the time my dad
responded she would give us a long hard of impending doom while she
mutely held the transmitter mic. If, while we were hanging over this
most precarious of precipices we were still unable or unwilling to
straiten up and fly right she would tell on us and recommend
punishment and once it was pronounced there was no coming back. That
dang radio sat back there like the sword of Damocles constantly
poised to recommend a grounding or spanking with no chance of a
commutation, because once my dad had heard a disciplinary need over
the radio the die was cast he would execute the sentence as a matter
of radio etiquette. He would reserve the most harsh and most severe
punishments for anyone who dared to violate radio protocol or was
guilty of 'playing around on the radio'. A spank-able and ground-able
offense not to be taken lightly. He was always afraid of official
sanction by the radio cops for misusing the channel he had be given
license to use. Periodic goofing off notwithstanding the radio cops
never stormed the castle to confiscate our gear and kill us in our
sleep. I can only figure we dodged a bullet there.
Popping a Bed
There used to be this thing called a waterbed that a lot of people
had until they discovered it is not too comfortable to sleep on a
water balloon when someone else is. Waves, waves were the problem. My
parent's waterbed was great for jumping on from the loft until my
sister ruined it by trying to do a flip and breaking the frame of the
bed with her back. It was still useful, to me at least, as a passive
aggressive vent for my anger. I had discovered that when my dad was
making me really angry that I could use a little trick to pay him
back short of confrontation which was not and is not my favorite way
to do battle. If I thought that my dad's behavior merited some
punishment I would find him guilty in my private trial and sentence
him to one wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-soggy, and then
dutifully execute that sentence. Waterbeds have a floating wave
suppressor that keeps the pressure off the top of the bladder when no
one is on it so the trick is to take a fine puncturing device,
finding a good spot about halfway down his side where he would lay
and make a tiny hole which would not leak right away. In the night,
however, as my dad's not inconsiderable mass was pressing down on the
bed the leak would start so slowly, so very slowly. In the middle of
the night there would finally be enough water to be perceptible and
would wake him up and force him to go get a towel to sleep on until
he could fix another leak in the morning. He couldn't figure out why
only his side of the bed leaked. I never admitted that I was the bed
popper until I was in my mid-twenties and both my mother and father
were a little upset about how many nights their bed had leaked a
little and kept them up but they also found it humorous and it did clear up a persistent mystery. The statute of limitations was up anyway so
their hands were tied.
I Organize My Sisters Things and She Hates Me
My older sister was hands down cooler than me. She knew about what
clothes were cool, she knew about what stuff was coo and was not
cool, she knew what type of music was good and bad. Most importantly
she would tell me all the time that I was not cool and to leave her
and her friends alone. I wanted so badly to be liked or loved that it
broke my heart that she didn't want anything to do with me unless I
was part of her scheme to get something else. I was always trying to
do things to suck up and try and ingratiate myself into her circle of
affection. It didn't work. One time in particular I wanted to do
something nice for her so I went in her non-shared room, she was the
only one at this time that had one, and cleaned it up for her put all
of her clothes away and sorted all of her stuff into shelves. That
might have been okay if I would have stopped but she had a hope chest
at the foot of her bed that was cram-packed with letters and papers
and all kinds of stuff in a jumble vomiting out the top. I decided to
take everything out and organize it. As a ten-year-old I actually did
not know what I was organizing but as a newly minted woman my sister
had some sensitive hygiene products stashed in that box and was
horrified when she got home to see that I had been going through her
stuff and had seen her pads. I had no idea why she was so mad but she
threw me right out and yelled at me never to go through her private
stuff again and then she was crying and slammed the door and told me
she hated me. I started crying and went to my room, I was out six
hours of cleaning and the whole plan backfired. My mom came and tried
to explain to me that my sister had personal and sensitive items in
her room and was embarrassed by me going through her stuff. I tried
to explain that I wasn't going through her stuff and I had no idea
what I was going through any way. My explanation was no good and my
sister was in a snit for a week.
Jumping Off of the Loft
I mentioned that when we built the add-on to our trailer that we had
an 8 foot square loft that was about eight feet off the floor. This
loft was accessed by a ladder made out of 3/4” pipe that had been
drilled through a 4x4 making a ladder that would cut your foot just
about in half as you tried to climb it in bare feet. The loft itself
had not a single shred of safety device at the top it was just a
carpeted platform in the sky with a strait drop off of one edge. The
edge with the drop had a water-bed indirectly below it but well
within the jumping range of kids over about six, never younger. We
had been jumping off the loft pretty much since it was installed with
no problem but we always kept it on the down low as to not unduly tax
my parent's fragile sense of safety. When my parents left for another
trip they had a neighbor girl come and watch us for a couple of days
she was cute and fun and knew all about going out with people and
stuff like that so we did not fight her authority because in mainly
consisted of hanging out with us and talking. She was not a real
strict disciplinarian and that usually keeps the fights to a minimum,
everything falls apart, of course but at least it happens in peace.
One morning we were up in the loft jumping off onto my parent's bed
and just hanging out and having a good time when my older sister and
younger brother and I left to go play leaving only my little sister
to stay with the baby sister. I was actually needed on some important
candy getting business up at the local pharmacy and was walking back
chore completed and when I turned down my street I was passed by an
ambulance and I actually thought, “That would be weird if they
turned into my house.” They did, and I started running as fast as I
could to cover the last two blocks home. I ran in and my little
sister was being put on a stretcher and getting her head strapped
down to be loaded into the ambulance. I was in a panic and the poor
neighbor girl was hysterical and sobbing. She was telling the
paramedics that my six-year-old sister had attempted a flip while
jumping off the loft, had slipped and fallen onto the edge of the
water bed and broken the bed and maybe herself. They took my sister
into the emergency room where she told everyone that we had
permission to jump off of the loft and our parents let us do it all
the time which was naturally shocking to hear about the gross neglect
we had endured and they were also wondering why four kids were home
with no parents with only a 16 year-old girl watching them. It looked
bad because it was bad. We had a loft with no safety precaution at
all and we were alone with a girl much to young for any kind of
long-term babysitting. My grandmother, 'Other-Mother', luckily only
lived twenty minutes away and came to the rescue she got the hospital
all squared away and told the concerned parties that she would take
us and take care of us until my parents got home. This was exactly
her type of thing she would have turned down the job of watching us
but the chance to be self righteous was right up her psychological
alley. My wounded sister was not hurt badly, she just had some
bruised ribs but she played it up for the pampering. She was also
telling everyone that would listen that my parents let us jump off of
the loft all of the time and that her older siblings taught her to
jump off and to do flips. My parents came home and were furious about
the situation for which they were at least entirely responsible. My
dad had never put a rail or wall up, they had a immature babysitter,
and he blamed my brother and sister and I for, 'Teaching and
encouraging your sister to jump.' We protested that we had always
told her never to jump and that none of us were actually there at the
time and that no one had ever tried a flip before she thought it
would be a cool trick. He wouldn't hear of it and sentenced us to a
long list of chores that included some of the perpetual
organizational jobs we had around our mass of stuff. We had to clean
out the cellar and the the front house for weeks without pay, and we
were grounded all because an incompetent babysitter let my little
sister try and do a flip off of a loft onto a water bed.. I am still
angry at the injustice. My dad did put up a rail and then to jump off
the loft you had to walk out in front of the rail holding on
backwards to the rung. That did keep the idiots off and left it to
the pros. He later installed a wall instead of a rail and you would
have to jump 12 feet to reach the bed now. Not worth it.
Babysat by Lunatics Part the Final
My parents were able to find a young couple from the local trailer
park to come in as middle relief, I bet you were thinking I was going
to say closer but there are still a few innings left in this saga. My
parents had left a little per diem for food and essentials and
it turned out that giving the trailer park people some money with
witch they were supposed to act prudently may have been misplaced
trust. They were a young twenties pair a little on the chubby side
and the husband had a penchant for beer. If you guessed they took all
of the remaining money and spent it on snacks and beer then you are
awesome at guessing. In exchange for cleaning out the stash of money
they did very little but occupy a place in front of the television
and eat. After the snacks and beer ran out they remembered they had
something else they needed to do and they would be unable to babysit
us anymore so they called my parents and told them they would have to
find a third babysitter. This time with us out of money and needing
someone who would work cheap and on credit they called in a 17 year
old neighbor girl to finish out the last little bit until they got
home. She was an accomplished pianist and yelled at us if we made
noise during her lengthy and convoluted practices on the piano that
was in our living room. She would also call her mom and friends and
complain about us like she was in an isolation chamber. I over heard
her say that we were little slobs and that everything in our fridge
was ruined because we never put the lid back on things or wrapped
them up. Honestly, that was a fair assessment, but that didn't take
the sting out. I helped to take back a little familial dignity by
making fun of her red hair and cawing voice. It evened up the score
nicely when she started crying. Thanks for watching us, never come
back. My parents were home soon and were upset about how the
babysitters were treated and how some of them stole all of our money.
We only got left with babysitters one more time and it turned out
worse.
Babysat by Lunatics Part 2
All of that stuff was eccentric but basically fine it was their kids
that started to rub us the wrong way. They were whiny entitled little
brats who were really grabby and bossy. They were the ones that had
killed my guinea pigs on a previous visit. The older sister had
recently cut off all of her and her sisters hair to try and look like
Tom Cruise in Legend and had gotten in trouble, deep trouble. Her
parents were now trying to overcompensate for punishing her by
allowing her to do whatever she pleased to show they were still cool.
On the third day I came home from school to see that the little
girls had gotten into my toys and had broken my most prized and
solitary G.I. Joe vehicle the Snow Cat. I was furious and
administered a little rough justice right there in the middle of the
living room floor giving the two girls and my sister a good whack in
the head while yelling at them to leave my stuff alone. Their dad was
at the kitchen table and ran over to save his precious babies from
what they deserved. He tried to hit me but I ran with what was left
of my toy into my, bedroom which was the first back from the living
room ,and slammed the door and wedged myself between the door and the
end of my bed forming a tight barricade with my legs. He banged and
pushed on the door and told me to come out and get my punishment and
I kept yelling, 'Go to hell!' out through the door. He left after a
bit but I realized that I had to come out sometime for food and
bathroom requirements so I formulated a plan. I found a weapon, four
AA batteries that were in my top drawer and I secreted them in my
hand. I opened the door intending to make a run for the front door
and outside to freedom but he was standing there in the kitchen
blocking the way. He told me he was going to give me a spank for
attacking his girls and started to close the distance and that is
when I sprung my ambush and threw the batteries as hard as I could
into his face and ran around my stunned attacker and right out the
door and to freedom. I ran up to the front house where there was a
room that my mom used to store all kinds of camping gear and old
clothes, I climbed in through a window and made myself a little nest
in the clothes and settled in to wait it out. I thought that if they
caught me now I was dead for sure. They didn't come looking for me
until it was dark and then they started to get really worried. I came
out a few hours later but they had had enough and called my parents
and told them they were leaving and not babysitting us anymore and
that they would have to find someone else because they were leaving
in the morning. Continued in part 3
Babysat by Lunatics Part 1
My parents usually went off on a vacation once or twice a year
without the kids. They would go to Yellowstone, or Catalina, Europe,
Mexico, or Tahiti. If you have six kids it is hard to shoot off to
Yellowstone to go snowmobiling for a week because you need to find
someone to watch six hellions. We were a particularly wild bunch
because we so rarely had structure that when structure was imposed we
tended to balk a little. A lot-tle actually. This generally meant
that we would only have a baby sitter one time and a new sucker would
have to be tracked down for the next time. This time the sucker was
my mom's cousin who was to watch us for three days while my parents
were gone. She had two little girls and had recently remarried. Her
first husband had been a lifeguard and model of some sort, so she had
decided on this go 'round to pick some one just the opposite which
meant a nerdy little worm of a man. He was a officious, bespectacled,
balding, unemployed aspiring screenwriter. He was also one of those
type of people that even though they are unsuccessful assume they are
both more talented and smarter than anyone else and are therefore
condescending and patronizing to everyone. The babysitting was
beneath them, of course, but they were desperately broke and had to
have the money. They were so broke that before he took us to school
one morning he was carefully packing snow around his license plate so
cops couldn't see it was out of date. The week started off okay even
though our surrogate parents were quite a bit different than our
regular ones. The first thing I noticed was that my cousins husband
was always at home 'writing', which involved a lot more playing
'Othello' on the computer than you would think a unemployed writer
trying to make his break would be required to play. He did show me
how to play so that was cool. He also let me read his script idea
which at ten years old, I thought sounded stupid but he told me that
was because I didn't understand the screen writing format. Could be,
but I remember thinking that this guy could not write dialog very
well. My mom's cousin was a quite different maternal figure from my
own mother as well, for starters she loved to exercise. Not to
healthful levels but right on past there to obsessive compulsive
levels. She would workout for a couple of hours in the morning and
then again at night. She also was a house keeper of the lunatic sort.
She fist day she was over she pulled out all of our clothes from the
drawers and sorted them, ironed them and then folded them and put
them away. I had never seen someone iron a tee-shirt. She was
vacuuming twice a day and she still found time to go though the
kitchen and pull everything out from the cupboards and fridge sort it
clean it and throw away bad food. She even got a scraper and removed
grime from the ridges in the filigree of our plastic cupboard door
covers. There was quite a bit of grime, my mom was barely a
housekeeper let alone a deep cleaner. Continued in Part 2
We Rip Out Matt’s Hair With A Power Tool
 |
| Sure it feels great for a little while but the comedown is murder. |
We are power tool people. We do the job, whatever job it is, with
enough or maybe a little too much power. One time when my brother
Matt and I were out in the front house that we used as a storage area
and shop we found some old welding rods. Welding rods, as it
conveniently happened, fit right into a cordless drill. We had a
drill so it was obvious what we were going to do, put the rod in and
start it spinning and rubbing it on our arms which felt pretty good.
It felt okay but then I ventured out and ran the spinning rod over my
scalp and through my hair. Matt thought that looked like something he
would like to try and he started running it though his hair and all
of the sudden things went bad. The rapidly spinning rod in the power
drill somehow, unforeseeably and inexplicably, got tangled in a
snatch of hair right on top of his head about 3/4” wide and 3
inches long, and it got tangled really well. He tried to manually
dislodge it but I came over to help when he was unable to free
himself from the entanglement. I approached the situation with the
attitude that power tools got us into this they can damn well get us
out. So, I grabbed the drill with the rod still in it twisted in my
brother's hair and flipped it into reverse and let-er rip. And rip it
did. Right out at the roots, but not quite all of the hairs came out
so I switched it back into forward and gave it another go. That did
it and tore out the remaining hair by the roots in a perfectly bald
little football shaped baldness right in the top center of Matt's
head. Because of my thoughtful take charge and get the problem solved
in a hurry attitude Matt blamed me for ripping out a swatch of hair
that may never grow back right out of his head. I wanted to make it
up to him so I started in on various plans to cover his shame until
his hair had a few months to grow back in. Our first line of attack
was to just glue the tangled hair lump right back to his scalp but it
looked like he had the corpse of a mangled mouse sitting on the top
of his head but not in a good way. We abandoned that idea and I
offered to try my hand at a little makeup trickery. I began that
tricky dance of light and shadow with my only masculine makeup that
we had, shoe polish. I took some brown shoe polish to his bald spot
and tried to blend the color down from the shameful and shiny bald
and into a less glossy baldness. Like most attempts to cover baldness
it ended up looking more ridiculous than just letting it all hang
out, bald and proud. He had to endure the shame of it until it grew
back but he may have learned a valuable lesson about who not to trust
with the trigger of a power tool when you are wrapped up and in a bad
spot. That sort of knowledge is priceless.
Mortality Confronted
While those local young men were working on our add-on they had a
friend come and help them on occasion. I didn't really know him very
well but he had been around town and at our house working a couple of
times. One Saturday before they were going to come to our house to
work they went hunting for rabbits. While they were hunting that boy
say what he thought was a rabbit in the early morning light and shot
at it. It turned out to be a white rock and his bullet ricocheted
right back at him. It hit his clavicle and spun right strait down
through his heart and he was dead in a matter of seconds. It was so
fast and such an unlikely shot that the friends that were with him
were confused about what happened and thought he may be joking
around. The shot was so unlikely that when the ambulance came they
called the police because they thought one of his friends must have
shot him. They found out the truth in the autopsy. The guys didn't
come back to work for a couple of days and when they did they were
understandably a lot less goofy. I wanted to ask them about their
friend dying but I, with my social tone deafness, knew that this was
the kind of story you were told if they wanted to but you never
asked. The boy who died from the ricochet was the first person that I
had actually known that had died and it was a weird feeling to know
he would never come back and it made me really sad.
Add-On and Nail Gun Fights.
In the distant past people paid for their small homes and then added
rooms onto them as they had money. This fell out of style when it
became desirable to have a house with no character devoid of any
spark of creativity, unless you consider choosing a different style
of brick or stone for your half-rock, half-stucco house stylish.
Houses have also tended to become unnecessarily large as a show of
opulence that other people can covet. Never slaves to fashion and
blissfully unaware of the zeitgeist my family did not participate in
this budding trend with our home. We lived in a mobile home that we
brought across town from the trailer park and parked it permanently
in the middle of our acre making it a stationary home. After a few
years we took off the tongue and wheels. Then, as the family was
getting too large for a three bedroom house my dad decided to add a
laundry and utility room and a large master bedroom. The master
bedroom would have the houses second bathroom which we were really
starting to need with four kids getting ready for school and church
were starting to strain the one we had. It would also have a loft
which at first was just a platform in the air with no rail that will
figure in a upcoming story. My dad hired some young men from town to
frame the add-on while he would be a way at work and because we were
home-schooled we would go and bother them all day long. They taught
us some valuable lessons about wearing safety goggles. It was vital
when using pneumatic nail guns to keep your eyes protected especially
if you were defeating its safety to shoot nails at your brother.
Those super cool dudes let us use their nail guns to try and shoot
each other every time they had a little break. That is the simple
milk of human kindness that we have lost touch with in our overly
protective and hyper-litigious society.
Didn't Make It. But Maybe I Did.
All this talk about walks of shame has put me in mind of a story from
my time in the third grade. Checkers had become an obsession among
the third graders and we would spend any of our lunch recesses that
were not outside days, all playing one of the six classroom checkerboards. I was
on a winning streak and had just buried a kid who was thought to be
the best in the class but he was only best in the sense that he
combined high level play with being quite popular and that confuses
people into thinking someone is better than they are. I had actually
been feeling a little queasy and I told him I needed to go to the
bathroom and would not be able to rematch him, but he insisted on the
instant rematch and I relented. We had a weird set of rules which did
not compel a player to jump an opponent which could lead to a
stalemate or tie quite often and after being beaten, this boy had
become quite cautious and deliberate in his move choices. This whole
prolonged battle of wits was taking place on top of my rapidly
loosening bowels. There was a little rumbling and then a gurgle and I
tried to concede but he wouldn't allow me. It is hard to imagine that
there was a time in my life that I could be peer pressured into
playing out a game of checkers at the risk of pooping my pants but
there you have the proof constant reader, there you have the proof.
At last there was nothing left to do I was going to blow right there
on the middle of the floor laying on my belly, playing checkers.
Without a word I jumped up and ran out the door. I made it around the
first corner but as I rounded the corner to enter the merciful
sanctuary of the boys restroom, I zigged, and my bowels zagged and
out shot a potential lifetime of shame. That was the type of thing
that a kid would be reminded of for the rest of his school days and
when he was to run into his old friends when they were both middle
aged and playing on the same golf course they would greet him as Mr. Poop-Pants right in front of his best clients who had joined him for
a nice relaxing day out. Then the clients would have their interest
piqued and ask for the story behind the nickname, the shamefully
literal nick name, and Mr. Poop-Pants would have to explain the details
of his pathetic childhood. The clients would most likely laugh it off
but in the deepest part of their brains, the part where they would
like to be the alpha male in the pack, they would know they had seen
weakness and from that day forth have little to no respect for Mr. Poop-Pants. I couldn't risk alienating my best customers like that so
I did the unthinkable for a third grader, I just left. I didn't check
out I didn't tell anyone I just kept running right out the north
doors, across the playground, across the road, I cut across the
vacant field and kept running the two blocks home. I took off all of
my clothes and jumped in the shower in one non-stop motion from laying
on my belly playing checkers to the shower at my house. My teacher
was naturally concerned when her classroom was short a kid after
recess and she started to panic, luckily my mom was home and was able
to tell her I had just run home and that she was sorry but I was very sick
and would not be returning to school. The escape worked perfectly and
I think until this writing only my mom and I knew what happened. I am
not worried about the world learning the truth now because I don't even golf anymore.
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