Daily Newsie

Mickey’s post about the Wet Banana — which I didn’t even know existed, but apparently it does and is quite superior to the Slip’n'Slide — got me thinking about the ridiculous things we did as children to amuse ourselves. My older brother J is two years older than me, I’m in the middle, and the baby of the family, N, is five years younger than me. (Yes, we told him he was a mistake, and yes, it turns out that I was actually the mistake. Best mistake ever, is all I have to say.) We lived in town until I was about seven, when we moved to the scary farmhouse with a broken toilet and a nest of fire ants in my closet, so up until then my playtime activities were pretty normal — biking to the park with friends, playing in the sandbox, swinging hard enough so the swingset legs came out of the ground, and so on.

Then we moved to a place so remote that it didn’t even have a street address, and suddenly my brothers and I had to find ways to amuse ourselves. One of our favorite activities was riding J’s blue plastic skateboard down the hill next to our house, leaving twin wheel-tracks in the grass. This pastime filled many happy hours until my mother noticed the stripe of dead grass and made us stop. She also vetoed exploding creamer cups and ketchup packets with a hammer on the sidewalk to the house, which really sucked because that was awesome, and I seem to recall she was none too happy about our attempt to ride the laundry basket down the stairs.

(Over the years, we’ve noticed that most of our good stories end with slumped shoulders and the phrase, “… and then Mom made us stop.” It was always Mom, since she had the pleasure of staying home with us all day long.)

So J and I shifted our focus to outside activities. We built a lean-to with branches, empty feed bags, and fallen leaves, where we would spend nights waiting for my father to try to scare us (he always did, and I always pretended not to be scared). After listening to Bill Cosby’s go-kart sketch, we took the wheels off of the lawn mower and built a crude go-kart out of two-by-fours to ride down the hill next to the pasture (Mom didn’t care if we tore up that one). Dad actually made us stop that time, because he needed to mow the lawn. In the wintertime, J and I would build igloos and giant ramps that would launch us and our sleds high into the air before we came crashing down on the other side — or got clotheslined by the wire stretching between the trees.

Now, the only reason I’m going to mention this next bit is because my father will call me out in the comments if I don’t. My older brother and I loved to ride our bikes, and would spend hours biking from our house to the tiny hamlet of Orangeville to get some ice cream at the Nor’ Pole. (That place was awesome, by the way.) We thought we were the cat’s pajamas with our mean cycling skillz, so we formed a daredevil group called “The Trixter Blixters” and would stage dramatic talent shows for our parents in which we would — gasp! — steer with one hand or — zounds! — stand up on the seat while riding. To their credit, my parents always acted suitably impressed at our prowess. Until, that is, the day when J was trying to torment me by dragging a rake behind him as he rode across our rock driveway (I hatethe sound of a rake scraping rocks) and wound up crashing head-on into our new mini-van. We decided not to tell anyone what happened, but apparently it was pretty obvious.

And then Mom made us stop.