after the hermit crab story, i started thinking about other fun adventures from when i was little. 1 in particular was not so fun, but it is mildly entertaining (at my expense) so i will share it with you.
if you ever thought YOUR friends were mean, think again. seriously.
so… when i was little (HAR HAR insert short joke, i know), my friends and i, like many other elementary school kids in the early 90s, PLAYED OUTSIDE. of course, we had computers. but they were not nearly as enticing as they are now. we rode bikes! and went roller blading! and played flash light tag! and climbed on jungle gyms! and crawled through drainage pipes! wait, what?
seriously, if our parents knew half the dumb stuff we did, they never would have let us outside again. they probably would have MADE us watch television. forever. i remember one time, we decided to go see our friends who lived in another neighborhood, like a mile away (a mile is a seriously long way for 8/9/10 year olds, by the way). within that 1 mile, we almost flipped a golf cart over (while attempting to take a 90 degree turn at like 35 miles an hour), walked barefoot through a creek under a highway riddled with god knows what kinds of goodies, and crossed a road busy enough to be considered highly dangerous for Stupid Children.
anyway, back to the drainage pipes. yes, we crawled through them–the ones that connected all of the houses in the neighborhood. the ones filled with spiders and rats and snakes and dirt. honestly, the dirt probably scared me the MOST. tangent!
my mother had this thing when i was little where she would dress me in ridiculously detailed matching outfits (i will show pictures when i get the balls to do so), and if i came home with so much of a speck of dirt (or food) on them, she was not pleased. needless to say, i did not like coming home with dirt on my clothes.
becky, sarah, katherine, and i were inseparable. neighborhood best friends. we did everything together. we even tried to roller blade on the same pair of roller blades (i’ll save that story for another time), so of course, we played in drainage pipes together. what could be more fun?
we got our “supplies”. by “supplies”, i mean handkerchiefs filled with the honeysuckle we picked (we might need a tasty snack while in the pipes!), flashlights, and… that’s about it. flashlights and flowers would lead us through the drainage pipes to… the other side of the drainage pipe. looking back, i have no idea why we actually did this, or what we expected to find, but i’m sure our wild imaginations had conjured up something filled with awesome that would be awaiting us. at the other side of the drainage pipe.
they left me in the pipe. IN THE PIPE. i was already all the way IN the pipe and the only “easy” way to get out was to be yanked out feet first. it took me what seemed like FOREVER (in reality, it was probably like, 15 minutes) to get out of that damned pipe. it was second most unforgettable (and traumatizing) day of my childhood (second only to the roller blading incident).
other unfortunate childhood incidents include:
- the girl scout ceremony where jill tried to light my hair on fire
- the time the mailman came (we used to write letters to the mail man… didn’t every child? no?) and my friends let me flip down a driveway in a little red runaway wagon
- the time(s) becky and i thought we could ACTUALLY increase flight time by taping construction paper dumbo ears to our heads (i don’t know which is worse–actually believing it, or attempting it multiple times)