In kindergarten, in 1972, I once mistook crayon for chalk and wrote indelibly on a blackboard.
I seriously believed at the time that I was going to be in grave trouble with school authorities, and briefly considered no longer attending school.
I forget how this was ultimately resolved. At any rate, the building was torn down in 1977, very possibly with an orange crayon still on a blackboard inside.
How about this?
My brother and I would build a realistic dummy, stuffing jeans, a shirt, shoes and a hat with crumpled up newspapers. Then, we would place it in the street in front of our house as a car was coming, then dive into the ivy hedge to hide.
There is really nothing funnier than squealing tires, sudden swerving, and adult cursing, is there?
:eek:
When I was around 8 or so, I was messing around and threw a half can of red paint off my porch, thinking it wouldn’t bust open. It did. Now this really wasn’t too bad, it only landed in the grass and made a small pool of paint in the backyard, but I totally freaked out. I figured I had to clean it up before my parents got home.
I remember getting a bowl and rag from inside, maybe some water too and I tried mopping up the paint into the bowl. I think at this point I tried dumping it in the toilet or something, it being the only place that could make red paint disappear forever. Well it took several trips and I managed to track the paint all through the house. My younger brother was helping me and he even stopped to answer the phone, leaving a red hand print on it. We also got it all over a pile of clean socks waiting to be sorted… weird how these little details stick out.
My parents weren’t too mad at the whole thing, they did make me clean up the house properly. Still they never mentioned anything about the stupidity of dragging a small puddle of paint in the yard all throughout the house.
That happened to my older brother when his stepmother had just bought brand new white carpet and then proceeded to give the family red velvet cake…
The first bad thing I can remember doing also involved a fish tank. My mom had put my clean laundry away, and hadn’t shut the top two dresser drawers all the way closed before going to get the rest. Being three or four, I made an interesting observation: those drawers sticking out looked like stairs! There was a ten gallon fish tank on top of the dresser, but given I wasn’t even 3’ tall, I had trouble seeing them. But realizing that the drawers were like stairs gave me a good idea. So…does anyone know what happens when an industrious preschooler pulls out the drawers so they resemble stairs even more, then climbs them?
Why, the whole dresser tips over, that’s what happens!
Both parents came running as soon as they heard the crash, and already crying, I got more frantic as Mom checked me over for cuts. I was fine but my fishes were on the rug! As soon as they figured out that I wasn’t screaming because I was hurt, they embarked on a valiant rescue mission, temporarily stowing the fish in the bathroom sink until they could buy a new fish tank. Every fish survived, by the way. They don’t make goldfish like that any more.
When I was a kid, about 5, I once took a night light and inserted a paper clip through the holes in the prongs so I could insert both the clip and the night light into the double receptacle on the wall.
It didn’t kill me, but the flash was interesting. My mother was not amused.
However, at about the same time, I did get off lightly because my brother had found my father’s .45 automatic and managed to shoot a hole through the closet door and the outside wall without killing either one of us.
Good times.
I had a thing with windows.
1.) Circa 7 years old. Bouncing a bouncy ball off my kitchen cabinet so it would bounce back to me. MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH. Right through the window above the sink.
2.) Similar situation (I didn’t learn very well) kicking a soccer ball with a friend against the facade of his bark bed. Again, MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH and it goes HURTLING into their basement window. How it DIDN’T break, to this day I still have no idea. I still swear I saw the window flex.
3.) Fast pitch baseball with a tennis ball in my side yard. Repeat with my across the street neighbor’s living room window. (Friend once it it across the street, house, back yard, back yard of the house behind THAT, the house proper, and into the street of the next cul-de-sac over).
5.) Fifteen is somewhat pushing “childhood” but now we’re onto chipping golf balls in my front yard. Same neighbor kid in the last two stories. We were having “closet to the target” competitions and in our defense our short game was pretty good. We did this for over a year before the toe of my club hit a root and the regulation golf ball made a BEELINE for the back window of our neighbor’s car. I mean that ball probably took off a layer of clearcoat it was such a close miss.
We never used real golf balls again.
As a little boy of 9, I fell in love with a beautiful redhead named Monika while we were still living in Germany and my Dad was in the US Army.
Well, y’all know what Speedos look like, right?
They look like underwear, especially if you happen to live in Germany?
So anyway… I thought my jockey shorts looked a lot like Speedos, even though they have that slot?
So hell, I decided to wear my jockey shorts (they were white) and went swimming in the pool where my Monika swam.
I got sent home.
Y’all?
Monika was my pretty red-haired girl (Charlie Brown).
I remember all the girls my age I had a crush on…
Ilona
Monika
Jeanette…
Quasi
I forgot about this until I read your post! When I was 10 and my brother was 8 we went to visit Grandma and Grandpa for a week. Apparently one of my older uncles had left a handgun somewhere that a curious litttle GI Joe-obsessed kid like my brother could find. Grandma was in the kitchen washing dishes at the sink and John-John, in the bedroom on the other side of the kitchen wall, levelled the revolver at the wall and pulled the trigger.
A bullet had been left in one of the chambers and it went through the wall, grazed the tip of Grandma’s ear, and flew out the window over the kitchen sink, taking the screen with it. Grandma screamed the worst swear-phrase I ever heard her say: “OH MY LORDY!”
This incident came to be dubbed “The Time John Tried to Assassinate Grandma.” In the eulogy I delivered at her funeral I noted that she had cheated a hit on her life at the kitchen sink to live 25 years longer; the family rolled in the aisle with laughter.
I can totally understand how that would be funny and sentimental in retrospect, however I can’t help but find it disturbing that a little kid would have such easy access to a firearm. Same for Quasi’s scenario. I was raised in a house with guns, but they were kept under lock and key. Grandma’s lucky that day wasn’t dubbed, ‘‘The Time John Assassinated Grandma.’’ :eek:
Ya gotta view it in cultural and era terms: 1971, extremely rural Southern Utah, rough, tough dirt farmers who had guns on hand to kill rattlesnakes, coyotes, and other fauna. Combine that with the unofficial motto of our family, “survival of the fittest” and that’s why there was a gun on the top shelf of the closet. Actually, we grew up around guns (rifle mounted on the back window of the truck cab, gun behind my parents’ bedroom door) and this is the only (almost) bad incident that ever happened with firearms.
I thought the fish were thirsty (when I was around 4 or 5 maybe?) - they kept opening their mouths! I gave them a big glass of milk. The fish died, of course.
Did the same thing with snowballs at my friend’s house. We hit one guy’s vehicle and he slammed on the brakes and stopped in the driveway. We were behind some trees up on little hill, we took off and ran into the woods, expecting to be pursued. Instead the guy went up to the front door of my friend’s house and talked to his mother. I got the hell out of there!
I’d forgotten about this til I read your story - my brother and a friend used to take a large pair of men’s shoes, attach a naked GI Joe to a fishing pole, and stand Joe in the shoes. They’d put this contraption in the middle of the street and hide in the bushes with the pole. When a car went by they’d reel Joe in so that he kind of “flew” out of the shoes.
You know that little pile of spherical marshmallows the old lady put outside by the side of her porch?
Those aren’t marshmallows, they’re mothballs. Don’t eat them. Why are you even trying to eat something you found on the side of the neighbor’s porch, anyway?
Don’t put that magnet in your mouth. Even if you don’t plan on it, chances are you’ll swallow it.
Don’t throw the unripe tomatoes from your mom’s garden at the kids on the other side of the fence. Even when you manage to hit one of those annoying kids, it isn’t worth the fury of a gardening mom wondering why her tomato crop is so small this year.
When I was a kid, I was always getting in trouble for reading when I was supposed to be asleep. I was about nine or so when the solution to this problem struck me: my bedside lamp needed to be dimmer, of course, so that my mother couldn’t see the light under my door. Of course, I knew draping a blanket over the lamp was a fire hazard.
My solution was that the bulb in my lamp needed to be like the stained glass windows in churches–just enough light shining through to read by. I carefully melted crayons against the bulb. Although the stained glass effect wasn’t as pretty as I had hoped for and the bulb gave off an odd smell, all was well until my mother discovered what I had done and gave me hell for “trying to burn the house down”.
My dad, a friend of mine, and I were driving along with the windows rolled down. My friend and I had made up a game where we (in our imaginations) swung out the passenger-side door of my dad’s truck as we passed them and collected points based on their station in life (little kid = not much, business-man looking guy = pretty good). We’d even gotten pretty good at making sound effects of the door hitting them. It was fun.
I saw my chance to make a huge score when we drove past a cop doing traffic control at an intersection. I made the sound perfectly as we drove past: ponkt! My friend gave me the largest score ever, and I was basking in the glow as we drove on.
Until the siren caught up with us, and he drove up right behind us, lights flashing, and pulled my dad over. Dad got out of the car when told to and went back to the rear of the truck, where they talked for a long time. He never told me what they said to each other, but in looking back on it, I think the cop must have thought I called him a punk as we drove past him and he decided that personal insult was more important than remaining at his station.
Whatever it was, it was scary as hell!
When I was about 8 years old, I developed a strong interest in the field of medicine. During a study session, I was caught playing doctor with two girls down the street by their older brother, and he said he was going to tell my mother.
I raced home, figuring I had better try to lessen the damage by being as contrite as possible. I ran into the house, yelling that I was really sorry and that I’d never do it again.
Naturally, big brother hadn’t called my mother.
I held out for over an hour of intense interrogation before my mother finally got me admit what it was I was apologizing about.
I swore off the practice of medicine for almost two weeks after that!
On New Year’s Eve, when I was ten or eleven, a friend spent the night while our parents went to a party down the street.
Having the house to ourselves, my friend and I decided, of course, to horse around as much as possible. At one point we crawled into our sleeping bags head first, then stood up and attempted to beat the living daylights out of each other.
At one point one of us fell across the coffee table, and broke my mom’s potted miniature palm tree into three pieces. I didn’t give two shits about the tree, of course, but I was rather concerned over the possible consequences for breaking it.
Before long I came up with a brilliant idea - I went out to the garage, rummaged through Dad’s tool box, and came up with a tube of Super Glue. A few minutes later, the tree looked just like new!
Over the next couple of weeks, my mother watched in despair as the tree slowly died. She did everything she could nurturing that sucker, bless her heart. She never did understand why it mysteriously died like that… until I was about 22, when I finally fessed up.
I was about 5, and thought makeup was very exciting. Mom was taking a nap, and I decided to take the opportunity to use her blood red lipstick on every single inch of my face. Mom waking up with my bright red face inches from hers was not a good thing!
And in 4th grade, when I brought a live grenade to school in my backpack.