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When I was two or so, my mother and aunt took me to the
movies to see Mary Poppins. At the time, my aunt was rather
pregnant with my cousin.
Apparently, I found the concept rather intriguing, and worthy
of note, because at some conveniently quiet point in the film, I stood up, pointed at my aunt, and as loud as my two-y-o lungs
were capable, shouted "PREGNANT! PREGNANT! PREGNANT!"
Then sat down as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
Also at a suitably young age (2ish years), I was taken to my first
funeral, one of my mother's uncles. My mother and her sisters, and
their father and mother all sitting with suitable solemnity; me being held and, for the most part, behaving.
Someone (perhaps a clergyman) began lighting candles. Thus, calling
on my limited catalog of prior experiences and expected responses,
did what must have come naturally to one that age: began singing
Happy Birthday.
When we were kids, my brother
slipped an envelope under my bedroom door. When I opened
it up and took the paper out, it had a big brown streak on
it. I freaked and told him that he was disgusting.
He said, "It's just brown crayon. Smell it." I
smelled it and... it wasn't brown crayon.
I peed on my cousin's cat.
I was 4 at the time, and Shaun
was 2. Back then, apparently (I didn't remember this, either),
they had cats.
This particular day, we must've
been heavily at the Kool-Aid. In any instance, we both had to
pee.
I don't quite know what possessed
us, but my cousin and I decided it would be great sport to place
one of the cats in the bathtub and, um, perform a little
"target practice." On my aunt's arriving on the scene,
she was treated to the site of the cat running back and forth in
the bathtub while Shaun and I tried to pee on it.
(I almost peed myself on hearing
this tale.)
When there was a problem at the TV station, and they'd play some
cheesy music with a repeated voice-over of "We are experiencing operating difficulties - please standby..." I thought that meant
you were supposed to get up and stand next to the set.
I never could understand why people got so worked up over the
song "Danny Boy" - after all (so I thought), it's just a ditty about some kid at
a vo-tech school training to be a plumber...
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
...or maybe even working on his degree in
Civil...
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
I wanted to grow up to be a horse.
I was terrified of getting older and growing a beard.
I used to watch the test pattern on the
T.V. (creepy)
I heard the vacuum in our neighbor's house and thought
it was the sound of the woman on the couch in the other room blowing sawdust out of her mouth. I
pictured this every time I saw her afterward.
I got in trouble in kindergarten class for drawing a reasonably anatomically correct drawing of a male,
labeled head-to-penis with the letters A through, um, "Pee-Pee"
In the same kindergarten class, I
watched a girl vomit during "opening exercises," thinking, at first, that she was
doing some sort of magic trick.
The following year I got in
trouble by partaking of that peculiarly male sport: trying to see how far one could stand from the urinal, and make it in... and having a classmate walk in front of me and into the
stream.
Also that year: when the teacher left the room,
I ran up to and kissed a (female) classmate and ran back to my seat.
This was repeated several times, to said classmate's annoyance. On the last time,
one of her friends saw me coming, and shouted, "Look out!" at which she turned to face me, and I planted one right on her lips. The whole class erupted in a
chorus of "ooooooooooooooooo"s.
In fifth grade, I went to the local office supply store and
bought a roll of red, "Admit One" tickets (identical in style to
those used in the school lunch program we had then). Of
course I brought them to school, and practically had them begged out of
my hands (for use as counterfeit pizza tickets). Yes, I
got in trouble.
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