Childhood

When you get older, you sometimes look back at your childhood with a mixture of both nostalgia and regret. Lately, I have been thinking about my relationship with my sister and all of its complications. Our relationship has come a long way since our childhood and will probably continue to grow and become stronger as age, maturity and love closes the gap that can sometimes form during childhood.

I am the second oldest of five boys. My baby sister on the other hand, is the first oldest of one girl. I am not being cruel or sexist, that is just the breakdown of family dynamics when five boys precede the birth of the only girl: A mob of monkeys, a Faberge child, a worried and protective mother, all lead to separate and distinct childhoods. This is not to say that she was not loved: on the contrary she was loved immensely, just loved in a different kind of way and could not be included in any of our games or activities that required copious amounts of face punching, taunting, face punching, ridicule, face punching and nut kicking that I played with my brothers (it is a tradition of male siblings that pre-dates the written word, culture or even language and must be applied to the end of all games including ball, board, video, invented and yes, even Bible trivia).

Despite the best efforts of my parents our house resembled a tree house: We knocked out the window screens for easier access in and out of our rooms, tore apart our bunk beds to build forts, disassembled the shower doors to use the metal frames as ninja swords and built clever weapons with nails, screws, wiffle-ball bats and sawed off broom handles (great for nunchucks). By removing the wick from your mom’s giant decorative candles, securing a thick rubber band to the sides of the candle with wall tacks or wood staples and feeding a shish kabob skewer through the hole in the middle, you can create one of the world’s best dart guns and can launch a wooden dart at speeds and force that can penetrate through your brother’s jeans and at least 2 inches into his thigh allowing you to hit him right in his stupid face with your homemade smoke bomb while he is gasping from pain (smoke bomb constructed from a baby’s snot-sucker filled with Ajax and a bungee cord for quick retraction after poisonous face smacking).

You are probably wondering where my sister was during all of our super cool, and mom approved by the way, games of boyhood innocence and tolerance exploration/exploitation (So is my mom at this point). Well, I will solve this mystery and at the same time successfully prove that we were not complete monsters that would endanger our baby sister and risk her becoming injured or even merely included in our too dangerous for girls excuse for not wanting to play with girls in our games. We kept her safely locked away in the closet or some drawer or something, I think.  I don’t remember, but she was safe for sure, I think… Oh, I should tell you that probably the most fun thing that we did was our tennis ball gun that required just a couple of soda cans, hairspray, a tennis ball and some matches… Forgot about my sister – I will call her later today and ask her where it was that we safely kept her so that you can stop worrying.

Back to the story about my childhood and something.

My youth was sort of a medley of Stand by Me, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and Lord of the Flies. On any given day we could usually be found running around and playing barefoot in the hills or orange groves behind our house and surprisingly often our days ended with poking something dead with a stick (honestly, I am not sure why there were so many dead things around our house – thank God my sister was safe). In both the hills and orange groves we had multiples of amazing forts built from what I can only assume to be donated materials and tools that were purposefully left unguarded at construction sites, the junkyard at Shafer’s Horse Ranch and my dad’s tool boxes and truck (he was always so excited to buy new tools and it made us happy to help – plus, it was totally worth the beatings ; ).  By the time we were finished, we had created the Ewok Village. It was the most amazing collection of tree forts ever assembled, complete with ladders (both wooden and rope), pulleys, decks, swings and precarious placed large boulders that were capable of crushing to death any intruders. When I talk about it with my sister, it is obvious that she would have loved it (I am always happy to let her vicariously enjoy the moments that made my childhood amazing and magical).

This post is going on forever. It feels like I am writing a book – I am not sure how to wrap it up. Do I keep talking about childhood stories of me and my brothers – like when we hit golf balls off our driveway with tennis rackets, or when my oldest brother tried to pee through a knot hole in the fence and got his penis smacked by the neighbor kid with a wiffleball bat? That literally ended in a puddle of laughs. Or maybe I should just apologize to my sister for the years of neglect, abandonment and indifference that she suffered at the hands of her older brothers. I am sorry…For real. Even though it was really mom’s fault when you think about it. Conscience cleared!