The Daily Procrastinator

Topic proposed by Tallgirl:

Think back to your childhood — and by childhood I’m going to go with anything prior to graduation from high school. What were the events that really had an impact on you?

Mine include:

• My grandfather’s death when I was 7. Even though he’d had a stroke when I was in kindergarten and was largely incapacitated for two years, it never occurred to me that he’d ever die.
• Best friend’s seizures/epilepsy diagnosis when we were 11.
• The wave of “oops” babies that appeared in all of my friends’ families when we were 11-13. It was my first exposure to child development and I remember being fascinated by how they learned and what they learned.
• Opening my SAT scores and sort of collapsing onto the stairs, realizing at 16 that I wasn’t going to have to stay in that town forever. I hadn’t really given it conscious thought up to that point, but I remember the phrase, “this is my ticket out of here” running through my head. Sounds terrible now, doesn’t it?
• My father being hit by a car and having major back injuries when I was 17. It totally changed my perception of my place in the world and made me realize that I had to grow up and take responsibility for things.

BigRedPoet

• My brothers and I played baseball with the neighborhood kids all day every day during the summers. I was one of the biggest kids in the neighborhood, and I could hit pretty much any pitch any kid could throw. By the time I was about 14, I thought I was pretty good. Meanwhile, I knew my dad had pitched city league fastpitch softball when I was a kid. He would toss baseballs to me the back yard, but he never really pitched to me…so I challenged him to come out back and see if he could strike me out. He did. Three times in a row. On the last pitch, he somehow got the ball to break up and in. I was swinging at a pitch that looked like it was right down the middle…and the next moment I was dodging before it hit me in the head. I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit. He’s good.“
• The same group of kids that played baseball also built a HUGE treefort in the woods behind our neighborhood. I don’t think any of our parents had a hammer or a nail handy for years because we stole every last stinking one. The final product was three stories, including a roof over the top one. It was about thirty feet long and about twelve feet wide. It involved logs, two-by-fours, nails, rope, and just about anything else you can imagine. One fine day, this kid named Lenny shows up. Apparently, he’s a nephew or a grandkid to some family way down at the end of the neighborhood. Eventually , we all end up in the treefort. For reasons known only to him, Lenny climbs out onto the roof and begins doing some sort of ridiculous dance while singing the theme song from the Smurfs cartoon. Suddenly, the roof cracks in two, dumping Lenny right into the top floor of the treefort, where several of us are hanging out. The combined weight of the strange kind and the ceiling causes the top floor crack, falling into the next (also full of kids), which cracks and dumps us all, about 15 kids, into a screaming, bleeding, broken-boned heap on the ground. An ambulance came and took Jimmy to the hospital for his shattered humerus.
• One of my earliest memories (I have no idea how old I was or even which house we were living in) is of building a snowman in the yard with my mother. The bottom section was huge, and we’d rolled a pretty big snowball to be the middle. When she lifted the second snowball to stack it atop the first, my mom tipped over backward into the snow. I remember her laying there in the snow, with a giant snowball on top of her, laughing so hard she couldn’t get up.
• My family dog was run over while following me across the street to the neighbor’s house. I didn’t know she was back there.
• When I was 14, I shot my first deer. After my dad helped me gut it out, he reached across the carcass and shook my hand. Like men do.
• When I was 10 or so, a kid named Jacob was abducted from the nearby farm town just ten miles up the road or so. He has never been found.

Juggernaut:

Interesting topic. Trying to think back that far, and trying to think of such events that had an impact on me, makes me think I was something of a cold bastard. But here’s what I came up with.

• There was a kid that lived down the street that got hit by a car when he ran a stop sign at the base of a steep hill riding on his mini-bike. I remember hearing screams (his <shudder>) and Careflight coming, landing pretty much in front of our house. While he was the first kid FlashCap [my twin brother] and I met when we moved there, by that point I (and probably FC) didn’t like him much (he was probably going to turn out to be a serial killer, IMO). So that didn’t really “change my life.”
• Freshman year of high school, maybe sophomore. In the high school weight room with FC after school. We are getting ready to do some bench press, and I decide that I want to try 35-lb plates (maybe 45-lb) on each side. This was new to both FC and I as all we had done up to that point was universal machines in 7th and 8th and a little weight bench at home that had those concrete-filled plastic weights. A little sh*t that had for some reason tormented me since 7th grade (I couldn’t exactly beat him up because it would have made me look bad for picking on this little dude) came up to me and said “yeah, right”, etc., indicating that I wouldn’t be able to bench it. I laid down on the bench, and threw it up in quick succession 10 times, then moved up the weight. Never heard a f*cking word from that little dude again. FC even commented that he was impressed when we were leaving. That really made me feel good. Great, really.
• Hanging out with the stock crew at Winn-Dixie after work. That was kind of significant to me, thinking back. It was the first time I moved outside of my and FC’s circle of friends (which included CowboyFromHeck) on my own. I think it prepared me for my going off to undergrad completely on my own as no one I knew was going to my college of choice.

FlashCap:

• Juggernaut hitting me with a toy (metal!) shovel and giving me 10 stitches in my nose, and a scar for life. Hey, Juggernaut, I’ve never forgiven you for that.
• My best friend getting hit by a car while on a little mini-bike. Juggernaut laughed at his screams. Hey, Juggernaut, I’ve never forgiven you for that.
• Juggernaut not letting me bench press after he showed up that little f*cker – his exact words were “Grab the towel, bitch, we’re outta here!” I muttered something about wanting to bench press, too, but Juggernaut for some reason just smiled and walked out. I had to go, because Juggernaut was my spotter. Hey, Juggernaut, I’ve never forgiven you for that.
• Staying at home, alone, waiting for Juggernaut to come home from work so we could spend more time palling around and joking around with one another before we went our separate ways in college. Come to find out, though, that Juggernaut is getting drunk in the Winn-Dixie parking lot with his “real friends.” Hey, Juggernaut, I’ve never forgiven you for that.