Many of my youthful escapades involved an imaginary war against “the Middle Street.”  The next street over from Hazelwood (I don’t think I’ve ever known what it was called, although I suppose I could drive over there and look) was a dead-end street that had a group of kids that were slightly older than us.  For many years we tormented each other. 

For example, when a couple of us convinced our parents to buy us “wrist rockets,” the first thing we did was fill a bag with “China berries” from a neighborhood tree and shoot them at the Middle Street kids.  Most of the time, we didn’t take any real action, we just made imaginary plans to attack them in one fashion or another.

I remember that there was a particular fence that we figured out we could climb over and get to the Middle Street.  On our side, the fence had the support boards that made it easy to climb over.  On the Middle Street side, there were no cross boards, so for a 7-year old kid, it was nearly impossible to get back over the fence if the environment became hostile.  That fence gave me many nightmares.  I used to wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming that I had boldly scaled the fence and dropped on the other side and then the Middle Street Gang came running at me to kick my ass.  With nowhere to run and no way back over the fence, panic was the only option.  Although we only made a few excursions over the fence in reality, we never seemed to get trapped on the other side.  Somehow, we were either able to “go around,” or we found another spot to cross between houses.

One of our imaginary attacks grew out of the desire to hurl snowballs at the other kids.  One year, it snowed about 2 inches (extremely rare in Houton), and for one day we were able to hurl snowballs over the fence.  About a week later, the temperature was back above 60 degrees, and we were longing for something to throw.  We came up with the idea of mudballs.  My friend, Nick, and I carefully collected enough mud to make about 10 baseball-sized mudballs.  We tested a couple of them by throwing them at the street, but to our dismay they were so soft they fell apart in the air or on impact.  It was clear that if we were able to hit one of those sinister Middle Street kids, it would barely even hurt.  We needed a way to make the mudballs harder.  We decided to go into my garage to look for something that would help.  For some unknown reason, we concluded that if we spray painted the mudballs, when the paint dried they would be more solid.  We hauled our remaining mudballs into the garage and placed them on the floor.  Then, we spraypainted them with a can of forest-green spray paint.  When we touched them, green paint came off onto our fingers, and we had each been punished severely whenever we came home with paint on us, so we wiped off our hands and decided that the best thing to do was to leave the mudballs on the garage floor to dry overnight.  Brilliant plan.

That evening, when my father returned home from work, he noticed something on the floor of the garage and decided to check it out before parking his car over it.  You can imagine his unbelievable level of anger combined with confusion when he saw six green mudballs sitting on the floor of the garage, each surrounded by a green halo that had been painted onto the garage floor!  Needless to say, we never got to test out whether the painted mudballs would have been an effective weapon.