25Lives

Here’s another story from the ranch.  I was about 9 years old, and my friend John came up to the ranch for the weekend.  He and I were exploring around one of the small ponds up there, no doubt skipping rocks, shooting our BB guns at turtles, and other similar stuff.

At one point, while we were walking around the pond, we came to a point where the pond drained around the small dam.  This point, at the base of the dam on one end, served as an overflow point so the water level in the pond couldn’t get too high.  Well, we must have gotten a lot of rain that spring, because the overflow point was muddy.  When I jumped across it, I landed on one foot in the middle of the mud.  I made it across okay, but I immediately noticed that my shoe had stuck in the mud.  John and I tried everything to get the dang shoe out of the mud.  We tried having him hold on to one of my arms while I leaned over the mud.  That didn’t work.  We hunted around and finally found a long stick that we used for probably 30 minutes to try to fish the shoe out of the mud.  As time went by, and efforts failed, we grew more and more frustrated.

Suddenly, we heard the familiar cry of one of the cows, as the entire herd came running around the other end of the dam.  John screamed, “stampede!” He then did something that shocked me.  He lept into the mud, grabbed my shoe out, and took off running in the opposite direction from where the cows were coming.  He clearly was in fear for his life!  I took off running after him, laughing the whole way.  We laughed for days about the fact that neither of us would venture into the mud to get the shoe – until a herd of stampeding cows changed the dynamic of the situation.

Growing up in the 70’s, I watched lots of “Cowboys & Indians” shows.  One of my fears as a kid was that a band of rogue Indians were going to attack me out of nowhere. 

This fear was fed by the fact that my parents had a small ranch in central Texas that we used as a vacation home.  Whenever I was out in the pastures by myself, I was always careful to watch for the telltale signs of an Indian raid. 

One time, we took my friend Nick with us to the ranch for the weekend.  While we were there, my father and some of his friends decided to go bullfrog hunting.  Nick and I went along, but were too young to actually go spear frogs, so we waited in the back of the pickup.  While sitting there talking, I reached over and plucked the radio antenna, causing it to vibrate back and forth rapidly.  That caused Nick to utter one of the most famous lines I heard during my childhood…  “Shhhh!!!  I hear Indian drums!!!!!”

On Hazelwood, I had a friend named Nick.  Whenever we got together, we pretty much spent all our time trying to come up with ideas of things to do, and about 90% of the ideas ended up getting us in trouble.

One of my favorite stories is the time that Nick and I decided we wanted to make some extra money.  We got my red wagon and went first to Nick’s garage and then to my garage, picking out the best looking tools from our respective fathers’ workbenches.  We then went door to door down Hazelwood, offering tools for sale and telling our neighbors that we were doing it to raise money for a school project.  The amazing thing is that when we got caught, our parents had to go door to door to buy the tools back, taking the neighbors’ word for how much they had paid for each tool.  Needless to say, by the time our parents were finished buying back all their tools, it cost them a significant amount more than the money Nick and I had raised. 

That experience taught me (and my parents) a lot about our neighbors!

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.

This story relates my first learning experience with money.

One day, the ice cream man came, and my parents were out.  I went inside to find money to buy ice cream, and the first thing I found was a $50 bill.  I grabbed it and ran up the street to buy an ice cream cone.  By the time I caught up, there was a crowd gathered around the truck.  I went up to the window, ordered a cone, and handed the guy the $50 bill.  He laughed and said he didn’t have change for that.  He said I would have to buy more ice cream.  Of course, the crowd was thrilled, because I ended up buying ice cream for about 12 kids!  The ice cream man was able to make change after that, but it was mostly change, so he gave it to me in a full-sized grocery bag.  Not knowing any better, I took the bag back to my house and put it on the dresser in my parents’ room where I had found the $50 bill.  I’m sure they laughed out loud when they came home, found the bag, and asked me what happened.

That was my first lesson about money.  As a six-year-old kid who just wanted ice cream, it didn’t matter how much it cost or how much we had.  All I knew was that if I had money, I could trade it for ice cream.  I can’t really tell you what I learned from that experience, other than that I realized that the money situation was more complicated than I originally thought.

For another story about the ice cream man, check out CottonwoodFarmLonghorns.

I spent the first 8 years of my life living on the corner of Hazelwood and Ashford Parkway in Houston.  It was a great street to live on.  My friends were Nick Baker, Robbie Cooksey, and Bobby Skinner.  We got into lots of trouble together, as will be reflected in the next few posts.

I went to a private school, so my neighborhood friends didn’t go to school with me, but we found plenty of time to hang out anyway.  Our favorite things to do included playing baseball in the cul-de-sac, shooting chinaberries with a slingshot at the “middle street” kids, playing football in my yard, and riding our Bigwheels.

Of course, as we got older, things got more serious, and we started playing “spin the bottle,” “truth or dare,” and other boy-girl games.  Those were good times.  I always wanted to get to kiss Julie Baker, but it never seemed to work out, and I always got stuck with the girls I didn’t like.  C’est la vie, I guess.

I remember that the Miller family always had the best Halloween decorations.  Usually, one of their sons would get on the roof and activate some kind of ghoul or goblin on a rope that would drop out of the darkness on an unsuspecting trick or treater.  They had everything from dry ice smoke to eerie lights to scary sound effects.  It was always a highlight.

Hazelwood was a great street to grow up on.  There was much fodder for “stories,” as you will soon see.

My grandfather was a Captain in the Houston Police Department.   When I was about 6 years old, he gave me a fingerprinting kit for my birthday.  I was playing with it in the yard one day, when the neighborhood bully showed up.  Of course, he spilled the graphite powder (the most important part of the kit), and I can’t tell you how angry I was.  Unfettered rage.  I was on him in an instant.  Tears were flowing like rivers from my eyes.  He was bigger than me, so he soon had pinned me on the ground and was sitting on my chest, holding my hands on the ground.  I was so furious that I couldn’t even comprehend what he was saying.  I don’t know how I knew how to do it, but I lifted my legs up, wrapped my ankles around his face, and pried him off of me in one swift move.  The back of his head hit the ground with a thud.  I immediately jumped on top of him, pounded him in the face a few times, and then, for no known reason, began trying to pull his head off.  I had my hands under his chin and started pulling on his head.  I’m sure it made for quite a comical scene.  Of course, my mother came out the front door after having heard the screaming going on in the yard.  She immediately pulled me off of the bully and sent him home.  Needless to say, it was not pleasant in my house that evening.

In retrospect, I can’t explain why I did what I did.  Perhaps the kid had done other things to me or my friends, and I was fed up.  For some reason, I snapped.  I lost all control and ability to decipher right from wrong.  Ever since that day, I have had a very “long” temper.  I will put up with a lot.  It’s very difficult to get me angry.  I’ll even turn the other cheek several times.  However, once I cross the line, the rage that spews forth makes the Incredible Hulk look like a wuss. 

I was born in Houston, Texas, on January 20, 1970.  For some reason unknown to me, my biological parents didn’t want me.  The best thing that ever happened to me is that my biological mother decided to put me up for adoption. 

I arrived at 12502 Hazelwood Drive on January 22, 1970.  Ready for action.  Mother with bufont hairdo.  Father, a hotshot stockbroker, full of piss and vinegar.  We almost moved to the prestigious Memorial Drive area, but that’s another story.  12502 Hazelwood would do for our purposes.