But for whatever reason, instead of thinking much about my former debate coach and her unfairly prepared kid, the first thing that popped into my head was the image of a friend of mine putting her oldest kid’s head in a urinal and flushing it repeatedly. Ah, good times. But wait, I’m going to get serious here in a minute. Why? Because as I sat with hand upon chin wistfully staring at the ceiling, I remembered something really strange. This teacher (who I liked then, and appreciate even more now) had a picture of her husband and kids on her desk that we would sometimes use to express ourselves artistically. Specifically, we would use a dry erase marker to draw horns and a tail on her husband. Because it was funny. Still is.  And because this teacher was usually fun and easy going and we might have done something like that to anyone foolish enough to put out a personal photo.

Upon discovering our “artwork” this teacher made a comment about how we were terrible, but otherwise didn’t really seem upset. She was certainly not as upset as this one crazy old teacher at my school who had a bad case of shell shock that kicked into overdrive anytime he witnessed a particularly gruesome MURDER BY WATER GUN.

I wouldn’t have given the situation much more thought, but the next day the teacher showed up at school with a big stack of reports that detailed how Middle Eastern immigrants (like her husband) had a higher income and contributed more to society, etc. than the average person born in the United States. Now clearly a nice set of statistics makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over, but all of this from a set of horns and a tail? I mean it’s not like he was Irish and we drew a bottle of beer and made him look drunk. Is there some devil stereotype that I’m unaware of? Because if there is, it should really be used on the Dutch. Those bastards.

My head had grown to full adult size by age 3. Seriously. No, seriously. Oh, and even though I was always the one in trouble, my sister has that same look on her face in most of the photos where she is next to me. Guilty? Well, obviously.

In my experience, there are two types of small towns. There are those, like my hometown that are close to a large city, and then there are those that, outside of other small towns, are fairly isolated.

Having grown up in the first type, I know that living close to a large city is almost the same as living in a suburb. As soon as we were old enough to drive, we would spend afternoons and weekends driving around Austin, going to the movies, and doing just about everything else that kids in Austin did. Nobody could have pointed us out and said that we didn’t belong. For the most part, kids in our town dressed and acted exactly like the kids in Austin. After all, we all shopped at the same stores, and MTV told us how to act like teenagers.

Then, there is the other type of small town. They filmed Children of the Corn in one of these towns. When I was 18, I dated a 19 year old girl from a blip on the map who had moved to Austin for college. During the many times that we visited her parents, I got a pretty good feel for the community. Weekends were filled with festivals, church lunches, dances, and weddings. The local kids were straight out of Footloose, and you could drive all over town and never find central air conditioning. In Texas. General Sherman didn’t say he’d rent out Texas and live in hell for nothing. It’s hot. Humid hot, not that bullshit they call hot in Arizona.

Like you might expect, the locals were a tad suspicious of outsiders, and didn’t mind sharing their opinion when something or someone didn’t quite fit in. I wore a pair of Nike sandals to visit my girlfriend’s relatives one summer weekend, and her young cousins laughed and called me a city slicker. Me? I’ll admit to loving the 24 hour convenience store phenomenon, but I’d spent summers locked outside with nothing but open pasture, and hay bales. Sure, I had a few liberal opinions, but it’s not like I staged a revolt in the middle of Sunday school. Attending a Catholic church after growing up Methodist was strange enough, so I kept my mouth shut and kneeled down with everybody else, while quietly wondering if the priest was speaking English.

The most memorable experience occurred during what was probably the last wedding I attended in the summer of ‘95. A friend of my girlfriend was getting married, and because their graduating class had no more than 23 people, the same group made up every wedding party. So, I’m at this wedding, and as usual, my girlfriend’s father is eyeing me suspiciously, the guys she grew up with are casting nasty glances my way, and I’m standing next to the bar staring at the bottom of my plastic cup. At some point towards the end, I went to change out of my slacks and tie because we were supposed to leave town afterwards. I put on jeans and a polo shirt, pulled on a baseball cap, and went back inside. I was dressed casual. Doesn’t everybody wear jeans and a polo shirt? The cap I was wearing was navy and made by Nike. It had a little white swoosh in the middle. You’ve probably seen them on Tiger Woods.

So, I walk back inside to grab the girl and get the hell out of Bubbaland. She’s standing in a circle of her old friends talking. I walk up and smile at her, and then perform the universal head jerk that indicates a readiness to depart. One of the guys in the group looks me up and down, and asks, “What are you, some kind of gangsta?”

We were lucky enough growing up to have an entire room dedicated to toys. In true nightmare fashion, it had clown wallpaper. My father built shelving into the wall that went all the way to the ceiling on one side of the room. On those shelves were endless green plastic buckets filled with different sets of toys. The little Fisher Price people? Yep, we had ‘em. We also had enough He-Man action figures to launch a full scale invasion of the kitchen.

The room was often described as appearing to have been “hit by a tornado”. My mother (she of Nazi style organization) would appear on the scene towards the end of a long day of kids gone wild, and demand that everything be cleaned up and sorted into individual buckets within the hour. You see, she had labeled every bucket in the place with one of those raised letter labeling guns. It wasn’t enough to simply clean up. No, Man-at-Arms couldn’t be mixed in with the Fisher Price farmer and his wife. Unfortunately, we couldn’t clean up that room in an hour to save our life. So, as the deadline approached, the mother would re-appear and threaten to start dumping buckets out and adding to our mess. Looking back, it seems sort of like a judge fining a guy who couldn’t pay his original ticket, but the crown didn’t accept plea bargains.

By the time I was in high school, we didn’t use the playroom for much, and it had been mostly converted to an extra bedroom. My parents went out of town one weekend, and a couple of friends of mine came over to do some of the things you do when someone’s parents are out of town. So, we locked ourselves in the playroom and smoked enough pot to get an elephant high. Conveniently, we kept our View-Master and slides in a metal can that made a perfect ash collector. I think the clowns on the wall started to dance and mock me, but I can’t be sure. It’s possible that I walked into the kitchen and suddenly declared that my heart had stopped beating. Meanwhile, another friend of mine was busy raiding the leftover ravioli in our refrigerator, and making a trail along the tile floor back to the playroom. Once inside, he fell backwards onto one of the beds, scooped up a massive amount of ravioli, and abruptly jabbed the spoon into the side of his face. (Editors Note: the side of his face did not have a mouth.)

Don’t hurt yourself looking for a lot of meaning in this story. You shouldn’t expect much from a cedar fever suffering Benadryl addict strung out on NoDoz and Cherry Coke.

According to the series description, “In the world of Sweet Pickles, each animal gets into a pickle because of an all too human personality trait”. The stories taught lessons about kindness, sharing, and acceptance. They also warned us about the failings of human nature, and how we often refuse to see in ourselves what is so easily recognizable in others.

All of the books had an illustrated cast of characters inside the front cover, and a town map in the back. The cast and map illustrations were one of my favorite parts of each book. There were twenty-six characters, each representing a different letter of the alphabet. My favorites included Clever Camel, Fearless Fish, Worried Walrus and Yakety Yak.

I think that Sweet Pickles especially appealed to me because I enjoyed feeling that I was part of a world that I could understand. A world that I could hold in my hands. While reading a story, I would find myself constantly turning to the town map to figure out how each tale fit into the larger world of Sweet Pickles.

At one time I probably had the complete collection of books, but only ten remain in my library today. Several of them have the beat up covers and ripped pages that are the hallmark of books that survived my early years. Someday it may be necessary to explain to my own children why someone named “Gerg” has written his name inside so many of the books. In the meantime, maybe I’ll read them again. I might learn something.

My father passed away a month after my eleventh birthday. For a long time, I was afraid that as the years passed, I would slowly forget about him. I mostly remember him in flashes, as if our time together is the memory of a movie I saw only once, a long time ago.

When I became a member of the Methodist Church, I received a standard edition bible with my name on the front in small gold letters. Although I read it a great deal in those days, it now resides on an overstuffed bookshelf in my living room, wedged between other books of similar size and shape. While writing a post for this site the other night, I decided to pull it out to reference several passages.

When I sat down at my desk, I realized that I had accidentally picked up my father’s old bible instead. I can’t remember how it came to be in my possession, but I had never really looked at it before. There was a small sticker on one of the first few pages with his name and our home address. I had forgotten that he used to put those address labels on all of his letters. It struck me that he always used his full name on correspondence, and that I used to practice writing in the same block letters that he would use.

As I turned the pages, I realized that the inside of the bible smelled exactly like he did sitting in church. He must have carried it with him hundreds of times over the years. I’m not sure that I remembered how he smelled before I opened that book, but in those moments, I remembered him more clearly than I have in the sixteen years since he left us. I will probably only lose more memories as the years pass, but it’s comforting to know that some part of him is locked in that book and waiting on my shelf. If I have children of my own one day, I may never be able to tell them who he was, but maybe it will be enough that I can share how it felt to sit with him on those early summer mornings when I was a boy.

One thing that you should know about me is that I think it’s incredibly funny to scare the hell out of people. My neighbors probably think that I beat Nicole regularly since she issues at least one blood curdling scream per week. She has a natural jumpiness that makes her an easy target. It’s probably something that she developed while growing up wondering when the Big One would dump California into the Pacific.

Meanwhile I spent my childhood building a gun arsenal and sneaking around the house like an outlaw. Yes, real guns. Okay, they were actually plastic guns, but they did make a loud popping noise that might have startled a small mammal to death. For some reason we prefer the rifle variety in Texas, but a nice Dirty Harry style handgun is hard to beat.

Not to go too far off topic, but plenty of kids I grew up with had plastic rifles, and that morphed into BB guns, and that led to real rifles. It didn’t happen that way for me, and no doubt partially because I didn’t have anybody around telling me how wonderful guns are. Another likely reason is that one of the few times I got my hands on a BB gun I shot out all the light bulbs in the barn, and then accidentally shot my brother behind the ear while trying to scare the hell out of him with the loud noise. Yes, according to Dr. Phil I was on my way to either becoming a serial killer, or the Governor of Texas.

Getting back to the point, one afternoon when I was a kid, my uncle came over to visit with my mother, and brought his son Clay along. Clay was probably around five or six years old at the time. While they were outside, my brother and I hatched an incredibly evil plan…wah hah hah. Unfortunately it was too complicated, so we went with the one I’m telling you about. After locating our “pop” rifle, we grabbed a bottle of ketchup from the refrigerator and went back to my room. We didn’t know when (or if) Clay would come inside, but we were hoping he would come alone, since most good plans are ruined by parental intervention. A few minutes later, we heard the back door open and assumed it was “the mark” since there weren’t any voices. My brother pulled his shirt up and I poured ketchup on his back. He leaned over to keep it from sliding down and we moved into position. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clay coming down the hallway towards my room. Getting into character, I started yelling at my brother about something that was worth killing him over (like taking too long in the bathroom). When Clay rounded the corner into my room, I pulled the trigger with a loud POP! My brother grunted loudly, and fell over dead. The ketchup ran down his back in perfect low budget horror movie style. My cousin’s terrified gaze moved from the “blood” on my dead brother, to my face, and then to my rifle. This all happened in a split second, and then he was gone, down the hall and out the back door, yelling bloody murder the entire way. Apparently he was crying and screaming when he found our parents, but still managed to spit out that I had killed my brother. Imagine the look on their faces.

Whatever happened after that gets a little fuzzy (and probably involves graphic violence), but all of these years later, every few holidays, my cousin will lean over and whisper, “Remember that time you killed Cody?”

Growing up in the country allows you a lot of freedom you wouldn’t necessarily have in the city. How so? Well, in my case, nobody lived close enough to see what we were doing, and there was nothing but wide open space and opportunity. My younger brother and I managed to get into our share of trouble together. As a team, I devised the plans, and he was responsible for risk assessment. For example, could a person jump a Big Wheel off the end of the porch at high speed, without being killed?

One summer, we developed what I’ve come to remember as the Igloo Sled. It’s probably not common knowledge, but a decent sized Igloo cooler pulled by a John Deere riding lawnmower can make a world class land sled. I can’t be certain where the idea came from, but at some point I realized that my brother could fit in an old cooler we found in the garage. And naturally, I was interested in finding reasons to drive the “racing mower” my parents had purchased for the humdrum task of mowing the lawn.

We attached a rope to the cooler and tied the other end to the back of the lawnmower. It’s possible that we also ripped the lid off and threw it away, but sometimes you have to destroy your parent’s property in order to innovate. At least that’s my theory. Anyway, my brother wedged himself down into the cooler in a sitting position, with his knees in front of him and grabbed hold of the rope for steering. I started off slow at first and gradually picked up speed through our backyard. I cut a corner around the house too close and almost killed him, but it worked! The Igloo Sled worked! Throwing caution to the wind, we raced alongside the quarter mile driveway leading up to our house. Up and down the hills I drove while my brother used the rope to slide left to right. This went on for some time, and our triumph nearly caused me to miss a glint of light that meant someone was turning into the driveway. Jamming the beast into 4th gear, we raced up to the house, parked the mower and walked away, completely innocent.

Unfortunately it was not the lord of the manor, who might have missed the unusual site of two boys and their homemade land sled. No, it was our sister, a spy who curried favor with the Queen by reporting on our activities. She jumped out of the car and marched towards us as we made our way to the safety of the house. “What were you two pulling with that mower?” she inquired. I took a second to ponder the question, and decided to play it cool.

“What mower?”