The Unwritten Code

So I read a friend’s blog yesterday.  He is very funny, and he inspires me.  In one post he broke the code.  There is an unspoken rule among siblings to NEVER tell.  Not even on yourself.  It is the worst kind of betrayal.  I imagine after you are a certain age, your parents simply do not care.  Family stories become legends and it doesn’t matter what you say, no one will believe you anyway.  I assumed I have not reached that age, because I am technically still grounded.  My dad said at the top of his lungs once, “YOU ARE GROUNDED UNTIL YOU ARE FIFTY-TWO”, and I’m not yet fifty-two.  But I’m going to tell a few things because they make me laugh, and I have to get them off my chest.

Dad tied an old sheet up in a tree for three of the five of us.  It was our “hammock”.  My two brothers and I would sit up there high above our world in the breeze and plot our adventures like three little pirates.  Woe to the interloper who disrupted our plans!  He might be pelted with crabapples picked from the nearest branches, or chased off by whooping braves!  You just never knew. 

Until one crisp autumn day after a lot of heat and rain, the sheet simply split.  Out tumbled the boys.  I, the older and quicker, remained high in the tree.  I was just clinging to the nearest branch like an old cat.  Dan landed on Lin, his two front teeth buried in Lin’s head.  Far below me, they rolled off each other and each ran away.  “MOTHER!  HE LANDED ON ME!”  and “MOMMMMMM!  I’M BLEEDING!”  They put Dan’s teeth back in his head, by the way.

And my two little brothers told mother I had done the unthinkable.  They still think I untied the hammock.  And nothing I say will convince them that all the sun, rain, wind, and temperature change along with the weight of the three of us split an old cotton sheet.  Because I stayed in the tree.  But it comes up from time to time.  And it always ends the same way.  The three of us laughing hysterically.

But here is something I did do.  My parents 69 Mustang quit one day.  It just wouldn’t go.  And they thought Dan had put his juice from his sippy cup in the gas tank.  He told them he did.  He WANTED to.  But I stopped him.  I stopped him by dropping in a Bic pen and wadding up the sheets from a small spiral notepad and shoving them in the hole where the gas goes.  And that is where my adventurous life of crimes against my parents began.