Boys…dance contests and cheek pinching!

In Woodgate Court there was a boy named Mike Harper…his father drove the Frito Lay truck…and that truck was always home base whenever we played hide and seek. I don’t remember much about Mike….but his father is the single reason I will visibly flinch if a hand gets close to my cheek. Every single day whenever he would see me he would lean over and pinch my cheeks… HARD…and he would always smile and laugh at me when I scowled. I am convinced that if the bumper on the Frito Lay truck was not the perfect size for an 8 year old butt to sit on after a long game of hide and seek, I would have told him what I really thought about his cheek pinching. But alas that truck was in the perfect spot for home base and the bumper was just the right size so I kept my yap shut!

The Deleans were two boys that lived about five townhouses away from Mike Harper… kitty corner to my house. Their parents were kind of caught in the Disco era…real flashy and sassy. I remember a few times she had us over for a dance contest and me and Danny the younger of the brothers danced our butts off and won. I am certain this is where my obsession for dancing began. Danny was a quiet sort… and was always willing to play house with me. Our favorite hiding spot was behind his bushes in front of his house and we would sit there for hours coloring and talking. It was behind those bushes I got my first kiss from him… which weirded both of us out and we both quickly decided that playing house was fine but kissing was not really in the cards for us.

In between the Harpers and the Delean’s there was a family that was reeeaaaalllly hippified. When you walked into their house there were all these purple lights and she had plants everywhere and it always smelled funny. There was a younger boy that lived there, he was maybe 5 years old and one night he set the house on fire because he was playing with matches. After the fire they brought all the neighborhood kids through the house to show us what can happen when you play with matches and it scared us enough to make us steer clear of flame for the next 10 years. I remember walking through the charred inside of the house and just wincing trying to imagine how much trouble I would have gotten in by my father if I had burned the house down and frankly I was actually a little surprised that boy was still alive after doing that.
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Questions for the day:

• Did you ever have any family members or people around you that would pinch your cheeks or do some annoying thing every time you saw them?

• Where there any people in your neighborhood that were “characters” and stood out for some reason?

• Who was your first kiss?

• Did you play house or school or pretend and if so who played with you?

• Where was your favorite hiding spot as a kid?

Of course you don’t have to answer all of them or any of them for that matter… but if any of them made you think… I’d love for you to capture those thoughts so you have them to share… because they are worth being heard !