I played little league like most kids. I got knocked out by a line-drive more than once. My dad was guilty of whacking me with a line-drive. We were playing baseball in our field. My dad asked me to pitch to him. I told him I was scared because I thought he might hit me with the ball. He told me not to be a sissy and pitch the ball. On the first pitch, he hit it right back and it hit me square in the gut. I dropped to the ground and screamed "I TOLD YOU!" I also got smacked on the noggin once during a little league game. I was in the outfield. I liked the outfield. It was as far as you could get from the batter. The distance from the plate reduced the chance of smacked. The batter hit a fly ball. Everyone yelled "HEADS UP!" I'm not sure why people yell that since if you look up, you will get in the face instead of the top of your head. All the yelling from the dugout interrupted my viewing of the game being played next to ours. I looked up and sure enough, the ball hit me in the head. They ran out on the field with smelling salts. Smelling salts don't really smell like salt.

Even with all the pain baseball caused me, I still enjoy watching baseball. I saw the Phillies win the 1980 World Series. My dad made my brother Glen and I stay up late to watch the games. He said it would be another fifty years before they would win the World Series again. He might be right you know. He was right about the kid who wore a T-shirt on picture day. My dad has lots of good sayings. When we played baseball in our front yard, we always got the five acre speech. It's not as famous as some of the one our presidents have given, but it is infamous in our family. Basically we had five acres and my dad would point this out when ever we would hit baseballs toward the house. We only broke one window. Some other Dadisms include, "what's the number for 911?", "There are 8 millions stories in the naked city.", "It's a 5 corncob day.", and "It's all about the benies!"

On Easter one year my parents made my brother and I wear matching green leisure suits. Some years later they got us matching brown suits and brown jogging suits. I really hated those suits. They had this weird fascination with brown for several years. Maybe because it was the Seventies and the economy was like poop. I'm not really sure. I didn't like wearing my Cub Scout uniform either. At least that that thing was blue. I didn't like looking like everyone else. I always laugh at the families that go to Disney World and all were matching clothes. You know they stayed in the same room. Didn't they look at each other before leaving the hotel. (As an interesting footnote, my brother took his family to Disney world and all his kids were dressed the same.)

I remember always wanting to be an astronaut until the Challenger space shuttle blew up. I think the NASA disaster is to my generation as the Kennedy assassination is to the generation before me. You also remember where you were. (Also as a footnote, the attacks on 911 put these other events in perspective.) I wanted to go to space camp. I ending up taking two years of astronomy in college to make up for missing space camp. I calculated the beginning of time by looking at the red shift of different solar systems. I was off by a couple million years but I still got credit. I guess in the grand scheme of things, a couple million years is nothing.

During my grade school years we were left in the care of a woman known as "Re-Re." I believe her actual name was Marie. But to all us kids, she was Re-Re. Re-Re ran what you might call a prison for small children. Her husband, who we will call "Pop-pop" to protect the innocent, was know for his ability to pass wind in the blink of an eye. Sometimes we would sit in the back room and listen to Pop-pop make his music. Some days we did not have time to eat at home and had to eat at Re-re's prison. There were about 50 others cell mates at the big house. If you ate breakfast there you could watch some of these kids blow snots into their cereal. It was so appetizing. Larry was the big man around there. He controlled the place. Larry was nine years old. He had been there for years. There was always a rumor that he was going to junior high and would leave Re-Re's someday. I knew better. Larry would always be there. Even with all the terror at Re-Re's, it did have its good points. During the winter we enjoyed one of the best sledding hills in the area. When I think back to the days of being dropped off at Re-Re's, I have only pleasant memories.

One of the activities we were sent to in elementary school was swimming. We were loaded on school busses and shipped to the local YMCA once a month to learn how to swim. I grew up around the pool so I was put in the group of advanced swimmers. Probably the only advanced class I ever attended during all my school years. We were seen as great warriors going into battle when our advanced group walked by the kids in the shallow end with their water wings. We were water wingless and heading toward THE DEEP END. Our group actually used the diving board. We didn't dive off the board, we jumped off feet first. But we were way cooler than the water wing kids.

All of my report cards had a check in the box for "Needs to improve self-control." I could never sit still, I still can't. I couldn't wait for lunch or recess. During recess we would play Smear the Queer. In today's politically correct world that would be Understand the Heterosexually Challenged. Anyway, that was when you gave the ball to somebody and then beat the piss out of him till you got the ball. It was better for the "queer" if recess was before lunch. If we played after lunch usually the "queer" got to revisit his meal. We also played the game were you tell someone that if their hand is bigger than their face then they have some disease. Then you punched the kid in the hand almost breaking his nose. Don't try this at home kids. In junior high the stakes were raised. Then the wedgies started. I remember some poor kid in gym class got one so hard they ripped his underwear waste band off. Ouch!!

Some other kids underwear was stolen, soaked in water the then flung against the wall. Wet underwear sticks to cement walls better than you might think.

I really miss playing kickball and dodge ball. My friend Thurston could kick a kickball almost six miles. Six miles is just an approximation. It may have just been kicked somewhere deep in the outfield. I was not very good at kickball. I usually got beaned in the head while running to first base. Another fun game we played in grade school was wall ball. We lined ten kids against a brick wall then someone twice your size tried to kill you with a large rubber ball.

I was what you might call "short" in elementary school. In fact I was the second smallest kid in almost every grade I went through. One stormy day when I was in first grade I got blown away by a gusty wind and the bus driver had to run after me. I didn't really grow until college. However, I won almost every limbo contest. I quickly learned to make friends with guys who had giant muscles and tiny brains. They make the best bodyguards. The only kid who was smaller than me throughout school was named David. I often wonder where David is now. He got spanked in junior high and the teacher broke the paddle over his ass. She took him outside the classroom to paddle him. We heard a couple loud whacks. David walked in smiling and rubbing his butt. The teacher came in with a paddle in two pieces. He also got kicked out of a video taping of our class playing famous people. I was George Washington, the father of our nation, and Thurston was Martha my wife. Thurston would do anything for extra credit. David was some Indian chief. Our class was seated in a circle. David was across from me. I was giving my speech on my accomplishments, when I noticed David was picking lint from his bellybutton. I started laughing and could not stop. The teacher screamed at David and he had to leave. I think David was also the kid who ruined a science teacher's day. In science class we were passing around different items from the ocean. A horseshoe crab shell was passed to David. When he got it the teacher asked him what he thought he was holding. David accidentally dropped the shell and it broke into several pieces. He picked it up and said, "A broken horseshoe crab?"

My favorite subject in school was lunch. My fondest memory of lunch was in fifth grade when the whole lunch room was buzzing about the kid in sixth grade who didn't just order double lunch on pizza day, he got triple lunch. We ended that period by watching that kid puke up three pieces of pizza.