Tagged. Like a little bitch.

As decreed by the Sweat O' The Arm, I must relay to you Six Weird Things From My Childhood, broken up into two parts.

If I can think of six things, that will be a victory in itself.

Why I Hate Model Rockets (Sort Of).
When I was four, living in the wilds of Passaic, the family took an excursion out to Bradlee's for some fun family shopping time. I remember wearing a little yellow gingham shirt that had snap buttons in the front and pictures of cowboys and Indians all over it. My parents, who wanted to look at various housewares, tasked my brother to watch over me while they went to the other side of the store. My brother begrudgingly took my hand and we started walking towards the toy section.

After about fifteen seconds of walking, my bro decided that he was tired of me tagging along. "I want to go look at the model rockets," he said. "You can't come." He then turned me around and nudged me back in the direction we came, and told me to go with our parents.

Four years old, I was.

My parents? Not in the place I'd left them. How silly of them.

I turned back around to go back to my brother. He wasn't where I'd left him, either.

Of course, my little four-year-old mind that amazingly held on to the memory of the yellow gingham cowboys and Indians shirt for retrieval twenty-five years later, quickly deduced that my family had obviously abandoned me.

I ended up sitting on the curb in front of the store, bawling. My parents and brother finally found me out there. We went home. I got the first spanking of my life.

My brother and I both got the belt, wielded by our father, although Mom did protest mightily. However, that seemed to make it sting more.

The weird thing about this? I distinctly remember thinking, as the lashes came, that it was horribly unfair for me to get a beating. After all, I was supposed to follow my much older (and supposedly wiser) brother. I mean, come on; I was fuckin' four!

After that, I made it my life's work to become an ever-present nuisance in my brother's life to get him back. Still working on that one.

And that is why I (sort of) hate model rockets. Nah, I still like them (how can I not, what with the whole "model" and the whole "rocket" thing?). It's bitch-ass beatings I don't deserve that I hate.

My Cousin, the Hero.
Within that same year, my Mom and I travelled to the Philippines (one of the resulting pictures is up in the top right corner of this page). This was the first time meeting a lot of my cousins, in particular my cousin Jay, who is less than a year younger than I am.

We were sitting on the edge of a duck pond on my aunt's property, when I leaned back too far, and fell in. Since it was a little duck pond, and very shallow, it was as if I was just sitting in a puddle of water; I could have easily stood up and walked out.

Jay, however, became very alarmed. He jumped up, and declared, "I'll save you!" (which is remarkable, considering English was not his first language,) and leaped into the pond after me. He ended up landing on his feet, then plopping on his behind in the water next to me.

There we sat, our asses soaked, looking at each other, dumbfounded. Of course, at any moment, we could have stood up and walked out, but we sat there and cried until our moms extracted us from the scary four inches of water.

Yes, we were in Deebo's duck pond, sweating like slaves... and only our Mamas could get us out!

For some reason, our moms still love telling that story to anyone and everyone who will listen.

Keeping the Sabbath Holy...and Refreshing!
Summertime Saturday mornings in Passaic meant I got my Dad to pull the kiddie pool out of the garage and set it up on the front lawn so I would stay occupied while he did yard work.

The pool was always set up by mid-morning so I could enjoy the outdoors before it got too hot. This always happened to coincide with the morning service at the synagogue down the street from my house.

Every Saturday, a parade of families dressed in their best walked past the front of my house. Many, if not all of the adults would smile and wave, so I made it my job to stand up in the pool whenever someone would go by to greet everyone. My father, momentarily pausing his landscaping efforts once in a while to make sure I hadn't either drowned or been abducted, found this mildly amusing.

All the kids my age looked royally pissed that they couldn't be enjoying sweet kiddie pool freedom like I was. I felt genuinely bad about this until I heard one of the parents chastise a whining little boy, "What are you complaining about? You have one just like it at home!" I always offered for the kids to come and play in my yard, but the parents always politely declined, as they were on their way home from Temple, and their children weren't wearing their bathing suits. This seemed to make those kids even more pissed.

I remember once I asked my Mom what going to "Temple" was. She explained to me that for Jewish families, it was like what going to church on Sundays was for us Catholics. I also asked her what the difference was between being Jewish and being Catholic, and she said that there wasn't really any big difference, because we were "all people" (got to love my free-thinking Mom!). However, she also said something about how Jesus played a different role in our church (why she was humoring me with mini religion lessons, I'll never know).

I came to feel bad for those poor Jewish kids though. I concluded that their God was a crappier planner because he insisted they had to show up for Temple during the all-important Saturday Kiddie Pool and/or Cartoon Block. How sad for them.

Part Two, tomorrow (hopefully).