We were tired of being just ten so we created a new number... Ten-teen. Had a good sound to it and made us feel so much older and wiser. I’m not really sure it impressed the folks on Birren Avenue. Lots of rolling eyes and sympathetic laughter. But Buttface and Crusty Johnson would not feel the shame, so I stuck with them for a few weeks.

Happy New was the acceptable greeting for a few days but we didn’t feel so happy about it. It’s a long, bitter month for kids who don’t like to bowl or play board games. On New Year’s Eve, we listened to the countdown of the top 100 songs of the previous year…boring and we never stayed awake beyond the 50th song. Normally, a transistor radio belting out cool songs was kinda fun if it was playing at the pool on Saturday afternoon, but in the dark, cold night of New Year’s Eve, it was like a funeral service that never ended.

In June a creepy car slowly rolled to a stop right alongside our homemade ball field. The window rolled down and Squirrely Fremgan stuck his arm out and handed Crusty a beautiful clean mayonnaise jar with the lid tightened down. Crusty asked what it was and Squirrely told him that it was a jar full of cooties and not to open or the entire neighborhood would be infected in an hour. Creepy car sped away. We gently put the jar down on the grass and stared at it in the afternoon sun. Saw nothing. Heard nothing. Wait!  No one has ever actually seen a cootie so it made perfect sense to us. We were approaching the fine age of Ten-teen and were sensing that we had to take a more mature attitude towards our fellow humans, so we carefully buried it until we were forced into war with the kids on Sunnyside Street. We were imagining that cooties would cause a conniption of some degree. No one had seen a real conniption fit either, but what the heck we were willing to cast a spell on kids from Sunnyside Street if a war started. We lived for neighborhood wars!  We buried the weapon in the hedge row about 40 yards from third base. Swore to secrecy and made dang sure we didn’t tell Mike Bornshier. . He , in a weak moment, spilled the beans about us previously about some other genius idea we created. We couldn’t really blame him... it was a totally different kind of genius idea. 

It was in January that cursed month that war had spontaneously started. I think it was a snowball striking the back of a Sunnyside kid whose sister was a mean little troll in our opinion. War was upon us within minutes. Snowball fury erupted, and we were outnumbered. There is nothing more humiliating than to be clobbered in a snowball war. Drastic measures had to be taken. Enter the crystal-clear mayonnaise jar! We called it a temporary truce and I held the jar high above my head and announced its contents in the loudest voice possible. We gave them a reasonable warning but were laughed at. At that point, I hurled the cootie jar into their midst. It broke to pieces like a grenade. They all scrambled back to their homes. That’s when we actually, for the first time, saw conniption fits. It wasn’t pretty! 

Nothing else to write about that January.

Hug your kids. Love your neighbor.
Watch out for cooties!
Nelly