Sputterpub's Blog

When I was 12, we finally managed a good fort.

In case you haven’t noticed or don’t remember, kids want forts. I’m sure they appreciate the bedroom provided by parents, or they would if they thought about it and imagined doing without, but every kid longs for a little place to gather with a select group of buddies, off-limits to adults and other outsiders.

We did what we could with blankets over tables, but that was about as fort-satisfying as a cough drop instead of candy. We found some “caves” eroded out of the clayey mesa behind the new high school, but they all lacked depth and the good ones lacked privacy.

The summer after seventh grade, however, we wandered onto the edges of the Rains estate. They had more property than they minded, to the northwest of our neighborhood just beyond the grove of lemon trees, and I and my gang of about six took over a little outbuilding.

It must have once served as some sort of barn or stable. It was made of old wood, had unglazed windows through which we entered and a rusted-shut door we never managed to open and a partial loft-with-ladder. There was a big pile of empty burlap bags in what was probably once a tack room; I remember we used them to sweep the inches of dirt and dust around and to partially upholster the space.

I think we only used it that summer. We’d meet there most mornings and figure out what we were up to. Like other kids of the area and the time, we were well-bolstered with tetanus shots and quite cavalier about the protruding rusty spikes and nails we encountered so often.

We never got caught but by the time school started again we got into flirting and dating and sports and running for school office. I’m pretty sure younger kids then found the fort and made it their own. I hope so.

   When I was 12 I wore my most ambitious Halloween costume, and it took no great skill to create. It was the October 31 of 7^th grade, and my friend Gwennie Cebulski and I went as a pair of dice. Lucky seven. We made our outfits out of cardboard boxes worn like 3-D sandwich boards. We covered them with old sheets and used Sharpies (then called Magic Markers, but just as indelible) to create the dots. One of us bore three on front and the other showed four.

We trick-or-treated (tricked-or-treated?) in her neighborhood, near our junior high. That was also where Steve M lived, hyperactive tormentor/buddy of mine (Detention – August 5). So I guess I wasn’t all that surprised when he shot at us with his BB gun, from his bedroom window. A pellet got me on the outer right thigh, below the cumbersome costume. It made a bruise.

It was okay for me to be out trick-or-treating with Gwennie. In fact I’d been doing it on my own for at least three years, counting from the first Halloween in Chula Vista.

That was the thing about old Halloween. It wasn’t really about acquiring candy. It was the one night a year when we kids got to cruise the streets without adult supervision. There were so many of us that we were all safe. The biggest threat we had to contend with was the fat red-haired kid a block away, the one who climbed up on his own roof and waited to lob raw eggs at us. We figured out how to mostly avoid him, just fine.

So don’t give me stories about razor blades in apples and arsenic in Snickers (don’t give me Snickers anyway). And don’t let me catch you dropping your kids off at a mall. If they’re all under age 8 you have a duty to escort them from a distance, ready to step in if they need guidance about costumes or courtesy or curbs. But as soon as they are old enough to ride a bicycle, gather them together with other kids and permit them, for that night, to rule the streets.

When I was 11 or maybe 12, at a family dinner that was probably Thanksgiving, I engaged in a dangerous act of safety. It creeps me out to this day, just like imagining that the bannister down which I’m sliding has turned into a razor blade … Yech.

We were living in Chula Vista. We were using the family room as a dining room. When I look back on that floor plan and see the pass-through window above the kitchen sink, I understand that the architects intended a dining room table would sit in that part of the living room, between the wall to the kitchen and the sliding door out to the back patio and yard. They designed the room to the left of the big living room for the TV and family activities. But we never used the house that way. We mostly ate in the kitchen, by the window to the front of the place. We made the table big in the family room when we had feasts.

So we were feasting. Mom had cooked and Dad was getting ready to carve (for an engineer and craftsman he never settled into good carving habits, but he spawned two excellent carvers in my brothers his sons), when he asked me, his eldest child, to fetch the sharp knife.

I’d been taught the correct way to present a knife. So I went into the kitchen, acquired the tool, and marched back to the family-room/dining area with the blade aimed at my own chest. I simply made the whole walk with the knife handle in the polite, recipient-friendly position.

My dad freaked out. He rose from his seat in one smooth swoop, removed the knife from my hand and let his body drop back into his armchair and said “What the heck were you doing?!”

I goggled at him.

“Mar! You never walk with a knife that way!”

“But it’s the …”

“Think of it: just imagine what would have happened if you had tripped.”

I understood the phrase “staggers the imagination” then, because that’s what my imagination did. Still does. Oooh.

Watch out for safety. It’s often inconvenient, at best.