Mike’s Memory Monday Minutes #6

That Roo-und My Night

At twelve I started to notice girls. But I wasn’t interested enough to spend time with them, talk to them, or anything really. I still liked my football, my forts, and friends too much to really give a crap about girls (that stayed with me ’til I was about eighteen).

It was nice to have Robert as a friend. We had lots of fun watching movies and spending the night at each other’s house. I smoked my first cigarette with Robert. I gagged and coughed for twenty minutes straight and let Robert be the designated smoker from then on.

Ryan and I did lots of cool things when we were kids. We played army wearing some of his dad’s camouflage jackets and pants while jumping over ditches, hiding in the woods, and not making it across the ditch and falling in – contracting scabies. Yes, I had a good childhood.

I don’t know what I did on this particular evening to earn such a random reaction from Kelly (though I had started calling him Hamster around this time, Ham for short). As for the hit by an eight-year-old brother, I’m sure it didn’t hurt at all. I was most likely pretty pissed off. Why the heck did my ten-year-old brother Dan take Kelly’s side and gang up on me? The jerk finally let out the family secret about me being adopted. I was hurt, to the core. I was modest when I said it “roo-und my night.”

The next morning at breakfast I had a frank conversation with my mother, only to find out that it was all a lie. I suspected the lie all night long – with only a small, nagging percent believing it could be true. I paid Dan back at breakfast by eating two bites from his bowl of cereal when he wasn’t looking. And one when he was. That’s how I rolled back in the day.