Odd Things That Happened During My Childhood

Once at the dinner table, someone was pouring milk into a glass and a piece of gum wrapped in soggy paper towel splashed out of the container.

Between third and fifth grade I waited for the bus in front of a XXX movie theater every day.

There was a peanut butter smear on the front of my bedroom door for five years (I know because I wiped it there). It never got moldy.

On the 4^th of July there used to be a big party at the pool of the apartment building where we lived. Every year someone would grease up a watermelon with Vaseline and then throw it in the deep end and we would drown each other trying to “rescue” it.

There was a rumor that Andy Applebaum got his lip stuck in the elevator door which I believed until I was about 30 when I had the (sudden) realization (in a crowded elevator) that the kids only said that because Andy had really big lips.

On the way home from a party one night my mom made my stepdad sit in the way back seat of the stationwagon because he was drunk, and he opened an umbrella and tried to hold it over his head to hide his cigarette. When my mom said, Are you smoking? He (in a small space jammed with kids) said “Good Question, and my answer is No”.