30th Birthday Think Back: Part 2 "5 to 10"

Okay, it’s starting to come back to me now.

The way to organize this stuff is to think back to what grade I was in when I was 5 to 10. I think that this layout will work for this entry. Let me take you through the years.

I’m pretty sure that I started Kindergarten when I was 5. My teachers were Mrs. Little and Miss. Robinson. I remember taking a pair of scissors and cutting a little bit of my hair. Later that day Mrs. Little found the snippet of hair and asked who did it. I was too scared to confess so it remained a mystery… until this very day! The punishment of not fessing up? Baldness.

I also remember getting the little red boxes of raisins in my lunch. To this day, Sun Maid raisins remind me of those crazy Kindergarten days. Looking at the new version of the boxes, Sun Maid seems to have gotten a lot sexier as the years went by. What, she makes raisins AND does yoga?! She sure did make good raisins.

1st grade lead to Mrs. Saunders’ class. More of the same mind molding as in Kindergarten. I remember learning the months of the year.

2^nd grade was good, with Mrs. Anderson. But the low light of that year was when I peed my pants. Bladder control seems to be a theme for me. That day, I needed to pee and I asked the teacher. She told me to wait until lunch, which was nearly 20 minutes away. I started dancing around in the back of the class. Finally, when she said that I could go to the bathroom I announced, “I already did.” She rushed to the back of the room and gave me paper towels to dry off. I don’t remember the other kids being too means about it. Maybe they were too little to understand cruelty towards a fellow classmate. But boy, did Mrs. Anderson feel bad about it. Not as bad as me, though, cause, you know, I peed my pants.

One of my favorite times at school was recess. We always played soccer. This is around the time that people knew me by my childhood nickname: “Bryce’s little brother.” I even remember when some older kids would ask me who I was and I’d simply say that I was, “Bryce’s little brother”. I’m pretty sure that this was good for me; it got me into the soccer games and people seemed to have a little more respect for me as the years went by, knowing that I could probably turn into some kind of athlete like Bryce. A few years later and Bryce was in Junior High, so I was able to eventually get my old name back.

I can’t forget the brief period when I wore red bandannas around my neck. I wore them to school and people made fun of me, but I thought it was cool. My dad called it my “trademark”, like Jughead with his crown. I think it was my friend Reagan who told me I looked like weirdo and that was that. I must have been 8 or 9 in that time. At least I didn’t wear a crown.

When I was 6, Barry was born. I remember going to the Stony Plain hospital to see mom and my new little brother. Barry was actually the first baby that I was ever allowed to hold.

At home, Dad eventually put up a ghetto basketball net onto our garage. I am amazed that that thing held on for so long. We played there a lot. As mentioned in a previous entry, I also played a lot of street hockey. Sometimes Bryce would join me, or a neighbor or two, but other times I just played out there alone. After shooting the ball around over and over I decided to dress up in goalie pads and flick the ball at myself. I was awesome! I was always either stopping a big shot or scoring a big goal!

I remember begging dad to play catch with the football. He usually agreed. Those were good times.

My football “career” started around this time. I must have been 9. I was a backup for my first game, but the starter (Brent) was late to the game so I had to go in. I was so nervous that as I lined up on the line I got a nose bled. I played through it until the series was over. That’s how tough I was back then. Crazy tough!

Who could forget the time we went on holidays to BC and I was supposed to be watching Barry when he tripped and fell on his bottle. Dad rushed him to the emergency with a pretty serious cut under his lip. I felt so bad that I sat on the bed and cried, thinking that Barry’s life was in jeopardy from the way he was screaming in pain. Barry has the scar to prove it. Years later, I got an elbow to the face in the high school basketball game. My tooth went through my lip. Now I have a scar above my lip so that Barry doesn’t feel too bad about the one below his lip. At least, that was the plan anyways;)

Ah, Barry. Bryce and I worked him hard like any good brother would. We would “time” Barry with our imaginary watches to see how fast he could get us food from the kitchen. We just wanted food and were too lazy to get it. Barry “broke his record” every single time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Bryce was probably my main nemesis during that time. He made me scream at him so loud that the fire alarm went off. He also got me so angry that I swore for the first time. I called him an a—hole and I think that he told mom and dad. That was lame of him.

Bryce would baby-sit me on Wednesday nights and we would watch Unsolved Mysteries. I would go to

bed sweating to death, sure that the killer was going to come into my room and dispose of me. He never did show up, and every week I refused to learn my lesson by watching it again and again.

What can I say? There are a lot of memories. I think that the 5 to 10 years were filled with sports and good times for most of the time. If I relate my life to Kevin Arnold’s of The Wonder Years, which I did a lot back in those days, these were the innocent days of playing in the yard with Paul Pfeiffer. Little did I know that life would get much more complicated in the next 5 years.