My mom and dad had a sky-blue Ford LTD when I was young. The car by today’s standards was a tank. It had two huge bench seats and a V-8 engine. I remember playing in the front yard of our house in Tucson and walking past the car with a key (or a nail – I don’t exactly remember) and scratching a line in the paint all the way down the car. At the time my 5-year-old brain thought it was the thing to do and I never gave it a second thought. I’m sure my parents wondered where it came from.
Mom: 45 years later, I am confessing that it was me and for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. You should probably sit down, because I’ve got other things to confess.
When my sister was potty training, you blamed her for peeing in a plush toy instead of going in the potty. It was me; I just didn’t want to go inside and interrupt my play time in the back yard.
A few years later Julie and I got caught by a cop playing in a construction site at the end of our street. He wanted to talk with our parents so he followed us as we rode our bikes down our street and I skipped our house and went straight to Julie’s. It was my luck that the cop asked Julie’s mom to talk to you and she didn’t.
There’s a lot more.
We played in the desert on the other side of the freeway and explored the camps made by the homeless people. We were chased away by someone who was mad that we were jumping on the mattress that they had dragged under a tree. We ran along the busy freeway and – this one is bad, I’m afraid – we often ran alongside the moving train, trying to jump on the empty cars. You should probably ask my sister about this one; she’s got a few stories of her own.
One time at Los Niños Park, my friend Jaime climbed a pine tree while I stood at the bottom. He was trying to climb to the top of this two-story-tall tree. I watched as he slipped and fell all the way to the ground, landing on his back. I stood over him looking at his lifeless body. He wasn’t awake and he wasn’t breathing. Eventually he took a giant breath and sat up. Too shocked to say anything, I just stood there watching him. He got up and staggered around for a bit and then we carried on. We never mentioned it again.
Jaime also had a BB gun. We would often take the BB gun to the desert and play our version of war. We would run and he would shoot. I took a BB to the back of my leg and it broke the skin. Jamie begged me to keep it quiet. He was already in trouble for shooting his siblings, which is a story for another time. I knew better than to tell my mom for fear that she wouldn’t let me play with Jaime anymore. I nursed my BB wound in silence. I still have the scar.
Lots of trouble was had when playing with Jaime. We pushed our bikes under the fence in Lochiel and played in Mexico. We tied a rope on his waist and dropped him down old abandoned wells. We broke into the old Lochiel Schoolhouse and played. (Sorry, German.) We nearly killed our siblings more than once. Mom, you know about the rock to Tammie’s head because there was too much blood to cover that one up. You probably don’t know about us tying the old bed frame to ropes and swinging Jaime’s 5-year-old brother from the tree. We pushed it so high that the rope came undone and he fell at least 15 feet to the ground. The worst part is that he was tangled up in an old rusty bed frame.
I have many more things to confess, but in the interest of space I’ll finish with one that I feel the worst about. When I was a teenager, we would go to the first gate of the bird sanctuary, where the donation box was, and steal money from the box. A friend of mine was skilled in the art of bending wire and pulling bills from the slot. We would take our ill-gotten gains and buy cheap beer.
There, I said it.
I want you all to know that my life of crime is over and now I spend my time giving back to the community. I hope I have paid back tenfold and ask for forgiveness. I also want to let you know that the kids in my story are all alive and doing well.
Cassina Farley can be contacted at cassinaandzachfarley@msn.com.