Burning off steam...

One night, at a time significantly beyond the hour at which I and my brothers, Mark and Jim, were supposed to have been sleeping, we were instead raising Cain; one of my step-father's many clever phrases for doing that which you were not supposed to do. Whatever we were playing at or arguing about or throwing back and forth or tooting on or dismantling at the time has long since been forgotten, but it must have been something interesting to have included all three of us.

You see, being only six months apart, my step-brother, Jim, and I shared a room. It wasn't unusual for us both to be called on the carpet after bedtime. If either one of us was either not sleepy or in the mood for mayhem, the other really had no choice but to be pulled into the fun and the subsequent punishment. Mark, being older by two years, had his own room down the hall. For him to be pulled into the mix meant that this was no ordinary shenanigans. Since I don't recall what we were up to at the time, I'll make something up.

So there we were, playing monkey-in-the-middle with some of Dad's fissionable material. I'm pretty sure it was a baseball-sized chunk of strontium 90, but Mark remembers it as being uranium 238. I was in the middle, of course. Jim and Mark were both active, sports types, and as such were quite adept at throwing, catching, and the basics of ridicule. For my part, the countless hours I had spent with my nose buried in books were paying off as I jumped up and down, flailing at but failing to catch each successive throw, and complaining that it wasn't fair with a fairly impressive vocabulary for a six year old.

But, as often happens when kids get caught fooling with their father's radioactive isotopes, we were hauled up short by a shout from downstairs. Dad was mad. "Put that down in a safe, lead-lined container, and get back to bed!" This being the third time he'd yelled up at us that night, we knew he meant it. So, being as rational as the next six, six, and eight year old you might meet, we kept at it a bit longer.

We lived, eight of us, in a rather old house. I think it was built in the 1920's, but I'm not sure (and I'm too lazy to check). Being an old house, the floors creaked whenever you so much as thought about walking on them. Sneaking around at night without making noise was simply impossible, yet somehow Dad could just appear anywhere he wanted in the house without making a sound. So, there we were, out of bed and misbehaving, when suddenly there he was, right in the middle of it.

"That's it. You boys have that much energy, let's give you an opportunity to burn it off. Come with me."

We followed quietly. Not frightened really, but worried. The normal consequence of the kind of behavior we'd been engaging in was a good spanking, some yelling, maybe a bit of both. But a chance to burn off some energy? We had no idea what that meant, but we were each quite certain it wouldn't be good. Mark, being the eldest and most rooted in the way things actually work, assumed it meant we'd be pressed into service cleaning the house or some such menial activity for a few hours. It was a reasonable assumption, as this would have served well both as a punishment and as a way to tire us out and burn that excess energy off. It also would have served a useful purpose; that of cleaning the house. Yes, Mark's was a reasonable assumption, but it was wrong.

Jim, being the more optimistic of the three of us, thought that perhaps Dad was about to challenge us all to an impromptu game of touch football in the backyard. Never mind that it was dark out and that we had no real lights for the backyard back then. Forget that we had never once played touch football with Dad up until that day (nor have we since). Given all the possible options Jim's brain presented, this one was the most fun, and so he settled on it, and began planning how to ensure that Dad picked him for Dad's team. Sadly, Jim also turned out to be wrong.

If Mark was the most realistic of the three of us and Jim the most optimistic, then I was the most fanciful. My imagination wasn't quite so tethered in reality as Mark's, nor quite so thoroughly ensconced in rose-colored glass as Jim's. Mine was shaped by a simple, overwhelming, and deep-rooted belief that life was pretty much the way they depicted it on TV and in movies. And so it was that as Dad led us downstairs, I imagined that our ultimate destination was the basement, where we would spend the hours until dawn shoveling coal into the rusty, monolithic blast-furnace that crouched at it's center, waiting to devour our childish joy along with shovelful after shovelful of jet black coal. Never mind that our furnace ran on oil, and was a boxy, pale-green affair that would frighten no one.

As you might have guessed, I was also wrong. We all were. Dad didn't take us downstairs and present us with mops, brooms, pails, and dust-rags; he didn't grab a football and call us into a huddle in the backyard; he didn't drag us kicking and screaming into the searing, sepulchral dark of our basement. No, he took us out onto the front porch and into the cool night air of an Upstate New York fall.

"You boys have so much energy, how about you run it off?"

"Wha??"

"Quiet. I want you to run around the block right now."

"But we're in our pajamas..."

"Now! Get, before I lose my temper!"

And off we ran. At first I think we thought he'd call us back, but once we turned the first corner, I think it dawned on us that he meant to have us actually circumnavigate the block. It's important to point out here that this was a reasonably small town and a reasonably quiet neighborhood. In fact, during most of the time my family lived there (and my parents remain there to this day) about the only thing that ever seemed to cause any problem or present any real danger to anyone was our family. So, while it might seem like a very foolish thing to do when viewed through a lens of today's world and views, it was a harmless, reasonable solution to the problem of three boys with energy to burn at bedtime.

And so we ran. Once we realized that this was our punishment, we got over being scared as to our fate and began to enjoy this strange romp around the neighborhood. We'd never done anything like it in our lives, and though we didn't know it at the time, we never would again. We ran and skipped and laughed. We ran so fast that our slippers flew off, and we had to go back and slip into them again and again. At the second corner, we decided to cut the corner and run across the front lawn. Apparently, people doing this was something the owner was trying to discourage, because at roughly the half way point across the lawn we simultaneously flipped in midair and fell flat on our backs. Startled and still laughing we climbed back to our feet and felt just there at about waist high for kids our size... a thin wire stretched from the corner of the house to a pipe driven in the ground at the corner of the lot. Mark and I stepped carefully over it and headed off down the sidewalk. Jim, who thought flipping over the wire had been a riot, took a few steps back and ran straight at it again. Apparently, it was just as funny the second time.

We made it the rest of the way around the block without incident. When we ran up to our own front porch again, winded, but sporting huge smiles, Dad said, "Now get to bed, and I'd better not hear another peep out of you." He sounded stern, but despite the darkness there on the front steps I could have sworn he was smiling too.