Friday, January 06, 2006

Pain In The Ass

I've always been a pain in the ass. I never conformed to expectations. If you say black, I'll say white. I believe this came from spending too much time on my own.

My father was in the army, so we moved around quite a bit. He;s from very, very, very small town in the Pennsylvania hills. My mother is Austrian from the Salzburg area (think Sound of Music.) My mother's grand-mother lived in a 500 year old multi-family farm house. The walls were 2 feet thick. Her apartment was on the second floor, no indoor plumbing, only the kitchen heated by a castiron wood stove. As you enter the apartment, you enter the kitchen. Then, you go through a door into the sitting room. Through the next door was the big bedroom. Through the last door at the back was the small bedroom. The rooms were attached to each other by thick doors. Each door had a lock.

We were at my great-grandmothers apartment once when I was four. I was playing in the middle bedroom. No one was in the back bedroom. All of the adults were in the sitting room, drinking, smoking and having a grand old time. I was the only child there.

I closed the door between the sitting room and the bedroom. No one paid me any attention. I flipped the lock on the door. No one heard. Oh, did I mention the spare bottles of Scnapps were kept in the back bedroom?

They tried to open the door. They were out of booze. It was locked and I couldn't remember how to unlock it. There was a great deal of yelling. Panic. Outrage. Instructions were screamed at me. I was flustered. This went on for about a half hour. I just couldn't unlock the door.

My great-uncle had a brainstorm. He went down and got the ladder. He had remembered that the window in the bedroom had been left open. He put the ladder against the wall outside the bedroom and climbed up. He rose above the level of the windowsill. He put one leg over the sill and into the room.

I flipped the lock on the door as I looked at him with a big grin on my face. He nearly feel back out the window he was laughing so hard.

Needless to say, my mother was not amused. I may have gotten into a bit of trouble in my day.

2 comments:

  1. Haha, pain in the ass? No, more like little precious. I mean, come on, what were you supposed to do. They were not entertaining you. So you went ahead and entertained yourself. I call it positively resourceful.

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  2. I was bored alot, then, as a child. My parents once left me to my own devices, so I played gas station with their car. I understand it's not easy getting sand out of a gas tank.

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