Food Nazis: Kelli’s perspective

Growing up, eating was almost frowned upon for my brothers and me. When we were allowed to eat, the food wasn't very appetizing.

For breakfast we were allowed to have either cereal or a Pop Tart. The cereal never contained sugar. We were allowed Corn Flakes, not Frosted Flakes. Mini Wheats, not Frosted Mini Wheats. We had every flavor of Chex and the most disgusting of all, Kix. When we were allowed a Pop Tart, which was only on the weekends, they were the unfrosted kind.

Lunch at our house was just as bad. My mother made us bologna and ketchup sandwiches. She made smiley faces in the ketchup as if it would make bologna taste good. It didn't.

Dinner wasn't always terrible, but my mother did make quite a few dishes that were not very good. She made Grub a lot. It consisted of scrambled hamburger and baked beans. The state should have removed us from the home for that one.

Even drinks in our house were controlled.

At breakfast we were told to "just drink the rest of the milk in your cereal.” 

At lunch we were allowed watered down Kool-Aid.

Dinner was always milk. Never chocolate or coffee milk. Just plain, white milk.

In between meals we could only have "ice water". Ice water was just tap water in an empty milk jug that my parents kept in the fridge. In the summer we were not allowed to go indoors to get a drink. We were told to "drink from the hose".

Snacks were allowed, which sounds good in theory until you know the nature of the snacks. Our snacks were always timed. We were allowed to have a piece of fruit everyday at exactly 3:00 PM.

After dinner we were allowed two generic Oreos.

We were also allowed a bedtime snack two nights a week. It was always served at 8:00 PM exactly and it was always unsalted peanuts. What kid really wants unsalted peanuts?

All this sounds bad but my parent's made it worse. When I opened the fridge to get my refreshing "ice water" I would see their two-liter bottle of Coke.

When I opened the fridge to get my plum at 3:00 PM I would see my mother’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

When we were eating our unsalted peanuts, all we could hear was their popcorn popping in the popper.

Hypocrites.

One more thing:

Chewing or possessing gum by the children was a punishable offense.

My parents were food Nazis. I am much more lenient with my own children.

Poltergeists and house fires: Matt’s perspective

It shouldn’t be surprising that Kelli’s two most terrifying moments from her childhood are moments that I remember well, and both scared the hell out of me, too.

The incident involving Poltergeist is almost too good to believe.

First, the reason why my parents felt that Poltergeist was a suitable Saturday night movie for children ages 6-10 is beyond me. But it was also not the first time that my parents’ ability to discern appropriate content for small children came into question.

Before the ripe old age of ten, I was also permitted to watch The Exorcist, The Omen, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jaws. Thankfully, I was never been as frightened by horror films as my siblings were, though The Exorcist admittedly scared the hell out of me.

Second, the fact that our dog just happened to fall asleep in our closet on the night we watched that particular film, and that it also happened to be the night that we left the light on in the closet seems too impossibly coincidental to believe. The whole damn movie is about ghosts in a closet and the light emerging from within. There was no better way to terrify us as young children than to have that closet door open seemingly by itself after we had gone to bed.

A living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex wouldn’t have been as frightening. 

And as far as I can remember, it was the one and only time that our dog made his bed in our closet, and it was definitely the only time that he crept out of the closet in the middle of the night by pushing the door open.

I had many terrifying moments in my childhood, many more than Kelli ever experienced, but the image of that closet door slowly opening and the light spilling into our bedroom is one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

I also remember the issue regarding Kelli’s bedroom window well, though I remember it slightly differently. While I am sure that I tormented Kelli about the inherent dangers of her room in the event of a fire, I was actually just as frightened about the situation as my sister and had begged my parents on more than one occasion to install a rope ladder in case she ever needed to escape. I also remember telling Kelli many times before bed that if there was a fire and she could not get out her bedroom door, she must jump regardless of her fear. “Two broken legs is better than being dead,” I had told her many, many times.

I’m sure that none of this served to inspire confidence in my little sister, but it was all I could do to rest peacefully every night.

And it’s not like my warnings weren’t entirely unjustified.

When I was about twelve years old, our chimney caught fire, and after several motorists stopped to warn my parents of the danger (which they ignored), the fire department was finally called by a neighbor and I was awakened from sleep by a firefighter. Though the fire remain restricted to the chimney, it could have easily been a lot worse had our neighbor not seen the problem and called 911.

Being awakened from sleep by a firefighter also rates on my list of most terrifying moments from childhood.

I wonder what Kelli remembers from that night.

Poltergeists and house fires: Kelli’s perspective

I was terrified twice while growing up. My two brothers enjoyed my fear. Even if they weren't the direct cause of my fear, they found it hilarious when I walked in their room with my pillow and my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag, begging to sleep on their floor.

The first time I was terrified was not my brothers' fault but our parent’s alone. At a very young age, (younger than ten at least), they allowed us to watch the horror movie Poltergeist.

Not a good movie for a child.

I was so terrified that I begged Matt and Jeremy to let me sleep on their floor. After much pleading on my part and a little teasing on their part, they allowed it. Just as we were beginning to fall asleep, me with one eye opened, the closet door began opening slowly and light poured out into the room, just like in the movie. The three of us ran screaming towards the door only to discover that the closet light had been left on and our dog, Pac-Man, had fallen asleep in the closet. The door hadn’t been clicked shut, so when he awoke, he nudged the door open with this muzzle.

Even knowing that it hadn’t been a ghost, I slept on their floor for a week.

My second traumatic experience was cleverly and evilly planned by my brothers. Outside of Matt and Jeremy's bedroom window was the garage roof. In an emergency, they could escape the room with a very short jump onto the roof and then a short jump to the ground.

My bedroom, however, was a clear two story drop.

One night Matt brought this to my attention, and Jeremy agreed with his estimation. They then took the time to explain all the worst case scenarios to me.

Fire. Robbery. More fire.

That night I snuck in their room with the infamous sleeping bag after they were fast asleep. After a few nights of sneaking in I got caught. Matt asked why I was scared. I was too embarrassed to tell him why so I spelled the word “f-i-r-e.”

I thought I spelled it wrong because he didn’t respond.

I thought he didn’t understand  what I meant.

Now that I look back I think the reason for his silence was his guilt. My brothers loved to scare me, but after a week of me on their floor, Matt may have realized he had taken things a bit too far.

Boy Scout Brownies: Matt’s perspective

I vaguely recall the brownie incident that Kelli describes in her post. In truth, I remember the Great Brownie Battle of Circa 1985 quite well, but I did not recall that the chocolaty ammunition had been provided by me.

Cooking has never been my thing. I lack attention to detail.

I had also forgotten that my sisters made frequent appearances at our Boy Scout meetings.

I probably wanted to forget that fact with every fiber of my teenage being.

Though they weren’t there every week, it was awkward to have your sisters stuffed in the corner while you learned to tie knots and  played capture the flag in the pitch dark. In all my years in Scouting, my sisters were the only girls who ever attended our meetings, and they were also the only non-Scout siblings to be left behind at a meeting.

Of course, this isn’t surprising given the pathetic parenting prowess of our parents. I was babysitting my four younger brothers and sisters until 3:00 AM on most Saturday nights at the ripe old age of nine, so leaving my sisters behind at the Boy Scout meeting (and often telling us to find a ride home) represented an improvement in the level of childcare that we typically received. 

Boy Scout Brownies: Kelli’s perspective

My daughter, Alexia, asked me the other night if she could make brownies all by herself with no help from me. It reminded me of Matt's first and hopefully only attempt at making brownies.

He was in Boy Scouts and offered to make brownies for the weekly Friday night meeting. Our mother offered to make them, but like my daughter, he insisted on doing it without any help. I sat in the kitchen and watched him mix the batter and fill the brownie pan. He even let me lick the beaters. He did everything right except for one thing.

He did not set a timer.

After the brownies were in the oven for what felt like forever, he remembered to take them out of the oven. He did not allow them to cool. He cut them immediately. I could tell that he was struggling to cut them but he wasn't admitting it. He put them right in a container and set them aside for the meeting.

I am a girl, but for some reason my parents made me attend the meetings with my brothers. Looking back it's probably because the meetings were on Friday nights and it gave them a few child free hours.

We got to the meeting, and I sat in the corner, observing with my step-sister. After the meeting it was time for refreshments. One of the Scouts attempted to bite into a brownie. He could not bite into it. He took the brownie and threw it at the wall. It did not break. All the other Scouts grabbed a brownie and started throwing them at the walls and at each other. My brother's homemade refreshment turned into weapons for recreation.

I really hope my brother hasn't attempted to make brownies.

At least my daughter’s were edible.

Childhood games: Matt’s perspective

I remember playing Monster more than any other game in childhood. I remember taking it very seriously, plotting and planning even when we weren’t playing the game. My preparation for Monster bordered on fanatical at times.

But I was not playing the game to be competitive. It was essentially a game in which I tried to scare the hell out of my brothers and sisters, and I tried my very best to do so. I felt like it was my job to entertain them in the the same way a haunted house at an amusement park might entertain visitors, so I was always in search of a new hiding spot, a new place to stow away a captured sibling, and a new approach to frightening them. I was not doing this to be cruel. I knew they loved to be scared, and I wanted to do the best I could make the game fun for them.

I’m not sure if Kelli remembers, but the game was not one of our own making. My father played the game with us until my parents  divorced and he moved out. The only difference was that our version of the game was played outdoors and Dad’s was played indoors.

Dad’s version of Monster was always played at night, long after the sun had gone down. The lights would be left on in the kitchen but the rest of the house would be cast in total darkness. My father would take up a hiding place somewhere in the house, and we would be charged with walking the circuit that connected kitchen to living room to parent’s bedroom to den to dining room and then back to kitchen.

Somewhere along the way, my father would strike, jumping out of hiding spots we couldn’t begin to imagine and grabbing one of us as his victim. He would place his victims in closets, under the bed or in the bathtub until someone managed to find and rescue him or her.

Sometimes we would make six of seven circuits of the house before my father would finally appear. That was when the game was at its more frightening. It was a lesson in the art of patience and the power of the unknown that I applied when playing our own version of the game.

I remember being utterly terrified as I made my way through that darkened home, but I remember loving the game as well. Nothing brought me more joy as a little boy than playing that game.

Our version of Monster was merely an extension of my father’s original conceit. With Dad gone, I assumed the role of Monster and tried to emulate him as best I could. I loved the game, but I also thought it was my obligation to continue the tradition and fill the void that had been left when Dad was no longer there to play with us. 

I often think about life in terms of lasts. Too often we doing something for the final time and don’t recognize the significance of the moment. There will come a day, for example, when I pick up and carry my daughter for the last time. After that, she will have  become too big and too unwieldy for me to do so.

Will I recognize the moment that happens? Probably not, and perhaps it’s better that way. The sadness of that moment might be too much to bare.

In thinking about lasts, I have often wondered what brought an end to Monster, and I have often wished that someone had told when our last game was being played. I would have liked to stop and savor that part of my childhood before it was lost forever.

The last hiding spot.

The last chase around the barn.

The last scream of a frightened sibling.

Maybe make that final moment when a young boy was trying desperately to replace the father who he no longer knew last a little bit longer.

Childhood games: Kelli's perspective

Growing up on a sparsely populated street (Federal Street) left my brothers and me with nobody to play with except each other. We had the three of us on the weekdays and on weekends and summer vacation we also had our stepbrother and stepsister. We did play the typical game of whiffle ball or kick ball on occasion, but we tended to prefer games we made up.

Color ball was a favorite. We would designate one person as the “thrower upper” and one as the “color giver”. The color giver would assign each of the players a color. The thrower upper would yell a color as he or she threw the ball up. If your color was chosen you would have to catch the ball and hit someone with it. That person then became the thrower upper and the previous thrower upper becomes the color giver. I recently played this game with my boyfriend’s sons and it is still as fun as when I was ten.

Another game we loved was called Monster. When I look back at the game, I realize the game wasn’t all that fun for Matt. Monster was a violent version of hide-and-go-seek. Matt was always the “monster” because he was the oldest and the strongest. The rest of us would go hide and Matt would come and find us. If you were found, Matt would drag you to a hiding spot of his choosing. When I say drag, I mean drag. He would then leave you there until someone found you and saved you. The game went smoothly until Matt had captured all of us and deposited us in different hiding spots and nobody knew. We never bothered to work out the kinks in that.

On cold or rainy days we had board games to keep us busy. Not your typical board games for seven through ten year olds. We had Risk, which is a game for adults about global domination. Not exactly Candy Land. We also played a French card game called Mille Bourne. It was actually one of our favorites even though we did not understand the French writing on the cards. We were also probably the youngest kids in our hometown to know how to play chess and backgammon.  

Playing normal kid games just wasn’t for us.

Childhood babysitters: Matt's perspective

Unlike our previous posts, my recollection of our sordid babysitting history is surprisingly strong. Though I could not remember the names of all our babysitters, I remember thinking that most of them were very good looking, and I had crushes on all of them at one point or another.

Though I remembered the Maria versus Lisa battle that Kelli described quite well, I had never connected this incident with the reason why I began babysitting my siblings at such a young age. But I suspect that Kelli is right. In addition to babysitting during the summer, I also became the Friday and Saturday night babysitter for my brothers and sisters, staying up until 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning at the ripe old age of nine while my parents were out drinking at Box Seats, their favorite sports bar. I would watch The Twilight Zone from 11:00 until midnight, and once I was thoroughly terrified by Rod Serling, I would turn to channel 38, which ran M*A*S*H marathons all night long. I would sit beneath an afghan, watching Hawkeye and BJ and Radar yuck it up while saving lives until my parents finally returned home.

I eventually began to view Hawkeye as a sort of father figure. He was the man who got me through the darkest parts of those weekend nights.

When I was in an especially good mood or (more likely) feeling especially nervous about staying up alone, I would also allow my brothers and sisters to stay up and watch Saturday Night Live with me. None of us fully understood the humor of the sketches, but the show allowed us to huddle together on the couch for a while before I finally sent my siblings to bed.  

There is one part of my sister’s recollection that is surprisingly inaccurate (since she remembers almost everything). Kelli described Maria’s house as “huge with lots of windows.” The house was actually still under construction at the time, so the big windows she recalls were actually open walls and missing sections of the roof. We essentially spent the day at a construction site, and though the house was near completion, there was still much work to be done.

I can also confirm that Lisa’s boyfriend would take me down Federal Street on his motorcycle as long as I promised not to cry. At the age of eight, I was apparently better prepared for a road test than my younger brothers and sisters, so it’s understandable. 

Childhood babysitters: Kelli's perspective

When my brothers and I were young we had babysitters taking care of us during summer vacation. Our mother worked in the pharmacy at Woonsocket Hospital and our step father was a social worker at the same hospital, so we spent our summer days at home.

Our babysitters were teenage girls who my mother knew. They were daughters of friends who she had ridden horses with when our father was still in our lives. Lisa was our favorite. She was fun and had a really cool boyfriend who took us for rides on his motorcycle.

Only in the driveway, of course. Mom never knew.

One night Lisa babysat while our parents went out, and she let us stay up late to watch The Omen. Mom was not thrilled. She was also the prettiest of our babysitters. I wanted to be just like her.
Then there was Maria. She was fun but made us listen to REO Speedwagon on full blast all day long. She was really thin with a huge puffy perm. I always thought she had a big head.

Then there was Missy. She was eventually fired and prosecuted for stealing rare coins from our family.
All the babysitters knew one another and were friends. They would often visit each other while babysitting us. Until this one day...

Maria was babysitting on a rainy day, so we had to stay in the house. The phone had been ringing a lot. Maria would answer it, scream and hang up. Matt, being the oldest (about eight years old at the time), was able to figure out what was going on. Maria had been after Lisa's cool motorcycle boyfriend, and now she was scared because Lisa has been calling the house. She turned off the radio and made us all hide upstairs. Matt told us that Lisa was coming over to beat her up. She went to use the phone and came back upstairs with our shoes. She helped me with my shoes and made Matt help Jeremy with his. Then she grabbed our hands and we all ran out to the driveway, where we found Maria’s father waiting for us in his car. He took us to their house and then went back to work.

Maria's house was huge with lots of windows. We thought we were safe until Lisa appeared in Maria’s driveway with a bunch of girls screaming and threatening her life. Maria cried so I cried. Matt was the smart one and called Mom at work. After what felt like hours of waiting and hiding, Mom finally came to pick us up. 

It wasn't long after that when Matt, only eight or nine years old, became our fulltime babysitter.

I sometimes wonder where Lisa, Maria, and Missy are today. Did Lisa and Maria ever become friends again? Did Missy continue her life of crime? I’ll probably never know.