STORY TIME

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I lived in a big, shiny, beautiful metropolis known to it's many inhabitants as simply Atlanta.
Has a more perfect name for a city ever been concocted?
And no, Tomorrowland doesn't count, as it is a not a real city, but a false moniker invented by a warped, demented mind, just like SeaTac.

It was between the time of my 10th and 11th birthdays and my family lived in a very spacious two story duplex. Connecting the two different floors was a very steep and extremely wide staircase, which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the upcoming tale, because it has been bolded.

A quick background into my familial unit. At the time, I had two little sisters, a Mom, and a Dad.
My sister's names were Julie, who has since dropped the "e" in favor of the more extreme "Juli", and Claire, who has more tattoos than all of The Habit combined (3), and is currently seeing a young man named Pal. Wait, let me just check the spelling on that...yep, Pal.

My father's name is Lawrence, and my mother's name was Joanne. Interestingly enough, she also has since dropped her "e" , but she decided to replace it with an "a", I guess to sound more professional, or maybe she was just trying to show up Juli. You know how women can get.

This story takes place in the summer of what must have been '87 or '88, I could figure out which one it was, but who has that kind of time? We'll just pick one at random and say '87.

So it was the summer of '88 (changed my mind) and my sisters and I were mired in the listless middle days of the golden season, when you had been out of school for just long enough to not be excited about being out of school. Both my parents worked during the day and all I had to look forward to was afternoon cartoons. So that left my sisters and I the whole day until three o'clock to fill with some sort of diversionary activity designed to alleviate the crushing boredom, and I'll be damned if we didn't come up with some doozies.

Doozy: informal something outstanding or unique of it's kind. (The Oxford American College Dictionary)

One day we went into the woods and found an old tree house that we decided, in our infinite wisdom, to fix up. We made plans, designed a rudimentary set of blueprints for reference, and made our way to a construction site down the road, to liberate some wood from the carpenter's oppressive regime. We were successful in our campaign, and we took our haul back into the woods to begin work on

The Reconstruction Project.

Only we never did it.
We never even started.
That wood's probably still laying there.
In the exact same place that it was when Julie was chasing fireflies in the darkening afternoon, and Claire was busy dabbling her feet in the creek, and probably in the same place it was in when I was stepping from board to board on the ground to avoid The Lava.
I was rather enjoying my little game, (as I always do when I'm winning) and then I noticed that one particular board was having trouble being persuaded to come off the bottom of my shoe. It was a very peculiar feeling, and naturally I looked down to see if I could find the problem.

I found the problem.
It was about six inches long.
It was made of metal.
And it was protruding from the top of my right foot.

The pain didn't really kick in until I saw the blood start to bubble up like the stigmata from around the thick black nail that was sticking out of the board, and that's when I began to feel a certain degree of panic start to settle in. I put my other foot on the board and started to pull up with my right leg in an attempt to extricate myself from this unholy union of flesh and steel.

That's when I discovered that the nail was going to hurt a lot more on the way out than it did on the way in.

And so ended The Reconstruction Project.

But never fear, The Nail Incident did not slow us down for long, and it was only about a week later that we invented a game that I knew would be the next big sports craze to sweep the nation, bigger even, than our beloved four-square.
The name of this game was Dog-Jumping.
It involved three players, (naturally) and a dog, (more naturally) and the act of jumping (duh).

It was all going swimmingly, and I was up by like seventy-five points, depending on whom you talk to, when I went for the big one.
The Irish Setter.

There were many dogs in our neighborhood, but none as feared and mean spirited as The Setter.
I think it's actual name was Lucy, but for the purpose of this narrative, we will use The Setter, because in our opinion The Setter sounds scarier.

It was lying in it's yard, facing away from me, when I began my approach. I ran swiftly, and stayed low to the ground, As I grew nearer, I knew that it was going to take all the strength my legs possessed to clear this bohemoth. I gathered myself, and lept!

And I cleared it.

But as it turned out, I jumped too far.
I landed awkwardly and stumbled forward and fell to the ground using my hands to slow my fall.

And that's when it happened. The second time in ten days that I was impaled by something.

Only this time, the material in question was not steel, it was glass.

And in the meantime, there was a very large, very red, very angry dog, who had just been punked in it's own front yard, baring it's teeth and barking, five feet away from me.




TO BE CONTINUED
(We haven't even gotten to the staircase yet)