A Legacy of Dorkiness

Oh man. After that last post I thought of so many things from my childhood, and every one of them embarrassing! Sheesh, I was such a total nerd!

I remember my tic-tac-toe shirt that had removable vinyl X's and O's that stuck on with high tech VELCRO. I wore that to school! And played tic-tac-toe on my own torso!

We used to have a little yellow Toyota pickup (who will co-star in my next post, so stay tuned) with a shell on it that we would travel in with my parents in the front and my four sisters and me in the back with sleeping bags, pillows, coloring books, and travel size games. We made up lots of songs back there, some of which I can still sing to you today and if this blog had audio I would post them here because they would fit perfectly with the theme of EMBARRASSING!

As you can kind of see in my banner picture, my canine teeth didn't come in for like, 2 years, so I had this really goofy smile for a very long time.

In another shirt debacle, I convinced my sister to go along with the idea of getting matching shirts that said "I Heart My Sister," but with a heart, not the word "heart." I believe we got in a big fight about it before she finally relented and we got the two pink shirts declaring our sisterly love.

And one of my favorite memories is when my best friend Becky White and I decided we could be like CHiPs (remember the tv show?) and ride our bikes next to each other down the street like Ponch and Jon. We did it often. We had the best cheer! Here it is: Bips! Bips! We are the Bips! Bimi and Kecky! Kecky and Bimi! Bips! Bips! Yaaaaaaay...Bips!

Are you lucky enough to have had something happen in your life that is so funny (to you, anyway) that you can recall it any time you want to lol? I have more than one. Some of them involve bodily functions, and fall under the "untellable" category. The best one for me, though, is when Becky was going to get a game down from the top shelf in her bedroom closet. No bodily functions involved, so you can keep reading.

That closet was packed to the ceiling! It had blankets and games and dress-up clothes and toys and the humidifier and wrapping paper and stuffed animals and who knows what else? I mean, I made most of that stuff up anyway. Like I'm going to remember what was in my friend's closet from when we were 9 years old! But you get the idea. It was kind of like how they say the California Redwood forest is the largest living organism because the trees are all connected to each other through a giant root system. I'm pretty sure that's how her closet was configured.

Becky couldn't reach the top of the closet, obviously, so she rigged up a little tower of objects to help her climb up. The game was under a bunch of stuff, so she was struggling to dislodge it, while propped precariously on no less than 4 different random doodads. Shockingly, her hazardous little improvised step ladder began to give way and the shift of balance nudged pretty much that entire Redwood forest of a closet into a massive cascade of storage matter.

At that moment, she squeaked out my favorite childhood line: "ACK! HERE COMES IT!" And we were buried in a pile of everything.

It took us HOURS to clean that mess up! But every few minutes we would revisit our initial giggle-fest that had outlasted any previous giggle-fest I had ever had, and can even rival the best ones I've had since. And up until now, to this very day, the vision of that moment can still make me L right OL.

I still use that line occasionally. Maybe even frequently. In fact, a while back I visited an entirely different friend from a different era of my life. She had heard this story years earlier and had heard me use the line several times. I loved it when she was showing me around her apartment and said at one point, "Don't open that closet there, or we'll have a 'here comes it' situation." Nice one, Sarah! Badoom ching!