Looking back on the past

I hope everyone had a good laugh or shook their heads in disbelief over "My Hellion Years" posts. None of it was fiction, just the facts of some of our misadventures during the summer of 1962. Being unsupervised for most of the day led to a lot of these incidents. We played rough and fought a lot, normally it was me, Mary and Barbara fighting against Robert and Carl. That is if we weren't fighting against the neighbor boys, that happened to be close in age to us three boys. They were never allowed to join in any of our antics, because when Robert and the oldest boy fought, they broke their back door window. Hence, we were not allowed to associate with them. Both their parents worked and to keep us from fighting (after the window incident) they stayed at their grandparents during the summer, or in their house with orders not to leave. Besides our adventures spoken of in the posts, we had several other incidents that I didn't speak of. Like Robert trying to teach my sister Mary judo, and forgot to let her arm go when he threw her, separating her shoulder. We were using coke bottles as hand grenades in one battlefield play, I rose up from a foxhole and was hit in the forehead by a coke bottle. A small piece broke off, lodging in my skull going unnoticed since it didn't bleed much. We were always getting cuts and scrapes from our activities. We would stop and make sure the injured was still breathing and go on. Mary ended up a day later having to go to the doctor. I didn't know about the piece of glass until I returned to school and started having a lot of headaches. The school nurse found the glass and removed it. I still have the scar from it, but the headaches went away.  Sometimes I wonder if my past was where I came up with the idea of Brian and Cindi fighting so much in my Lightning in the Tunnel series. I know the hateful attitude that Brian has in the series, came from my experiences with my brother Robert. He was mean and very hateful towards me while growing up. We get along so-so as adults. 

TALK BACK, I'm LISTENING!