AmandaHickmanMemoir

Amanda Hickman English 103 Section 32 September 17, 2010 When the Fun Becomes Dangerous When I was younger, my family’s rental properties were frequent places where we would be spending time at. My mother, father, brother and I would always work together to clean our rentals for the next tenant to move into. Often tenants would leave the houses so destroyed after living in them that we would not know where to begin our journey of fixing the houses up. My parents, my mom in particular, were always extremely strict when it came to keeping our home clean. So my brother and I could not believe the sights that we would see from the way some people keep their houses. My brother Anthony and I were always instructed to carry the rubbish that was scattered throughout the rooms in each rental to the big trash bins, while our parents would take on the more difficult tasks that we were unable to do. Despite the fact that Anthony and I were supposed to be cleaning the houses, we would find different items in the rubbish and would often become distracted from our cleaning duties. Upon one occasion we decided to close all of the window blinds in one of the rentals to play a joke on our dad. Dad was always a prankster with us kids, so we often tried to “get him back” with out own harmless pranks. Our own prank ended up backfiring on us because we got in very much trouble for touching the dirty blinds. At such a young age, a little bit of dirt did not bother us, but we ended up going immediately to the hospital to get tetanus shots to avoid any harm from the dirty blinds. This was just one of our countless episodes at the rentals. It was winter, and all four of us had loaded into our jeep to drive to one of our smaller rental houses to continue fixing it up, as we had been doing for the past week. We had already finished hauling all of the pointless rubbish outside of the house and into extremely large bins, which was a task that consumed an entire day. On this particular day, mom and dad were painting the living room and the bathroom. Anthony and I were pulling out the countless nails that had been randomly hammered into the bedroom walls. A short while later we became lazy and managed to talk mom and dad into getting McDonalds for lunch. Eating out was not a frequent occurrence for my family, because my parents never believed in “wasting money on food that was unhealthy to begin with.” McDonalds was always our favorite place to eat because of the very fact that we felt so deprived of it. Nevertheless, dad went to McDonalds and returned with our lunch. It was always cold in the house because we never left the heat on while we were not at the house. Today happen to be one of the coldest we had experienced at the rental. Anthony glanced at me as if to perform a telepathic connection with his eyes; we were going to team up and pick on our father. Every time we came to the rental to work, we fought over who get the privilege of sitting on the heat vent. I knew exactly what Anthony’s next action would be before he made a single movement. Today, dad was the first occupant of the heat vent, and began to dip his greasy chicken nugget in the honey mustard dipping sauce. As soon as he turned his head in the other direction he was pushed off of the heater and was left with no seat. Anthony scrambled up to steal the seat he had just won in victory, only to be swiftly pushed off of the heat vent by myself. As if he was moving a pile of leaves, dad effortlessly scooted me from my newly possessed seat and occupied the space himself. As we ate our food and fought with dad over the heat vent, Anthony spotted paint sticks in mom’s box of paint supplies. She had always brought her paint supplies in a large cardboard box filled with numerous utensils and tools that are useful when doing her paintjobs. He immediately grabbed one and threw it to me. The paint sticks were now our swords to battle against dad. Two against dad was unfair, but that just made it all the more fun. Soon after, mom joined in while calling out that she was Zena the warrior and battled against dad. Mom had very seldom joined in on our fighting or joking before. She was often the mediator; instructing everyone to calm down before any type of injury obtains the chance to occur. Her involvement in this escapade of ours multiplied the excitement of the fight greatly. Seeing mom begin to battle dad was enough to push Anthony and I into fits of laughter. As she and dad began making the battle their own fight, Anthony and I dropped out to watch the scene. Mom made a karate chop in the air with the half white, half brown paint stick that was in her hand. Dad returned the chop with a swipe through the air; because us children had staggered to the sidelines of the enormous living room, the strength of the swipes and chops had begun to escalade. Mom returned dad’s swipe with a final chop, the chop that ended the game and taught me a lesson from that day on. Dad’s hand ended up becoming the victim of the chop. The crack echoed between the walls; his hand was unmistakably broken. From that day on, I have always respected my mother’s continuous warnings of being careful and letting our “harmless joking” become careless. She never again joined in on any escapade of ours even though we would have all loved for another battle contestant in combat, leaving the one day she actually had joined in embedded in my memory for the years following.