I Dare You!
Learning about dares, avocado fights & peer pressure. Issue #5
ifOnlyi… I realized back then how much my parents cared and wanted the best for me, instead of thinking I was not loved. We are loved in so many very different ways. Real love is knowing and accepting when you are wrong about your parents and letting them know the truth. I feel so blessed to have truly great parents, and very lucky. More coming your way soon.
This is the year the shit started hitting the fan at The Howard School, I quickly learned about giving and being given “dares”. Ouch! This was not something I wanted to learn about. The Howard School was right next door to a very large Avocado field.
We would be given dares by the older boys, peers, to go into the field packed tightly with Avocado trees, pull the small, hard, unripe ones off the trees, and start throwing them; it was every man for himself in there.
Today, you could look at it as a form of paintball, but paintball, from what I know, little about can’t kill you or knock you unconscious, or break facial bones or knock out teeth, yes, I can go on and on. We were crazy, throwing these round green monsters at each other, as fast and hard as we could.
Yes, the number of times I would wake up with welts all over from being hit completely on and many, many times with unripe, rock-hard avocados. They cracked bits on the body too, and so many others also got hurt in these war-like, highly elevated testosterone-fueled games.
We were like crazy kids. Perhaps that’s what caused my issues with an underdeveloped brain. Just wondering, or maybe it was from my mother smoking and drinking daily while she was pregnant with me. Am I reaching too far?
Another dare was one that, if caught, would have gotten me expelled. What an idiot I was. I had to wake up late in the night, walk across the creaky wooden floorboards, pass the Matron's room, then sneak past the headmaster’s room with the door ajar, run down three steps, and go into the girls ’ room.
I then had to tiptoe to the last bed in the room and wake the girl up by quietly shaking her, making sure none of the other girls woke up or screamed. Then, I turned around and went back to my room without waking anyone else or getting caught. I promise you this is one dare I never did again or anything else so flipping stupid. There were other dares, though, oh help!
So, with My Mom living in Portugal and my sisters, I often spent weekends with friends. Then there were the times that I was blessed and picked up by my parents’ pilot and would fly home all by myself, sitting in the cockpit as co-pilot at 12 years of age.
No, I was not flying, in-fact I was scared as shit to take over control yoke even though Dave the Pilot, who was awesome, used to fly P-51s and was not afraid of anything and loved nothing more than scaring me when he would take his hands off the Yoke and say “It’s all yours to fly, fly or we die!”
Dave, pictured below, was taken 48 years after he was a pilot for our family.
Who does that to a kid who was barely tall enough to see anything out of the front window other than sky, what was around me, more sky, and clouds above? Yes, he even let the plane take dives!
I saw the ocean on a few occasions for sure, going nose first, as if it had lost control, and Dave would look over at me and say, “Do you want to pull up it now or do we go down?” He loved the pain and fear he saw on my face, an ex-Navy pilot and an extreme one for sure. But never did he ever let it get out of control towards death.
When I was home, it was time together with Dad; we had awesome times. We would play tennis together, BBQ steaks, ride on his Triumph motorcycle, or go to the movies. Dad introduced me to James Bond, Pink Panther, and Planet of the Apes films, which are still some of my favorites today. It's funny how these three movies have captured audiences for over 50 years and still do today, with new versions being filmed. It makes my dad a classic, too. Laughter is my happiest time, and I always try to make it a part of my life.
The special part of 7th grade was when I was taken out of school around 6 weeks early. The school was not happy with me, nor was our baseball team, since we were in first place and had a solid chance to win the trophy. Dad was taking me off to live in Portugal in a town called Estoril, a beach city, with our entire family for the next 5 months.
ifOnlyi…. short stories are published chronologically, and follow my life growing up in California from 4 years old. If you’ve just found me, the stories will come together when you start reading from….Issue #1