Selah // Something Witty

Crossing your t's as though it weren't irrelevent.

Date: 03.03.17 -- Day 23 (Day 3 of 30-Day Blogging Challenge - March Edition)
Music: "Division (Do The Right Thing)" / Ages and Ages

Prompt: Fun Fact Friday! - On this day in 1903, Barney Gilmore of St. Louis, Missouri was arrested for spitting. What's one of the dumbest things you've ever gotten in trouble for?

Most of the things I've gotten in trouble for have been things I've actually done. Absolutely guilty as charged. Luckily, I have been pretty successful in staying out of trouble. Of those times I was caught for my crimes, I usually was the one to turn myself in because I have a guilt complex at least ten miles wide. Like the time I stole a couple of candy bars from the corner store when I was four-years old. I held onto them for two hours, confessed to my mother in abject horror and tears of my theft, and went back to the store to apologize to the store owner and pay for the candy bars I had taken. The funniest thing about that was the fact one of my eldest brothers was madder at me for narcing on myself, but that's another story for another time.

This particular story starts with my parents and their late night discussions after we all retired to our rooms for the night. They would settle down and talk about their worries, including the fact that they had given birth to an owl. I was a little girl who had a horrible sleep cycle and who couldn't seem to sleep on a regular basis. So the rule they gave to their little owl was to play calm things at night unless I was tired enough to sleep. Sometimes those play things would be me talking to myself in my room telling my stuffies stories, asking my fake friend where he was going every night and what were the things he saw when he was out at night. "She's a weird little girl," they would say, but they let it go as just one of those odd things.

However, for about a month, those little conversations seemed to change in tone. It seemed like I had developed an imaginary friend. They would try to talk to me about it in the morning hours, but to no avail. I didn't know what they were talking about; I was simply too literal for imaginary friends yet they were so convinced this was just one of my quirks. A bit concerning but they weren't too, too alarmed. Until the night they heard footsteps on the roof.

The alarm that we were being robbed soon gave way to anger. They followed the steps to my room, slowly opened the door to my middle brother, CR, coming through my window. It turns out he was my imaginary friend, exploiting the small ledge and trellis outside my bedroom window to climb down from the second-story window. Regrettably for him, and luckily for my parents, the trellis was accidentally damaged when my mother was trimming her tomatoes; and when CR attempted to climb out for his nightly meeting with his junior high friends, he had broken some of the steps, thus the roof had to be utilized through the garage. Fortune favors the bold, but it does not favor the heavy-footed, especially over our parents' bedroom.

I'm not sure who was more upset - my parents in not realizing my brother was sneaking out, my brother for having gotten caught (this is the same brother who was upset about me admitting my undiscovered crimes), or me about the fact they had assumed I was talking to thin air. In the end, I got an extra cookie with dinner the next night and an apology, CR was grounded for six months without television or phone privileges, and my parents added reinforcements to all the screens on the upper floor windows. Let's just say it was a really long summer that year, and I learned from afar the consequences of trying to be an escape artist.