Fun idea, Kobby! My mom did not have a problem spanking kids in public, so there wasn’t much pantsing of adults in my childhood.
When I was little we lived in the country. Our neighborhood was one long nameless dirt road with about a dozen houses built along it plus the old one at the end. The road used to be the old house’s driveway until our next-door neighbor’s brother bought it and decided to build the houses we lived in. Our next-door neighbor’s wife (we called her Mee-Maw) smoked a corncob pipe. It was her brother-in-law who built the neighborhood.
There were ten kids who lived on our road. Two were high school age and had cars, so we seldom saw them. I was the third-youngest of the remaining eight. My brother was the second-youngest. So when the Big Kids got us all into trouble the blame rarely made it all the way down the ladder to us.
When it snowed our neighborhood was perfect for sledding. The whole thing was built on a slope that led downward to the old house at the bottom. One year we got a pretty deep snow with a couple of inches of ice on top. It was a thick enough crust for us to walk on without breaking through.
That’s when one of the kids got an idea. I have to guess it was one of the Big Kids because the rest of us littles and middles couldn’t have executed the plan even if we had all been in it together. The first thing I knew about it was a summons to the yard at the top of the hill.
We had been playing outside and so were already dressed head to toe in snow gear. This meant we could barely move, and once we fell on the ground we needed friends to help get us upright again. These were the days before Dry-Fit and Thinsulate (and the Internet). Snow clothes were bulky.
So the four of us who had been playing in my yard made our way to the top of the hill. The rest of the kids were there. They had a door. We were going to ride it like a sled across the back yards to the bottom of the hill. All ten of us.
As an adult I now realize that it was one of those huge, solid wood interior panel doors from the old house at the end of the road. The hardware had been removed probably for restoration. The house was empty and under renovation almost the entire time we lived on that road.
Anyway at the time I didn’t question the presence or origin of the door. I simply climbed on where indicated by the Big Kids.
They put the littlest ones including me in the middle. This was a good thing because steering was accomplished by some combination of leaning, legwork, screams, and magic. Being small none of us four could contribute much except for the screaming.
We went really fast. The first thing I remember about the ride was shooting sideways across the potato field at the bottom of the hill with all of the Big Kids scattered on the ground and yelling somewhere behind and above us.
The four of us littles were stranded in the middle of that door and heading for the woods fast. My best friend was behind me. She somehow bailed off on the uphill side. We swung sideways a little more and I could see her sliding along the ice across the field.
I was pretty sure my younger bother and sweet Karen the littlest one who was probably about four years old were not going to get us out of this. They were by now too scared to even make a noise. I had my legs locked around my brother and my mittens full of his coat. I waited until the door rotated again and rolled off as hard as I could.
He must have had a death grip on little Karen because the three of us hit the ice in a ball. The door met a tree and burst into about a million pieces. My brother got a scratch under his eye from flying wood. When the Big Kids made it to where we were at the edge of the woods (where they were no doubt planning to hide our bodies) we were all still on the ground. Puffy coats, remember? None of us could stand up.
I remember a circle of red, astonished faces with blue sky in the middle. They hauled us up and set us on our feet. One of them said “Holy [vulgar word for poo],” and that’s the first time I remember hearing that expression. There was a moment of silence. Then another one, I’m pretty sure it was my best friend’s oldest brother (a brown-eyed blond whose name escapes me) said, “Let’s get another door.”
