Grumpy Cat started it all!

Continued...(Christmas lights and three things I feared most)

Believe it or not, when we weren't in training to kill each other....(see pictures below) we really were angels at one time.

Look at how cute we were... sometimes we were even saints...

But with the advent of The Beatles, long hair, marijuana plants and the Ooze- those days are long gone. 

Because my mother has locked herself in her room and refuses to come out... my older brothers are meaner than junkyard dogs with mange, and this time it was the stupid grumpy cat that had riled them up. The "Law" in our house was that boys could not pick on girls and since I was the youngest boy... all sibling torture fell on my plate - it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. 

In the last episode, Lazarus, "The Miracle Cat," had lost the rat which upset the older boys to no end... that caused a riot to brake out in the living room when one of them caught a glimpse of me climbing out the window. With an old smelly rope slung over my shoulder that I had pulled out of the murky bottom of one of the two sailboats on the front lawn, I tried to sneak onto the carport roof without being seen. My job was to scale the steep pitch of the old turn-of-the-century house so that I could pull up the Christmas lights that Karin, Pinky and I had laid out earlier on the front lawn (lawn is a loose translation- but go with it). 

Those little stinkers - Tommy Blaser and Jeffery Lennon and Michael Lennon kept breaking our Christmas lights and I was content to have a good third of them working when we tested them while the boys were betting inside.

After the wrestling match inside, older boys had retreated to the hippie-hut out back and I had gotten to the tippy-top peak of the old house without incident. 

                                           

I figured that with 38.2% of our light bulbs working and the fact that I had made it to the top of the house without being spotted by my big brothers (the Wolf Pack)...                                                                                                                                     ...THIS WAS GOING TO BE A GREAT FINISH to a hard year.    

In order to pull off this Christmas light project every year, it meant that I had to face three of my greatest fears. The first: Fear of the dark. I had to climb into the dark cluttered basement - home of the portal to hell in order to retrieve the lights. As usual, I threatened my little 9-year-old sister, Karin, that Santa would not bring any toys if she did not go into the basement with me and lead the way. I told her that I didn't want her to trip over all the junk down there, that I needed to go second to "have her back" and that I needed to hold her hand so that I could protect her...(all lies).

I was thirteen, but was smarter than her and knew the boogie man lived down there.

I had overcome my first fear with the help of my little sister - but I'm not going to admit that to anyone.

My second fear was heights.

My job was to climb to the top - shimmy out along the peak (hurting my boy parts) as I straddled the high roof and lean out over the edge to lower the rope down to Pinky who would tie a boy scout approved square-knot to the middle section of the enormous string of lights.

Not gonna lie - this freaked me out! I had to sit there leaning out over the edge of the roof some 900 feet up in the air... (okay 35 feet or something like that) but I couldn't show negative pheromones because as soon as the Wolf Pack were to discover this weakness they would certainly exploit it.

The third thing I was afraid of was being discovered by the Wolf Pack with a rope... To me, it was like sending up the bat-signal into the sky showing the Wolf Pack my location as though it were a beacon that invited them to come and torture me. It reminded me of the story in the Bible with Abraham and Isaac. Isaac was told to carry the wood to the top of the hill...the very wood he was to be sacrificed with...gulp!

There I sat on top of the roof with the potential that all of the negative stars in the universe could line up against me.

But with the hippies out back smoking it up - everything was groovy - "all copacetic" as Bruce Grant would say.

With the ropes clearing the third-floor window I nearly had it all finished when I heard the clamor of Santa's Reindeer right behind me - it was a Christmas miracle!

Hearing the commotion of all of the reindeer hooves and panting and the noise of the sleigh settling on top of roof behind me, I turned around expecting to see Santa himself. Actually, I turned around praying it would be Santa...for I had a foreboding feeling in my gut.

YES, Kids never...ever...ever climb to the top of a very tall building with a long rope slung over your shoulder in the presence of older brothers or near the edge of a cliff or near a tree or near an abandoned well... if you happen to be the baby brother - LET ME JUST SAY THIS NOW - you are only asking for trouble.

The Bat-signal was up.. I had sealed my fate. The Wolf Pack plotted revenge on me for laughing at them when the retarded grumpy cat attacked them.  Somehow it was all my fault and now I was tied up by the ankles and being dangled over the top and swung back and forth by half of the motley crew who were on the ground racing back and forth across the lawn with the strand of Christmas lights.

Okay so... we weren't normal...but who has ever seen a kid hanging by his ankles from a rope off of the top of a giant three story house swinging back and forth? The Blasers might have had the straightest Christmas lights, but by golly who could top this show - not even the Lennons (who were in show-business) down the street...The rest of the world- eat your heart out!

All of this to say - I guess it is good that my parents had especially trained me in advance for such occasions...

The grumpy, mean O' cat came out of the house, as if to see, if I could land on my feet if the rope broke...and wouldn't take his eyes off me as if betting against me.
I stared the sucker down as if to show the dumb cat that I had more lives than it did and was thankful that Kris and Donny didn't bring out the BB guns and use me for target practice...

So you see in the end, it wasn't all that bad - it could have been worse!  

I'm sure my homeroom teacher, Sister Schultz, would tell me that, "I shouldn't have put yourself in that position."  

I'm wondering if she would have told that to poor Issac!

Merry Christmas