7 Things You Don't Know About Me

By Rattus Scribus© 9 Nov 2009.
Please read the previous blog (Kreative Blogger Award) before this one.

Here are seven things that most of my blog readers don't know about me:
One part of me wants to say that some of these things would make me who I am today. Another part of me wants to say, "And you're bragging this?"

1. When I was an infant (that's my excuse) my mother (so she says) found me once in my crib covered from head to toe in a thick brown substance. Apparently, I had worked my diaper loose and, well, let's just say I was born an artist. I still think my mom told that story so that no matter my educational or professional achievements, I would always remember that I was one of the little people.

2. At around age 11, I fell into a bout of sadness about what I cannot for the life of me remember. But I do remember that I had had it with home and was going to run away. It was a day or two after Halloween, so naturally I grabbed my pillow case and filled it with all the candy that all four of us kids got trick-or-treating, which would sustain me for the circumnavigation of the globe. Although it was in the afternoon and I could just as easily have run away through the font door of the then empty house, I chose, dramatically, to climb out of my sisters' bedroom window (there were big bushes outside the room my brother and I shared). I got to the corner, vagabond candy pack over my shoulder, and ran straight into my mom who was driving home. She gave me that, "Your arse belongs to me" look, and I ran tout de suite back home, thus ending my wunderlust. I never traveled over seas until 2003.

3. When I was about 13, I was with my brother in a store that sold everything from penny candies to live animals. Without warning, my brother opened the cage of parakeets at the rear of the store, grabbed one, stuffed it into one of the pockets of his levis and started walking across the entire length of the store to the door, the bird chirping away, though sounding like it was bound and gagged, and me sweating my youth away thinking we were going to Alcatraz for sure. That was the least stressful and least dangerous example of what could happen at any given moment hanging around my brother in those days.

4. Right around the same time, my brother and I (and the whole world) were into the Beatles, so we begged our parents Christmas after Christmas to buy us musical instruments: a guitar for my brother, a drum set for me. We were going to be the brown Puerto Rican Beatles. One Christmas morning we awoke to unwrap a plastic toy guitar-like thingy for my brother, that was impossible to tune and play (indeed, I am certain it was not meant to be), and a 3 piece all METAL infantile toy drum-set for me that was only slightly better than overturned coffee cans. I would tell you how that Christmas changed my life. But I'm trying to keep my blog positive.

5. In middle school, my parents took us to buy shoes. Since we NEVER (I say again, NEVER) dressed in style, I was biting my nails all the way to the shoe store. What O sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph, would our dear but so not fashion conscious parents buy us? They bought us each the same pair of chalk white indestructible humongous bricks (I'll not call them shoes) that would have been our last choice if it was between them or walking across the burning sands of Arabia barefoot.

These are the only shoes I could find on the web that might give you a feel for what we had to endure.

Our friends could see us coming from a mile away and we never heard the end of it. My brother and I tried to color them black with roll-on black shoe polish. But the fiendish things would just keep absorbing it, succeeding only in looking like a bad Earl Scheib paint job. We tried everything to shorten their life: kicking trees, scraping them against stones, nuclear detonators. OK, OK, it wasn't my money. Maybe my parents just couldn't afford the latest shoe styles. But was it too much to ask that my shoes not look like a pair of great white sharks?

6. Right after high school a second cousin of mine came back from Vietnam and started hanging around us "kids." These were the days when I used to inhale. One time we planned a camping trip for a bunch of friends. Willy and I left a day ahead, and we brought all the necessities for a one-with-nature experience: pot and plenty of stupid foods. By the time we got to the camp site, we were so high, that we couldn't even figure out how to make our dinner, let alone put up the "five-man" tent (which back then required an advanced degree). We laughed for an eternity under the starlit mountain sky, eating uncooked beans and candy. We slept under a totally collapsed canvas tent that acted as our 50 pound blanket, under which the effects of the beans and candy made themselves known. Those were the days, and it's a wonder we came through them alive.

7. I went to high school with Marie of Dancing in Tattered Shoes (who nominated me for the Kreative Blogger Award), though we did not "hang out" together. She and a couple of people here of course know this. But what most of you will not know, and what I myself could not have known in my high school days is that I would (8 years later) marry Marie's cousin, Anita from Castles Crowns and Cottages. We are still happily married 27 years later. My brother has calmed down and has long been one of my best friends. And my mom and I are as close as we've ever been, though the tables have turned and it's me the one telling the stories now.

Now you know the real mind behind the blogs, Rattus Scribus and Rattus' Tales. I hope you still like me.

Rattus