Too Much Reading Isn't Always a Good Thing

I was flipping through some old photos the other day of my parents' backyard, and suddenly I had a funny thought. In fact, I just burst out laughing thinking about it. I guess I'm nostalgic this month or something...

My sister Barbara, who is 2 years younger than yours truly, was my constant companion growing up. We were pretty much inseparable, and for the most part, we got along pretty well. We rode our bikes everywhere, explored the large drainage ditch next to our home, wrote stories, operated our own Krieger Hotel complete with a check-in ledger, managed our own drive-through restaurant in the back room, dressed up in old costumes, held club meetings with our neighbor Misty in the clubhouse above her Dad's shed, and played often with the kids in my Mom's daycare which she ran from within our home. Our summers were full of fun and adventure.

Well, I was a big reader at the time. I rode my bike 3 blocks to the library at least once a week and came back with a basket full every time. I regularly filling my head with imaginative stories especially mysteries like Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, etc. So I blame the following story on excessive reading in my impressionable years. AHEM!

Apparently, I got my sister and a couple of the little kids to go along with me on this project. We got some old shovels out of the garage and dug some gaping holes in the backyard. We then buried a couple of shoe boxes and played cemetery out there all afternoon. We used a few pieces of old paneling that my Dad had in the basement to make cemetery markers. We labeled them using a big black magic marker reading: "Here likes Jake Smith," etc. and then stuck those in the ground. OK, so it was a bit morbid, but we weren't concerned with that. We were having fun digging holes, burying boxes, attempting to fill the holes back in again and then marking each "grave" accordingly.

So just picture this scene with me, my Dad gets home from a long day of work and finds his lovely backyard lawn full of lumpy holes and dark paneling cemetery markers. Funny thing is that I don't remember much about the rest of the day. I remember the afternoon of mortuary fun, but after that, it's all kind of a blur. I'm sure I got a well-deserved spanking especially since I was the ring-leader and, and I probably lost my reading privileges for a week, which would have been sheer torture to me at the time. [sigh!]

See what too much reading can do to you? Be careful.