i married a hooligan

Wade's brother, Jordan, came for a short visit and stayed with us last night. He left this morning and now all my kids are sad. So, as often happens when Wade gets together with any of his brothers, we took a little trip down Memory Lane. Now, I thought I had heard most of Wade's stories and I would have categorized him as a bit of a trouble maker with not as keen of a conscience as you might expect a young boy to posses. Yes, most boys get into trouble, but we could all safely say he was trouble on another level. Not true!! After last night I can say he was not just trouble on another level. He was trouble in an entirely different league. Like maybe the "federally offensive" kind of league.
You can imagine my horror when the words, "Remember when You tazed the lunch lady?" flew from Jordan's mouth. First of all, where the heck did a 7/8th grader get a tazer; secondly, did he have no conscience? Apparently it was considered great fun to taze each other at home. I doubt the lunch lady saw the humor. They were all waiting in line for their hot dogs, the lunch lady walked down the line, and Wade stuck out his arm and tazed her butt. Wade maintains there was no way she could have known it was him cause' she was out cold and that someone must have ratted him out. He was sent home for the rest of the day. What? One half day out of school? Where was the expulsion or the community service or the jail time? His mom had to come get him. Good thing she thought to ask for the tazer back. Where was he the next day? Right back in line for his hot lunch.
So I never really considered that he might be a bully either, but my opinion on that matter started to shift last night too. He says his favorite thing to do was to "roof" the balls at recess (or kick them on the roof). Of course this happened from time to time by accident but if the yard duties noticed a trend of frequent roofings from any one specific student that student was in trouble. That's why each student had to check out their balls at the beginning of recess. This posed a problem for Wade. But he had a simple solution. Two actually. The most obvious being to steal balls from smaller kids and kick them to the roof. The second, much more sinister solution - check out the balls under a stolen identity. He'd check out balls saying he was someone else and then kick them to the roof having all the fun of roofing a ball while other kids got in trouble for it.
Wade claims his greatest idea ever came in the form of a prank that involved a toilet plunger. Step one : break into the janitor's clost (off to a bad start). Step two : find the toilet plunger. Step three : emty bladder in the upturned plunger. Step four : when the coast is clear, stick the filled plunger to the ceiling of the hallway. Step five : (This is the most crucial step) Wipe the ceiling around the plunger with a damp mop to erase any leaked evidence of the plunger's contents. Step Six : Walk away. Wade says,"those kids just couldn't resist a plunger stuck to the ceiling. They fell for it every time!" And we all know what happened when someone succeeded in catching the end of that plunger. They were probably too humiliated to spread the word and warn each other. If he didn't have to "go" when it was time to fill the plunger he'd put warm water in instead. No one likes a mystery fluid.
Another favorite past time also involved breaking and entering. In the summertime, after a trip to the barn store where they'd pick up chips and candy and put it on their parent's tab (which they'd been banned from doing and later were supposed to supply a password in order to purchase things on the tab, a password which Wade was never given) Wade, Jordan and a cousin, Chris, would break into the elementary school. Chris' dad was the principal. They'd climb on top of the portables and from there climb on top of the gym. There was a small door in the ceiling of the gym that they could pry open, for some reason it had no lock. Then they had the gym to themselves. When they got tired of kicking balls and shooting hoops they'd go down to Chris' dad's office and find a key in his desk drawer. Not just any key. THE key... to the pop machine. (I have to say "pop" here because that's how Wade tells the story. We all know it's soda, but to be true to the original telling we'll say pop.) Down to the pop machine where they indulged in all the grape and orange Crush they could ever want. Aweful, I know. It gets worse. They didn't just steal pop, but the money in the pop machine too. But not all of it. They didn't want it to look like someone had been in the pop machine. Very smart.
So then a discussion about the politics of child punishment ensued and Wade and Jordan were both adimant that Canada was lawless when they were growing up and they both lamented the fact that kids today can't do more of the things they did growing up without suffering severe consequences. You're right, Wade and Jordan, it is sad that our kids aren't allowed to be the social miscreants their hearts yearn to be.