If you ask any of the kids raised by my mom and dad / stepdad, you know there were a few hard and fast rules in our house:
No hats at the table
Don’t even try to ask for breakfast cereal because that shit’s too expensive and you animals go through multiple boxes a day
If you wrong someone, apologize to them in person, face-to-face
I mean I’m sure there were other rules in the house.
Get good grades? More like don’t get Fs. (I only made one F and it was in seventh grade art thank you very much).
Don’t get arrested? How about trying super hard not to get arrested (well, my sister satisfied this one).
And other sorta kinda rules too. But #3 above is the one that still sticks with me. And it really revolves around one incident in the summer before 8th grade.
At the time we lived in a neighborhood in Houston called Memorial Hills. It was this idyllic place to live in, a big difference from the apartments we had seesawed between in the years before. There was an enormous culvert running down the main street, a keen place to hunt for crawdads after a storm. A creek ran through the back edge of the neighborhood, complete with a rope that swing for near death stunts. I’m painting a picture that sounds like it belongs in a Mark Twain novel. But there was one thing that Tom Sawyer never encountered and that was the Dairy Queen that sat on the front edge of our neighborhood.
The summer before 8th grade is a real minefield for boys (ok, actually for any human being. girl, boy, non binary, whatever). It is an age where you are easily influenced to test new boundaries. And for me, I found that in the summer before my 8th grade year I had one helluva an arm throwing eggs at cars.
I ran around with the same bunch of goofballs I’d run around with since we moved into that neighborhood. Mark, Doug, Jason, and a few other dudes, all my age, all basically good kids, and all very curious to see what kind of mischief we could get into. I’m not sure who had the bright idea to start egging cars, but at some point in June of that year we discovered it was pretty amusing / dangerous to pelt unsuspecting cars with eggs as they passed by at night. We would lurk in the aforementioned crawdad headquarters, the deep culverts in the middle of the neighborhood, waiting for a car to pass by. We’d spring to action lobbing the eggs at the cars and then leap into hiding, waiting to see if they noticed the egg on the side of their car. Some did notice and immediately stopped. We’d “scramble” (I’m sorry / not sorry) into the pipes and hide out knowing that no one wanted to venture into those creepy ass culverts to come find us.
There was a problem with this strategy for egging cars though. Given that it was the evening, there were fewer cars to terrorize. Our parents only let us stay out so late after all. Someone in our group said we should start egging cars in the middle of the day when we had more time. And more opportunity. I stood back.
The middle of the day? I mean who was this guy. Were we brazen criminals? Running around in the sunshine committing petty crimes? We kinda stood around contemplating this bold move when he said “I have the perfect spot”. He then lead us to a corner of the neighborhood we rarely ventured. The front corner contained a cul-de-sac that had a spooky abandoned house that we always avoided because, well, it felt like Stranger Things before Stranger Things was The Thing. But we went to this house and snuck into the backyard. A few boards were busted out of the fence revealing the back of the neighborhood Dairy Queen.
Now, the rest of this story does not contemplate my life long addiction to Peanut Buster Parfaits. Instead, it details how on a regular afternoon summer day while all of our parents were at work, we loaded up on eggs, descended to this house, and proceeded to egg cars as they went through the drive thru at Dairy Queen.
Can you imagine the indignity of having to explain that you were at a DQ at 3pm on a Thursday when you were supposed to be working and some neighborhood dickheads hit your car with eggs? Terrible, terrible.
When we’d hit a car while they were waiting for their softserv, most people would just look around not knowing what the thump was. Some folks opened their car door and looked around. Another person rolled their window down and started yelling indiscriminately into the ether that “they’d find us!” Hahahah. Sure pal. Sure.
But it was the 4th or 5th (or 10th?) car that we discovered what “old man speed” is. We’re still not sure if the guy was actually a sprinter, super human, a member of the S.W.A.T. team, or what but my faulty memory recalls one of us hitting his car and within .125 seconds the guy was shot out of his car like a cannonball in the direction of the house we were reigning fire from. One of us was on the roof, the rest of us in the back yard and when we saw him coming our way we dropped our eggs and hauled ass. It was like that scene in Stand By Me where they’re on the bridge trying to outrun the train. I was the Jerry O’Connell character, running, crying, wondering if I was going to die.
Fortunately I made it home and slammed the door. We all went our separate ways, not knowing if we’d made it home in one piece. A few hours went by and I sat nervously by the phone wondering what was going to happen next.
Then a call came in. It was the mom of one of The Egging Crew. I hung up. She called back. I hung up again. She didn’t immediately call back and I waited, and waited. The circumstances of what, exactly, happened next are still fuzzy to me but at some point, the Mom ultimately won (as they always do) and managed to get in touch with my dad, on duty that weekend because my mom was in Atlanta with my new stepdad searching for a place for us to live in what would become my adopted hometown.
My dad wasn’t much for giving me the lessons of life but he did come into the room and look and me and say “you’re going to have to apologize to your mom when she gets home. And to the Dairy Queen”.
I already knew I was going to have to apologize to my mom. And I was not looking forward to that. But….to the Dairy Queen? How the hell was that going to work??
Apologizing to the Dairy Queen proved to be much easier than I thought. My dad loaded me into the car and we drove over to the main entrance. We walked in and he asked for the manager. The manager appeared and my dad looked at him, then looked at me and said “TJ, do you have something to say?”.
“I’m sorry for egging the cars that came through your drive thru”. Seriously, I apologized to this sweet manager who had no idea what had happened since he wasn’t on shift when the incident went down. But you know what? This apology stuck with me! My parents enforced upon me that every little infraction regardless of whom it was against came with a guilty plea. And now that I have kids, I feel the same way. When our girls cross someone (at this age, usually their sister), it has to come with an “I’m sorry for doing [xyz]”. I think it enforces a sense of accountability.