When I was in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade the world was a different place.
I’d spend the night at Ronnie Vickery’s house and we’d stay awake until the wee hours of the morning. His family had a kind of game room above their detached garage, and that’s where we would play pool, horse around, and just as the sun was coming up, eventually drift off to sleep.
Late into the evening we’d roam around the neighborhood in search of entertainment. I don’t remember exactly what type(s) of entertainment we were hoping to find. I don’t remember if we ever really put all that much thought into what we were doing. And I don’t remember much about the specifics of what, in the way of entertainment, that we ever actually found. All I know is that I loved spending the night at Ronnie’s!
I do remember that on one the above-mentioned evenings we decided to go streaking. Thinking back, I can only imagine we were inspired by Ray Stevens’ song The Streak. We were probably up in the game room playing pool and listening to the radio (This was Houston, and based on our ages we were probably listening to 104 KRBE) when his song came on the radio. And the wheels began to spin.
What we decided to do was head out shirtless with only gym shorts on. We’d walk down to the end of the block, take off the gym shorts and run around the block.
All we knew is that streaking was running naked. It didn’t occur to either of us at the time that, even as the song suggested, to truly be “streaking” you needed to somewhere where not only people could see you, but somewhere where having a naked person might disrupt the venue. We were streaking around the block of a dimly lit neighborhood at 3:30am…not really the same thing.
However, like I said, that never crossed our minds. So off we went. Reaching the end of the block we made a quick, but extremely thorough, scan for life forms. Finding none, we stripped off out shorts and took off!
I’m not sure how far we got before we started talking, but I’m sure the conversation went something like this:
“This is cool! Right?”
“Yeah! I think I expected it to feel different.”
“I know. It’s not all that much different that just running, except I feel a little silly carrying these gym shorts.”
“So, how far are you supposed to go? I mean to really call it streaking.”
“I don’t think there’s set distance requirement. I’m pretty sure as long as you’re running and naked then it counts.”
“So, in theory, we could stop now and still have completed our objective?”
“I suppose, but we should probably run a bit farther.”
“Um, why?”
“Well that way when we tell the guys about this, and they ask how far we ran, we won’t have to say only about half a block.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“We could stop here and just say we ran around the whole block…I mean who would know?”
“That sounds good to me!”
And that was the end of our streaking. We stopped, put our shorts back, turned around and walked back to the garage. I think in the end we only ran about six houses, but we were cool.
Like I said, when I was in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade the world was a different place.
Or is it?
2 comments:
I made the mistake of reading this post right before supper tonight. Um - not good. The mental imagery that was painted in my mind of you running naked through a neighborhood adversely effected my appetite.
I'm not sure how this blogging thing is going to work out for you, but you may be onto a pretty good weight loss concept.
Oh, oh, oh! What in the world! If I ever had the least idea this was going on, Sue V. and I would have been on the phone forever and ever. Good thing moms don't really know everything, isn't it. Certainly not dads, the dads of you two guys.
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