Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Speedway

Have you ever spent the better part of 4 hours searching for loose change throughout the house just so that you could go to the gas station to buy ramen noodles, soda, cheetos, cappuccino, and candy? I have. This was a regular pass time of my siblings and I.
Not being allowed to have any sort of junk food, we would wait until we were home alone or until our parents were distracted, and then go to Speedway, the gas station about 3 or 4 blocks away, on our bikes, and somehow carry multiple bags of snacks and boiling hot cappuccinos back to our house. There were many times where only one or two of us would go to get cappuccinos for all 4 or 5 of us. We had to ride our bikes no-handed, or with one finger on the break. Honestly, I'm surprised we still have skin on our hands and arms even after all the burning liquid.
Another problem with out methods was the ridiculous amount of change we used to pay for these forbidden snacks. We very rarely had any paper money. In fact, it was mostly pennies. None of us wanted to have to go up to the register with handfuls of pennies, so this is how it usually went: "Okay, if you go in and pay this time, I'll carry all the cappuccinos" A fair trade. Then the appointed 6 year old kid would slowly shuffle up to the register and pay for about $20 worth of junk food in mostly pennies, avoiding eye contact all the while. Usually, we would have to meet at the end of the cal de sac or at the playground and consume the majority of our food so we could ditch the evidence of the items that wouldn't fit under out shirts before going home. Even then, we would have to do our usual method in reverse to get back into the house. Send a "volunteer" scout to assess the location of our parents, who inevitably gets caught and is made to vacuum, thereby creating the necessary diversion for us to sneak inside with the stuff.
Like I said in an earlier post, that method was used every day for everything.

2 comments:

  1. We just swiped change from mom's purse then blamed it on the youngest kid. And we pretty much only bought gum. No fancy cappuccinos or ramen for us! Of course, we had a lot more supervision than you younger kids. No real chance to scour the house for change, and no way we would've been able to sneak anything in the house that didn't fit in our pockets.

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