Sunday is a great day around the Hobgood Household. A lot of genius ideas have been concocted that revolve around terrorizing the Papa Johns people, Sam’s flowers and cheesecake (must have whip cream and strawberries/tart cherries), the Civic ramping the railroad tracks, and more terrorizing – this time of Best Buy employees. And I’m still sad Backyard Burger is closed. A perfect end to a Sunday of debauchery was a BB Lemonade. However, these things have nothing to do with this particular Sunday in question, I’m just giving you some flavor of what Sundays hold for the Hobgood Kids (HKs).
And the HKs consist of: Me; The sister: Andrea; and the Little Brother (or LB): Kevin. For three months we are all reunited, while the rest of the nine months Kevin leaves The Blind and The Blinder for college. We’re hardly able to get him back…perhaps this next story holds the key as to why…
This past Sunday we were at LBs softball game. We missed half of the game due to Rock Band (*cough* rocking out to Hole and getting “those cute little outfits” *cough* my sister *cough* for our “people.”) and an usually not enforced rule called the Run Rule. This failure to enforce said Run Rule usually means the 8 p.m. game starts at 8:30 p.m. if you’re lucky. So when we left, we thought we had plenty of time to get to his game.
Well, that was wrong. And, we were so keyed up from rocking the fuck out of XBOX, that with ten minutes and one full inning left in the game we came up with a brilliant idea. Kevin had just hit the third out of the inning, by hitting a pop-up that even the most inexperienced kindergartner could’ve caught. He tosses the bat at the dug out, disgusted with himself, then takes his batting glove off and goes to throw it over the fence into the dugout. Well, his bat wasn’t the only thing off at that precise moment. His throw was also off and the glove sailed onto the tin roof of the dugout.
Andrea and I start cracking up and I make the comment, “It’s going to be hilarious to see him climb his ass up there and retrieve his glove.” The laughter suddenly stops. My comment sets the wheels in motion for the moron twin’s next moronic plot. We look each other in the eye, not speaking a word, but just knowing we were on the same page.
“Where are you going?” our dad asks.
“To make asses out of ourselves,” I rightly reply. I say rightly because even I couldn’t begin to imagine the sheer moronicness of what was about to happen.
We walk over to the picnic table stationed behind the dugout and hop up to see the location of Kevin’s glove. It’s toward the front corner (closer to the field than the stands).
“I want on your shoulders,” Andrea replies.
“Well, climb up and stand on them,” I say my mind quickly skipping back to the lost cheerleader days. Shh…it wasn’t a good time for me having just quit gymnastics and not having any other sport to do.
“I want to sit,” she says and proceeds to sit on my shoulders.
I walk her over the place within the closest reach of the gloves and watch as she reaches up, her hands gripping the tin roof. She removes her legs from my shoulder and anchors her toes into the diamonds holes of the metal chain link fence.
“I can’t reach it,” she squeaks. She then proceeds to unhook her feet and kick them back and forth.
The people who had shifted their attention from the game and their sons were laughing at us by now, causing the few still loyal to their college-age sons to turn and watch the show unfolding in front of them.
I pick up Andrea’s shoes and attempt to put them on her kicking feet, successfully planting the left one before she dropped.
“You were supposed to catch my feet and lower me down,” she says while trying to shake the powdery dirt from the right foot.
“I thought you wanted your shoes for protection from the dirt,” I said.
She rolls her eyes and a spectator who went to school with my brother (and both of us know) approaches us with a big, sturdy, twisted limb and recommends we use this.
“Eeww, there’s a pad on it,” I say grossed out.
“It’s not a pad,” he says.
“More like a ped,” Andrea responds (for those of you unfamiliar, peds are those miniature sock thingies. Yeah, really ridiculous things).
“Whatever, you’re not holding that stick while you’re on my shoulders.”
I get another eye roll and we reconvene at the picnic table and take another look at the errant glove.
“I need something to move the glove,” she quietly says. I know immediately where her thoughts are going – to the stick – and try to persuade her to climb the chain-link fence while I stand on the ground and spot her. She doesn’t even take my case seriously and climbs on again.
I walk over to the same spot, passing the trash can and feel my body lurch in the direction of the trash can. My equilibrium is thrown and I do a nice little tap dance routine trying to right myself with my sister wobbling on my shoulder making me top heavy.
“Hold still,” she mutters and reaches her hand out for the pad-encrusted-tree limb that was thrown in the garbage. This is when it dawns on me that I nearly ate the ground because my sister has decided to use the stick, exactly like I knew she would, to retrieve the glove.
With the stick firmly in her grasp, she struggles to get it up (That’s what she said) as I walk back over to the dugout. Once we’re in position, she raises the limb onto the roof of the dugout and I get this mental image in my head of a chimp inserting a stick into an ant hole and pulling out ants to eat. She has no luck, the stick scratching the tin roof, the people laughing even more at the show unfolding, and she tells me to step closer. As I do, Kevin’s team catches the third out and runs back into the dugout.
Red, a lithe, quick, agile, little fucker asks what we’re doing. Andrea tells him, and in less than three seconds, Red climbs the fence, grabs the glove and jumps back down, leaving Andrea with a stick and a pad in hand.
“Well I feel ridiculous now,” Andrea says.
The mission over, I turn away from the dugout, head to the trashcan to deposit the disgusting limb, and dismount my sister. I forgot to take into account the powdery dirt and her shoeless form. She begins running in place saying something about the dirt until I get her shoes on.
But the story is far from over. After making an ass out ourselves, Andrea decides she wants a shaved ice. She gets strawberry lemonade one with three gummy worms (so good!) and shares them with me (the worms). The shaved ice, she doesn’t eat. How strawberry lemonade can taste like Cherry Coke is beyond me, but it does.
“What do I do with this?” Andrea asks because the concoction was way too nasty to eat.
“I don’t know,” I say as we turn onto a certain road. “Throw it at a car…or a mailbox."
“Or the Smiths![1] Great idea!” she quickly tags onto my sentence and then rolls down the window as we roll pass the Smith’s driveway. She hangs her hand out the window and turns the shaved ice over, splattering the messy beverage onto their driveway.
“Nice,” I said.
“I know,” she smirks. “That’s gonna be a sticky mess.” She begins to look around my car. “I cut ya deep,” she says, her eyes skirting over the nonexistent mess in car. “When I get mad at you, you have to watch out, I’ll cut you deep,” she repeats.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Oh, uh, do you have anything else to throw?” she asks.
[1] Names have been changed. Just know that we don’t like these people or their kids.
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