When Grandma What A Little Girl #9

Story #9 - The Hoover Vacuum Cleaner business and naughty little twins! Oh My!
Have you ever put on a skit for your family or just for yourself or your brothers and sisters or friends?

My brother Douglas and his friend Larry Cunningham were buddies. Their family lived about 3 blocks away from us. A few years later their family bought one of the houses my dad built that was behind us.

We had a swimming pool that my dad built but after a few years we lost interest in swimming in it and it was left empty, no water in it. So my brother Douglas and his friend Larry decided to have a skit and create their own play business. They were probably about 12 or 13 years old. So that meant I was probably about 9 years old. They built a set and strung a rope across the middle of the pool with an old blanket thrown across to make an office space. They had little desk made out of boxes. They were ‘Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Salesman.’ They had my mom’s old Hoover vacuum and they made an office and it was pretty cool.

Well, they didn’t like my twin brother and I hanging around there. We ‘weren’t allowed’ in there without permission. We did not like that rule very well. We felt ‘left out!’ One morning my brother Gayle and I went up the street to where Larry and his family lived. Larry had a younger brother Lewis that was our age and two younger sisters, Linda and Pam. We knocked on the door and nobody answered. The door wasn’t locked. (Growing up when I was young, people did not lock their doors. We did not have problems with people breaking in and stealing from you. You felt pretty safe. It’s not like today were you have to lock you doors because people will break in.) Well, we went in and called out to see if anybody was home but no one answered. We should have turned right around and went home! We should have never even gone IN their house in the first place! I got the bright idea to ‘look around.’ I was curious! Larry’s dad Leroy smoked cigarettes. He smoked a lot. I looked into a kitchen cupboard and found some small packs of matches. I took some. We should not have; it was wrong! It was stealing! We took them without asking. We knew better. We left their house and as we went out the front door I said something like, ‘goodbye and we’ll see ya later.’ I said that in case any neighbors were looking. (What a pair of naughty twins we were!) My brother and I went home. Then we thought, 'We’re going to be in trouble because we know we’re not supposed to play with matches and mom will wonder where we got them.’ So we had to get rid of the evidence! So we went to the pool where Douglas and Larry built the set for their vacuum cleaner office. We climbed down into the pool. Like ‘ naughty little twins’ we lit the matches and burned little holes in the curtain they had and in their cardboard props. Then we threw the match stubs down and left.

---Talk about being dumb!
We burned holes in things and then threw the matches down! (Right now as your Grandma is writing this I am laughing myself silly at how dumb we were! Not to mention what little demons we were!)

You can guess what happened next!
Gayle and I were in the house playing and minding our own business and my brother Douglas stormed into the house and told my mom what happened to his set he built in the pool and how it had to be the ‘twins’ that did it! My mom went out to ‘inspect the ruins.’ I can remember thinking my twin brother and I should hide, but we weren’t quick enough. My mom charged back into the house and called both of us out and marched us straight to the pool! ‘Guilt’ was written all over our faces! The first thing she asked was if we did the damage! We nodded our heads and said, ‘yes.’ We looked pretty scared. We knew we were in deep trouble! Then she asked, ‘Where did you get those matches?’ We told her about going to Larry’s house and taking them out of the cupboard. Then she made us tell Larry’s mom what we did. That was awful! I don’t know how my twin brother Gayle felt, but I can tell you I felt like the biggest criminal in the world and I would go straight to jail for what I did! I vaguely remember that Dolores, Larry’s mom, wasn’t too upset and that we were just kids. That is NOT how my mom felt however. We had to clean up the mess. Well, first we had to apologize to Douglas and Larry for what we did, then we cleaned up the mess and we got spanked and we were grounded! We never did anything like ever again!