It's not Kool-Aid

Age 4

         

I am sure this is where it all began. It was a warm spring day, not too warm, but hey its California so the sun has some heat to it. The countryside is rolling with amber waves of dead fields. In the faint distance you can hear a dog bark followed by the baying of the most annoying donkey ever. The clanking of the chain, placed on the top of our back door follows. Mom says the chain is "So the wind won't blow it away in the winter." We think it's so Mom and Dad can hear us when we come back in. We call it the warning. Once my brother said that if you open and shut the door really slow than they can't hear it, but decide that is too much work...hey when your excited to go out and play you hardly do anything slowly.

Today was like any other day, I followed my brother wherever he went. He was tired of that so he devised a plan to make it stop. Next to our horse barn was a large, round, rusted, metal barrel. Upon closer inspection it was more than rusted it was very old. The barrel had a little spicket on the bottom allowing for liquid to be removed. What liquid would be kept in a rusty ol' barrel? As kids are very curious we decided to inspect it. Only now do I realize that my brother already knew what was inside. I still don’t know if it was he had been planning it for a while or if the boy was a master mind at “making it up as we go along.” He stood by the barrel and called me and my cousin over.  

“So I heard Mom and Dad talking about this barrel last night.” He was smiling, but it didn’t strike me as a mischievous kind of smirk. Not like at that age I would have known the difference. “They said they keep the grape Kool-Aid here so we won’t sneak it in the middle of the night! Tell ya what you put your mouth under here and I will move this thing and the Kool-Aid will come out.” I was so excited. I heard once that Kool-Aid was crack for kids. It’s funny because it’s true. I loved Kool-Aid, and grape Kool-Aid was to me like the crack you buy that hasn’t been cut with anything and cost like a thousand dollars a snort. On hind site I should have been worried that he was going to share his gold with us. He was after all the one who found it, and in childhood we are all pirates when it comes to “finders, keepers.” The cunning behavior of my brother would have made Black Beard himself look like an angel. So here I was with my face under the barrel looking at the spicket wondering when the beautiful taste of purple heaven would cascade in my mouth. There was a funny smell but my brother assured me it was the old barrel rusting from all the sugar in the Kool-Aid. He opened the spicket and the gold that flowed from the rusty faucet was not purple but amber, a mixture of gasses for the farm tractor. Before my four-year-old brain could register the taste I had drank a few cups of the gas. The trick worked I was no longer my brothers shadow.

 

             I went inside the house telling Mom I didn’t feel well. Upon my arrival my mother could smell the reason for my sickness. Not knowing what to do she immediately feed me bread, trying to soak up the fuel in my stomach. As I began to throw up my cousin entered the room complaining of the same stomach upset. After administering the bread and having no reaction my parents rushed me and my cousin to the hospital. They were able to pump my cousins stomach but the real worry was me. Un be knownst to my mother inducing vomiting for gas ingestion was a big no no. The vomit would cause the gas to become a vapor and as I gagged to vomit again and again the gas vapor would enter my lungs and burn the little sacs I need to exchange oxygen into my body. After several tests and a few administrations of O2 it was determined that I would be scared for life. I would develop asthma, there was no doubt about it, and may have a hard time if ever I was to contact pneumonia. My mother was told, like any other wound, my lungs would need healing.

I think huffing the fumes of the gas damaged my brains ability to think things through entirely before committing myself to an action. So I blame this incidence for all the other things that I stupidly will do from this day on. Yes I stopped following my brother around, well for at least a while. He had left his God status on that rusty barrel and from that day on he was as annoying to me as I was to him.