The Wonder Years

A couple of days ago, I was talking about old-school Nintendo with a friend. And I was telling her how I used to play Mega Man with my next-door neighbor until we were bleeding from the eyeballs. And it opened a dam of memories for me, even though I've had those brief "I wonder what they're up to" thoughts from time to time.

We were an unlikely combo--he, two years behind me in school, and a boy to top it off, I functioned as he and his sister's babysitter. Yet, we had so much fun together. Plus, I could beat Snake Man, and so I was useful to the cause.

When I babysat, it was like playtime to the fortieth degree. I would let he and his sister (four years younger than me, as I recall) stay up til midnight--if they made it that long--and we would have a literal midnight snack. Then when the headlights appeared in the driveway, I'd yell "run! goodnight!" and they'd hop upstairs and feign sleep. One time they went to bed a normal hour and I heard a scary noise by the backdoor. I woke him up to check it out. Some babysitter.

I remember calling the local Top-40 radio station and requesting "7" by Prince—while I was making pancakes, no less—and the DJ playing the song. The kids thought I was a celebrity--my squeaky voice made it on the radio--and we ran around the house screaming and laughing after Tone E Fly played me.

Other times, we created whole new worlds with our imaginations—the swingset was sinking ship, we were scientists saving the world with our potions, or, more often, we pretended we were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I was always April, the reporter (some things never change, I guess).

My bedroom and his bedroom faced each other, although he was upstairs and I was downstairs. But all it took was a well-timed whisper or a blink of a flashlight, and we could chat away the evening long after we were supposed to be in bed asleep.

We raced down the street on our bikes, played ditch in the connecting backyards, set up a school, opened up a business selling lemonade. We pooled my babysitting money and our quarters and chewed grape Bubblelicious and ate Slow Pokes til we were sick.

The weekends where he and his sister went to his dad's house were pretty quiet for me. There weren't many kids in the neighborhood—and the ones that lived there, I didn't like. No imagination in those kids.

He and his sister were my buddies. His sister was a darling little girl, all giggles and dimples, who I loved to dress up and put makeup on (again, some things never change). She was a little sister to me, something I craved as the baby of the family.

Hide and seek. The Game of Life. Fresca. Taking pictures with my purple plastic camera that used disk film. Trips to the Science Museum. Jumping in piles of leaves, cartwheeling through the sprinkler, walking to the city pool, biking to the park. Ice skating. Renting video games and eating bomb pops til our mouths were blue.

We wouldn't go home for dinner 'til we were called by our moms at least twice. For some reason, my memories of those dinner bells were always in the fall, our hands like ice, our faces reddened from the wind.