After waking up in my own bed, nobody with me except for the teddy bear, I get up to have breakfast. Seeing that the kitchen is almost empty (what with the visitors that I have had lately - which I will save for another time), I poke around until I find something palatable. Chocolate chip cookies and grape Kool-Aid. With the sugar rush, I begin to space out. I don't even read the newspaper or turn on the television. But I do begin to experience "flashbacks" from when I was young.
My Mom says "We don't have any more bread or Pop Tarts for me to toast (i.e., burn), so choose what you want for breakfast." I choose Oreo cookies, Cheese Whiz, and a powdered fruit drink that I have forgotten the name of. (It was the precursor to Tang.) The cookies and the Cheeze Whiz are not burnt, but the fruit drink is watered down.
My brother and I run outside and start playing with our 3 inch tall army men. You know the ones - in different poses, with different weapons, scattered all over the ground, green. Except today, my brother and I heard a story on the news about these people who ate magic mushrooms and went a little crazy. So we pull out a 2 foot tall stuffed bear and a 2 foot tall stuffed Easter bunny and have them attack the army men. The bear and the bunny have eaten the magic mushrooms, grown to 50 times their regular size, and gone a little crazy. It is a tough battle, but the bear and the bunny end up winning. They won because they pulled out the garden hose and flooded out the army men. (We were finding army men scattered about the yard for the next 3 months.) The army men did, however, launch a nuclear bomb against the bear and the bunny, but they missed. We had seen Lyndon Johnson's famous nuclear bomb attack ad on Barry Goldwater and decided to use it against the bear and the bunny.
Eventually we all tire out. My brother and I go play one of our favorite games - Shoebox Derby. We take a pair of my Mom's high heel shoes - she doesn't have many, but she has some - set them at the end of two long narrow boards, lift the end of the boards where the high heels are, and see which shoe makes it to the bottom first. We try various combinations of treatment to the board to make the shoes go down the board quicker without tipping over the sides of the board. We try cooking oil, vaseline, pencil graphite, and other board treatments. All of these treatments got us into trouble because they make such a mess.