I am the oldest child

The reliable one; the dependable one; the responsible one....

The Ringleader.

Oh yes. It was I who organized assaults on the victim du jour. I don't know why it never occured to my little brothers to join forces and gang up on me, but they never did. Since there were three of us, our battles were always gloriously one sided, two on one, and I was ALWAYS on the winning team.

I don't know what made me think of this, but this is one of my more vivid childhood memories. It was the time I learned what it meant to "hog tie" something...or someone!

I used to read a lot as a kid. I still read more than anyone I know, but not as much as I did back then. So I learned a lot about things that weren't necessarily a part of my world. I don't remember what book I got the information from, but I knew when I read about hog tying that I had to try it out on someone. I just needed the opportunity to arise.

Well, one day, my mom decided to go to the store for something, I don't know what. She used to leave us alone all the time, and that's when we would really get up to trouble. I was mad at the middle child for some reason, and he knew it. I rounded up my youngest brother and got him behind me. The plan was set.

As soon as my mom's car left the driveway, we attacked. We wrestled him to the ground, and I held him while my younger brother ran to get a bedsheet. We wound it into a rope and used it to tie his wrists and ankles together behind his back. He lay there, belly on the floor, arms and legs twisted behind him, like the turkey he was. He was bawling and howling, so I knew we had to shut him up. Younger brother came to the rescue with a sock to roll up and shove in his mouth. Dirty, of course.

So we had him tied up, and the question was, NOW what do we do with him? We poked him and teased him and called him names. We were really rotten and cruel children. This lasted for only a minute or two, and then the worst happened:

We heard our mom's car pull up in the driveway.

We tried to get the bedsheet off him, but it was no use. I had tied the dang knots too tight. The only option left was to hide him somewhere and hope that she left again quickly, since she had only been gone a few minutes in the first place.

Our apartment had a very strange layout. It was shaped like the letter "L". You walked in, and there was the living room. Straight through there and you were in the kitchen, then my bedroom. Hang a right, and there was a walk in closet that connected my room and my brother's bedroom. Another right from their room took you into the bathroom.

We decided to hide him in the boy's room. He was way too heavy for the two of us to even attempt to carry, so we did the only logical thing: we dragged him. Across the living room, into the kitchen. We only made it as far as the far end of my kitchen when my mom walked in.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

She was PISSED. Immediate, instant pissed. My younger brother looked at me. "Um, playing?" I said, looking down at the brother who was bound at my feet. Tears were streaming down his face, and snot too, and his mouth was held open by the crusty gray sock that was protruding from it.

Yeah, she beat the holy crap out of us that day. Then we had to each stay on our beds and stare at the corner the remainder of the day. Not the middle child, of course. He would wander in and mock us when she wasn't looking. And he wondered why we got him in the first place!