In the front yard of the house I grew up in we had an enormous tree that filled up the sky with its branches when you looked upwards. The thing was massive. My parents looked into removing it on numerous occasions because insurance appraisers warned of how fucked our house would be if it got struck by lightning, but it was always way too expensive to justify the cost.

I hated that tree. It shed sticks all over our front lawn like I would imagine some enormous dog sheds dog hair all over your favorite living room chair. This had two implications: first, running or playing in the front yard bare foot was stupid if the sticks had recently fallen. Second, over the years my Dad developed an obsession with getting the sticks off our lawn - I think for both cosmetic and practical purposes (so he could mow the lawn without turning our yard into a mixture of grass and wood chips) - and when he wasn’t picking them up himself, he made one of his three children pick up the sticks every time a gust of wind flew through the neighborhood. I can’t event count how many Saturday mornings I spent picking up sticks and putting them into the garbage bin while my friends were off building tree houses down the street.

Eventually, I got sick of the routine of bringing the sticks back to the garbage bin and instead started throwing them - throwing isn’t event the right word. I was whipping them - chucking them as far as I could. I was the greatest stick thrower in the world. No one had ever thrown a stick as far as I could. And I was positive, sure of it, I knew people were looking to make use of these skills. Someone needed a 12 year-old boy with extraordinary stick throwing abilities to work with them to design space ships or write comic books or star in major motion picture movies next to Michael Keaton. Or maybe someone was recruiting for the Olympic Stick Throwing Team and they knew the perfect place to start would be in the suburbs of Minneapolis. It did not matter, they were looking for me and I was going to give them every opportunity to find me.

So, I decided that I needed to make sure that everyone that passed by my house knew a kid lived there who threw sticks like no one else in the world. I would gather a pile of sticks and wait. I would see a car coming down the street, grab a stick, wind up, and whip the stick as far away from our yard as I could, making sure I timed the release perfectly to allow the passerby a vivid picture of how incredible my throw was. They loved it. I did the same thing over and over and over to people. Even if it was the same car that passed by two minutes earlier in the opposite direction, they got another stick and would clap the second time they saw it. I did this to bikers, walkers, runners, other kids on bikes, even Tommy (who I hated) got a stick and he loved it. Everyone was amazed; they were stunned; in awe of what was happening in front of their eyes. 12 year-olds aren’t supposed to throw sticks like that. I swear, some of the sticks I threw never even came down to the ground. Crowds formed until the whole street was blocked off and I was just throwing stick after stick after stick after stick while the world cheered.

No one ever came from the Olympic Committee on Stick Throwing. My Dad did, however, get pissed when the neighbors started complaining that their idiot son was throwing all of his tree’s sticks into their yard.

I miss being young.