My First Bromance

I was a military brat in the earliest years in my life. Then my Mom married my Dad. See Dad was retired military, but I think his twenty some years in the service gave him a sense of wanderlust that had us moving every few years or so. I have no life long childhood friends. I couldn't tell you where a friend of mine since second grade is because quite frankly I don't even know the name of that elementary school the was in Belfaire Washington.

In one of our bigger moves we wound up in Blue Mound Texas. There is nothing spectacular about the neighborhood where we lived in Blue Mound Texas. It wasn't a bad neighborhood. Not by a far shot. It just wasn't an amazing place in my mind save for one aspect. My first Bromance. A bromance is a highly formed friendship between male friends, or "bro's". Back before this clever slang was coined I called Brian Killebrew my best friend.

Brian and I were inseparable. Where you saw one, you also saw the other. We developed special languages. We crashed our dirt bikes in the various bike trails that were positioned in a slightly wooded area behind the open field next to our neighborhood. We teased our sisters relentlessly as the sacred unwritten sibling laws dictate.

We were Webelo scouts in the same troop. My dad was the... I'm not really sure what you'd call him. Den Leader I guess. He certainly wasn't a "Den Mother". Anyways we did cool things like build catapults, make sugar crystals, and create tin art. Under the watchful eye of my dad we were pretty well behaved. Dad was the notorious strictest father around. We knew we had to be cool.

But then my parents went out of town to visit my ailing Grandmother in Minnesota (where I was born by the way) and My parents left my sister and I at the Kilebrews house for the week or whatever. That's when Brian and I shined. Within a day we had consumed an entire box of Froot Loops, dug in the trash on garbage day and found metal poles to stick on the neighbors electric fence, and the grandest scheme of all that involved what else, but tormenting our sisters.

It was at this time in American History that Cabbage Patch dolls were out of control. I don't know if anyone remembers how weird it was, but they were a company that showed footage of their dolls being born in a cabbage field, birthed by a strange nurse/farmer hybrid lady. If you were one of the lucky little girls to get one of these freaky looking dolls, then you filled out adoption papers to make sure that the doll was officially your child/doll... Crazy. So when these dolls were a craze there were of course these knock off dolls that you could buy. However if you were a family of like seven (the Kilebrews) and had to stretch the dollars then you simply made your daughter a cabbage patch knock off doll on your sewing machine. Now these home made deals weren't all that sturdy and Carrie, Brian's sister had like ten of these dolls but only two of them were intact. Eight bald cabbage patch dolls were all about the girls' room. So when they were playing tea or whatever we decorated the room with these dolls.

Couldn't tell you were the inspiration had come from, but by the time we were done we had these doll heads pushed on the bedposts, with the bodies strewn about the room wherever we could cram them. In the end the room looked like a Cannibal's Thanksgiving. Really morbid. So we wait. Along comes Carrie down the hall while we were across the hall in the boys' room. You would have thought that we used real babies the way Carrie and my sister Jeni Reacted. Carrie dropped her doll in hand, held her hands over her mouth and screamed. Jeni followed suit, but to this day I feel like she wouldn't have reacted this way if Carrie hadn't. So we laughed. The reaction was HUGE. Much better than we had hoped for. I can only imagine that we looked like little devils laughing and carrying on at the plight of our sisters. At least I'm sure that's what it looked like when Brian's mom came rushing to find out what all of the commotion was. Or maybe it was the grim display of Cabbage Patch corpses that got us that severe spanking from Tom, Brian's father.

We moved the following summer. Not because of the Cabbage Patch ceremony, but because my Dad got a better job, and we found ourselves in a better suburb. Brian and I drifted apart. I met my second Bromance. I'm sure he did too. But in the highlights of Bromance #1 I think of round decapitated Cabbage Patch doll heads and find that they make me smile.