Teenagers, Chess, and Toilet Tissue

As a young teenager there weren’t many other girls my age in the old neighborhood. In fact,   the girls who did live close by were either five or six years younger than me or a couple of years older than me. So I rode bikes and played board games with my brother and several other boys. On warm nights we would gather on the front porch of our house and play Chess. Between all of us we had three or four Chess boards with one player extra who would watch the games in progress. When one game ended, the extra player would take one of the loser’s place while the others shifted opponents. We rotated opponents and passed the evenings pleasantly enough with game after game of Chess.

 

One warm evening when I was the odd man out and waiting for my turn, a movement on the street caught my eye. Two boys on a motorcycle coasted silently down the street with the headlight turned off. I alerted the guys and we watched as they stopped in front of a house further down the block. The boys began to decorate the trees and bushes of the house with toilet paper. One of the guys in our group yelled in a deep voice, “Hey! I’m going to call the cops!” The culprits dropped everything, jumped on their motorcycle, and beat a very hasty retreat. It was a hilarious scene and the guys left behind numerous rolls of toilet paper which we collected and then stored away for later use. We began to watch for other teenagers attempting to toilet paper homes in our neighborhood. By the end of that summer we had accumulated dozens of rolls of toilet paper. On Halloween we must have decorated most of the houses in the neighborhood with toilet paper! What teenagers will do when given a chance! In our defense, we only decorated the houses of other teenagers we knew. At least we all learned to play Chess!