Mrs. Kedzierski didn’t dig kids

“What if she finds the body? Oh, man, we should never have buried it there!”

This is not a sentence a guy would normally utter over a phone line, especially if he knew Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in.

But I was ten years old; the word “consequences” was not to be found in my vocabulary.

These were the days of the party line, back when four or five families — usually neighbors — all shared a single phone line. It seems impossible now, one step removed from smoke signals or beating sticks on a hollow log, but it happened kiddies, in the Long, Long Ago.

At any rate, every time anyone made or received a call, it was a given that Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in, probably taking notes. As she no doubt was now.

“Why did we kill him?” Jim moaned.

Jim was my buddy from down the street.

“Just keep your mouth shut and nobody’s ever going to find out,” I said, ad-libbing my end of our pre-arranged dialogue. “We buried him deep enough. Don’t worry.”

“But what if Mrs. Kedzierski starts digging around in her old garden? Oh man oh man…” Jim whined, adding just a touch too much breathless trepidation, in my opinion.

I heard a gasp, neither my own or Jim’s. Mrs. Kedzierski, of course, forgetting in her surprise to cup her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

Mrs. Kedzierski lived next door. She wasn’t as old as Moses, but she could remember when he played tight end on the varsity football team during her sophomore year of high school. 

She spoke just enough English to holler at the neighborhood kids who wandered too close to her yard (this included walking on “her” sidewalk). She was also diligent about reporting any juvenile transgression to the neighborhood’s parental contingent.

Nobody under 13 liked her and to all appearances that feeling was reciprocated with a vengeance.

Which was why Jim and I were doing our best to convince her we’d buried a dead kid in her garden. 

We’d planned this little caper a couple days in advance and had snuck out the night before with shovels to loosen the soil around the October remnants of her shriveled tomatoes and snap peas.

“Look,” I said, sotto voce. “Just keep your damn mouth shut and no one will ever know.” I figured using a swear would convince her if nothing else did, that we were unaware of her eavesdropping. Heaven knows Jim’s chops as an actor were not going to do it.

“OK, OK,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and hung up before Jim could gum up the works with any more of his over-acting.

Two minutes later Jim’s StingRay bike skidded to a halt in the alley bordering my side door. We watched from my upstairs bedroom window as Mrs. Kedzierski lurched to her garden, shovel in hand. 

She was out there digging for nearly two hours.

I never did figure out why she hated kids.

Lousy parents (like me) can scare their kids to death

Just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more guilty about the lousy job I did raising my kids, along comes the news that children can actually be startled to death. I don’t know whether this is really true; I read it in someone else’s column and columnists are notorious liars.

But even if it might be true, this news is going to put a big crimp in millions of games of peek-a-boo.

If it is true, well, all I can say is it’s a miracle my son lived into adulthood.

I didn’t really do a “lousy job” of raising my kids, but I was for the most part a young, single parent and I made my share of mistakes. The worst of these was teasing Jordan—the most “believing” kid who ever lived—whenever the opportunity presented itself.

By the time he was seven years old, Jordan believed the following things: 1) round bales of hay lying in fields are actually giant rabbit pellets, left there for the benefit of giant rabbits residing in nearby woods; 2) a fierce gorilla lived in a locked garage near the restaurant where we dined every Friday evening; 3) fried chicken was made in a factory and definitely not in any way related to the cute, little birds; 4) Care Bears were real and watched over us daily from their vantage points on fluffy, cumulous clouds.

He believed all these things because his father (me) told him so. For all I know, he believes them still. Jordan was a smart kid, but he definitely put the “bull” in gullible.

Anyway, as a natural born prankster, I delighted in playing little tricks on my trusting son.

The best (or worst) of these took place one night at my dad’s restaurant, an older building requiring a lot of after-hours cleanup. Jordan often accompanied me to do the floors; he liked racing donuts with his remote-controlled car on the just-washed tiles.

The old furnace there made creepy ticking sounds for a couple minutes prior to firing up. During the day these were barely noticeable, but at night, echoing around the big, empty dining room, they were scary-sounding, even to me.

While Jordan happily raced his RC hotrod between table legs, I set a loud kitchen timer for three minutes.

“I’ll be back in the office for a sec,” I told Jordan. “If you hear an alarm, come get me right away, because that means the furnace is about to blow. The whole place could go!”

Jordan responded as he always did: “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It should be OK, though, so long as you tell me as soon as you hear the alarm go off.”

I retreated to the office and watched through the one-way glass looking out over the dining room. Jordan continued to pilot his car, but now kept glancing nervously at the heating vent, from which the ticking sound ominously emanated. This went on for a few minutes, with Jordan becoming increasingly uneasy.

The timer went off with a loud beep. Jordan jumped and began edging backward toward the office door, his eyes never leaving the heating vent.

Four feet, three feet, two…just as he reached the door I leapt out, yelling KAPOW! at full volume.

My seven-year-old son burst into tears.

We stopped at the ice cream shop on the way home and Jordan was allowed to order whatever he wanted, up to and including the entire store and the vehicles of each and every employee. This did nothing to assuage my much-deserved guilt, but it did help slow Jordan’s quivering lower lip.

OK, maybe I was a lousy parent after all. I’m just glad I didn’t kill the kid.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.