Sunday, April 26, 2009

Because Boxes Make The Best Forts

I've been feeling nostalgic for the good ol' days when everyday was funny back when I was a teenager so I thought I'd tell you a story from those days.
One day, I must have been 16, my friends and I, bored with the summer days and tired of the same old stuff decided that we wanted to build an amazing fort like we did when we were kids. This sounds more difficult than it sounds because you can't just use anything. You need big boxes and to make your life easier, finding big boxes that are all the same size is a good idea. We had no idea where to find these but since my friend's parents worked at Wal-Mart, we thought that that'd be a good idea of where to start.
We went to the Wal-Mart and found out that they DID have boxes and they were free but that we had to come at 6 in the morning and you had to just take what they gave you (meaning they would be all different sizes and shapes). Disappointed but not yet dissuaded by the idea, we thought well, we'll just buy them, I mean, how much can a box cost? Actually quite a lot, which we found out quite quickly. I think it was around a dollar and thirty cents a box, and to make a really good fort, we needed at least 30 boxes. Being poor teenagers, we decided that this would not work either. We didn't know what to do and were about to give up when my best friend all the sudden said, "Wait. I know what to do. Let's go back to the van and I'll tell you what to do."
In those days, my mother had a purple mini-van which I drove everywhere. I didn't have a car and my friends didn't either so my mother's purple mini-van was our only mode of transportation. We were so cool.
So, we went back to the mini-van and my friend instructed me to drive around to the back of Wal-Mart. He pointed to a storage closet that was on the outside of the building. He said, "I remembered that they store boxes over here that they plan to re-use. When I say go, me and him (my other friend) will get out and grab these boxes and we'll jump in and you hit the gas." I started laughing and I was about to protest the whole idea but we were already to the closet and before I knew it, my friend had yelled, "Go!" and jumped out and started throwing boxes in the car. They couldn't keep it together though. All three of us were dying of laughter and the two throwing the boxes couldn't even get any boxes cuz they were laughing so hard. They finally finished and jumped in and yelled, "Go! Go! Go!" to which I slammed on the gas and sped off.
I realized pretty quickly though that nobody had saw us so I slowed down and went the normal speed. I kept it that speed all the way back to the house. When we got home, we took all of our boxes to the back yard and began assembling. They were easy to put up because they were all the same size but we realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work. We didn't have enough boxes. The dream had been to build a fort big enough that I could walk through standing up straight. Being that I was 6'2", we needed quite a lot of boxes. We barely had enough for one wall. So instead, we set them up and then jumped into them.
But it didn't matter. The fun was in the journey. I really think that even if we had had enough boxes to finish the fort, we would have got bored with it pretty quickly. We were 16 years old. What were we going to do in a fort?
We were so happy with our victory. All we had REALLY wanted to do was to do something different and out-of-the-ordinary, to break from the norm and the beaten path. We had achieved that and to this day we all still remember it vividly.

4 comments:

Nene said...

I don't know why but this reminded me of the time I went to a playground as an adult and decided I'd give it a go on the monkey bars, since those used to be my favorite thing to do. I gave a little jump and grabbed the bar and when my dead weight hit my arms I thought they would pull out of the socket. I guess you can't go back to being a kid. I'll have to stick to the swings. Cute story, thanks for posting.

Amber said...

I think what is so much fun about being a teenager is that you are so fearless and in a way much less self concious to be seen doing silly things, Heather and Jay and I used to get up to some pretty crazy stuff when we were teenagers.

Jake & Kim said...

That is so funny-boys are so wack-o, then again girls can be too-maybe someday I will have to share with you my story of can stealing and hooker outfits-----until then....

Stacy said...

I dont think you every told me this story...I like it :)