Finding 35

11. Early Riser With a Sweet Tooth

For some reason, I always went to bed early as a kid.  Now I don’t know if that was because I was tired, or because I just liked going to bed early.  There were times when I tried to stay awake when I was told to go to bed, and I would just lie down on the floor, usually by the heater grate and listen to all the people talking, and my eyes would be closed, body limp, and someone would say, “Allan go to bed”, and I would say “I’m not asleep, I’m thinking with my eyes closed”.

The consequence of going to bed really early was the waking up really early, 5:00am early.  I would get up and the whole house was quiet.  No one else stirred.  This of course presented itself with opportunity.  And opportunity at the age of 7 and 8 usually means sugar.  So being as quiet as I could I would open the refrigerator door and see if there was any pop.  Usually there was, and I would unscrew the big metal cap, and drink it right from the bottle.  Sometimes I would use a glass, but I didn’t want to leave any evidence behind of my pop crime.  Sometimes, when there wasn’t any pop, and there weren’t any cookies, or I couldn’t reach them as they were in the highest cupboards above the stove, or they were the crappy kind of cookies with raisins in them (cookies should have raisin’s or almonds in them), I would get a spoon and go to the deep corner cupboard.  This corner cupboard was really big and deep and it had what seemed like a bottomless pit in it, as it was situated in the corner of the two counters that connected at right angels and the cupboard ran the length and depth of each counter.  Taking a spoon, I would the bag of icing sugar.  This was a great treat, and no one ever-noticed icing sugar missing!  And it just melted in my mouth.  One big tablespoon of icing sugar, and I would put in all in my mouth and let it melt on my tongue.  Parents, let that be a lesson for you, go hide your icing sugar.  Kids know what it is.

So after consuming all sorts of sugar, I would go to the basement and wait for the T.V. shows to come on.  This was back in the day when television started at 6:30 or 7:00 am.  Until then, there was a screen of nothing or a sound tone, or a note that said, “Broadcaster not transmitting”, or something like that.  There was, however, a Teletype news channel that had music playing, so I often put that on and listened to the music as I set up the Monopoly board.  At a very young age I discovered that Monopoly is all a game of chance, really.  Who lands on what property first buys it.  I would set up the board with four players, each with their own pile of money and I would play all the players sequentially, and as each player landed on a railroad, or St James place, I would buy the property, play the buy and the seller and the bank all in one go.  When it came to the utilities though, I would by them, but I didn’t understand how to calculate the rent, not being sure what a percentage was at the age of 7… 

Sometimes I would play checkers, but that was different, you can’t play checkers with yourself, because it isn’t a game of chance, you always want one side to win.  And playing with Hot Wheels was noisy, and I didn’t want to wake anyone up.  So I played Monopoly, a lot of Monopoly.