STAYING ON TRACK

It was a Friday night, and one of my baby sisters was having her Sweet 16 birthday party. In those days Dads didn’t go out and find a catering hall or a 5-piece band. No, Dads in those days gave you the basement and $15 for potato chips and pizza and some sodas. After all, the basement was meant for coming out parties, it was the social event of your 16 years if you were a girl.

The young new socialite left rules for the family to follow. NO family member was to be downstairs, no spying, laughing at the boy friends, and positively no brother to be seem or heard until Saturday at the earliest.

Mom was to enforce this rule and I was supposedly going to follow it. This was like saying there will be a high mass at the Vatican, but NO pope is allowed! Little did sis understand that I go where the pizza goes.

That night from some odd quirk in the cosmos, I found myself standing in the basement amid a group of boys. They seemed to be in a huddle and my curiosity was peaked as I approached them.

One of them spoke up.

“He’s going to kill himself”, pointing to a friend next to him.

“Oh! Why?”

“Because she won’t talk to him anymore!” pointing to a young lady across the room.

“He better not do it down here, my mother hates a mess, and my sister will have to clean it up!”

The saddened lover looks at me and asks if I have a gun.

“I have a caulking gun, but we’d have to go to the hardware store for caulking.”

“My life is over. Maybe I can lay down on the railroad tracks!” (We lived just down the street from the Bellport Railroad Station.)

I considered his plan and suggested that that would be a good plan, since we had no caulking for the gun.

“What time does the train come?” he asked.

“East bound or west bound?” I enquired.

He shrugged his shoulders and asked: “What do you mean?”

“Well” I continued, “If you don’t know which way the train is going, how can you do the job right?” I suggested matter of fact.

Shrugging his shoulders once again, (He was a real shrugger) he answers: “Eastbound.”

“Wait here while I get a train schedule.” With that request I go upstairs to my room and bring down the train schedule. Returning I corner lover-boy and give him the bad news:

There isn’t a train until tomorrow morning! Can you get to the station at 5:05 am?”

“My life is over, I can’t do anything right!” Dejected he walks off.

It’s a good thing he didn’t say westbound; he would have had to hurry!

The next morning as I went downstairs to check out the basement under orders from mom, I look for bodies but all I found was empty booze bottles, tucked away in the joists in the boiler room!