The recent clean out of the parsonage was difficult for me. Memories were around every corner and in every cubby. Not memories of the house, but memories of the life I was privileged to live with my wife. However, as I went along, I refused to dwell on those memories. It wasn’t until the last day, the day of the sale, (AND THANK YOU TO ALL WHO HELPED AND WHO CAME BY TO PURCHASE THINGS) and it had nothing to do with my marriage. Standing in the kitchen with Terry and Carla, I looked down and saw a piece of plastic that I recognized, but not from this life. I reached down and picked it up. It was pink (the one I had was green) and it was plastic (the one I had was tin). It had a little button on the top and when I pushed it, it made a loud clicking noise. The three of us talked about it for a bit. It may have been Marsha’s for some reason, but I had never seen it. It was a toy, a noise maker, but it brought back a memory thread that had been buried.

          Back when I was a little boy, we played Army. My friend Keith (my age) and his older brother Kevin and I all had plastic helmets and plastic Army guns and we played a lot of Army. Army shows were on TV and Army movies played and our Dads were WWII vets and Vietnam wasn’t yet a thing. I don’t ever remember playing cowboys and Indians. That stuff was on TV and the movies, too, but we didn’t play that. We played Army. Toy makers knew that boys played Army, so they make plastic replicas of guns and helmets and hand grenades and all kinds of stuff they couldn’t have now. If that stuff existed now they would be saying we were raising a generation of murderers. Funny how we missed that memo back then and all seemed to grow up pretty normal, relatively speaking. Anyway, we were equipped with authentic looking plastic Army gear.

          And then the toy maker Hasbro came out with this little clicker thing. The advertisement had actual video of paratroopers landing in fields at night while the announcer told the story of paratroopers landing the two nights before D-Day back in 1944 to carry out sabotage behind German lines. The troopers would land and get rid of their chutes and then, in the dark, use little clickers to locate one another. Now, Hasbro was selling these little clickers just for you so you could have what them real soldiers had!!! And, they were real metal.

          Within a month, every boy in school had one. The teachers were taking them away so fast that they were filling their desk drawers fast with the little things. I imagine they were super annoying. Just a flat, loud click. You could keep the clicker in your pocket and click it in secret there. They were going off all over school; classrooms, busses, hallways, library, music. They made the teachers angry and made the boys laugh like loons. Pretty soon, they were all gone.

          As a toy craze, they didn’t have real lasting power. Other than clicking them, you really couldn’t do anything else. On the last day of school when the teachers handed back all the things they had confiscated throughout the year, we got our clickers. They weren’t fun any more and most of them just wound up in dresser drawers in our homes.

          Jumping forward a few years to junior high. All of us boys thought we were thrill seekers with a solid streak of ‘bad’ in us. It was coming up on Halloween and everyone was talking about what they were going to do. We were, of course, far to grown up to trick or treat, so we planned to create a little mayhem. Toilet papering the trees and soaping windows were high on the list. Keith and I lived on the same toad, but that was it out there at the time. Just us. I had two sisters, Cathy and Debbie, and Keith had a brother and sister, Karen. My sisters were older, in fact Cathy had graduated from school and Debbie was a senior, and Kevin was older, also in high school. So, they were not going trick or treating. Karen was two years younger than Keith and me and was at that pest age. Actually, she had been a pest all her life just because she was a girl. At that point in time, except for the pest, it was just Keith and me.

          We decided we could be bad. We grew up in Perry Township. There was also a Perry Village, which seemed big to us but was really a collection of houses. A gas station, a bar/pool hall, a little, tiny grocery store, a little place they called a delicatessen but was really sweet shop with a four stool soda fountain in the back, a feed mill, a lumber yard, a post office half the size of Urbana’s and a small volunteer fire department. And there was a barber. He also ran the bar/pool room and had the barber shop in the bar. You got a better haircut if you caught him early in the day. But it was the village and it was where Keith and I were going to be bad on Halloween.

          We dressed all in dark and told our Mom’s that we were going to be bums. We carried bags that were supposed to collect candy, but that actually carried our objects of terror. Keith brought several rolls of toilet paper and I had the soaps we needed to terrorize the Village. Karen, being unusually perceptive, knew we were up to something and wanted to join us. But her Mom told her that the boys didn’t want to look after her and that they would go elsewhere. Yay Mom! Keith’s Mom drove us into the Village and my Mom would pick us up. And in the meantime, the Village would be so rocked that it would never be the same!

          Things didn’t go right from the beginning. The reason was that, while we were bad boys at heart, we didn’t know how to be bad boys. We had planned this all out. Keith would go and toilet paper some trees. I would go and soap some windows. We would meet back at the feed mill by using our clickers that we still had (just like real soldiers) and then just wander through the village innocently observing our daring raid. Except……..

          You stand away from a tree and hurl the roll of toilet paper up. It unravels in flight, leaving a strip of toilet paper draped over the tree. Then, you went and picked up the roll and did it again until the toilet paper ran out. He had three rolls, so he was all set. However, toilet paper then, as now, has a light adhesive on the end to hold it together until used. Keith never thought to peel that away before he threw. So, he chucked a roll skyward and it didn’t unravel. He ran over and picked up the roll and tried again. Same thing. Like throwing a white football into the trees. The grass was wet because it had rained earlier, and after the second throw that roll was wasted. He pulled out the next roll and wasted it, too. Frustrated, he just threw the third one into the weeds.

          Meanwhile, on the soaping front, I had brought a box of Tide. I tried to rub the powder on the windows and that was as pointless as trying to toilet paper a tree with a roll of toilet paper that will not unravel. Terrified now, I booked back toward the feed mill. I pulled my clicker out and began to click like mad. The mission had to be aborted! All of a sudden, clickers went off all over the village. In the shadows you could see figures bent over and running like crazy. The clicking grew louder. Apparently, most of the boys from my class, grouping off in twos and threes, had the same idea as Keith and I. They would descend on the village, make their raids and use their clickers to locate or abort. My call for Keith was taken as a general retreat.

          The next morning I imagine people were surprised to find soggy rolls of toilet paper in their yards and bars of Zest beneath their windows. Someone, I am sure, was very puzzled as to why there was a half full box of Tide in the weeds by the feed mill, just as my mother always wondered what happened to her box of Tide. As the stories circulated, one of the guys had three lunch bags with dog poop in them. What you were supposed to do was put a bag of dog poop on a porch, light it on fire and then ring the door bell and then hide and watch the home owner come out and stomp it out and get poop on his shoes. This guy had brought the bags of poop but forgot matches, so when the retreat sounded, he just threw the bags away. That was also an interesting find, I am sure. The destruction of the village was not happening that night.

          The fact was, we were not bad kids. We all grew up and made something of our lives. Death has claimed several, though none for a while now. When we communicate, either by e-mail or phone or Facebook or, for those who live close still, getting together, the talk is kids and grandkids and aches and pains.

          No one, though, ever talks about that Halloween night. Seeing that clicker on the floor brought it all back, but I am not saying anything.

          However, I do have a story of that little pest if anyone wants to hear it.