Reminiscing about our childhood, a couple of friends and I realized that despite the effort our parents had put into making our birthday parties special, none of us could remember any of them, except the few that were marred by sudden violence.

Surely, we recognized, such a revelation would crush our mothers' spirit. We resolved never to speak of it in their presence.

We also resolved to ensure our own kids would remember their birthday parties by arranging at least one episode of sudden violence.

payson lived a couple of blocks from me in Bellaire. I attended his fifth birthday party on a Saturday morning, along with about a dozen very energetic boys from our kindergarten class.

Payson's family was one of the first in our neighborhood to retrofit their house with a sliding glass door, disposing of the French patio doors common to Bellaire's little postwar bungalows. (Funny how that's now come full circle in the home-fashion world.) The new door's heavy, rolling panes proved hard to operate even before shifting foundations eventually bound up the tracks.

With so many boys running between the house and backyard that morning, the mothers in charge soon tired of dragging the door back-and-forth and just left it open. Eventually, after they'd allowed us to burn off enough steam, the moms called us inside to the kitchen for birthday cake, and shut the patio door behind us. We crowded around Payson in front of the cake with hats and noisemakers to sing "Happy Birthday."

The instant Payson blew the candles out, the most energetic boy among us bolted from the room yelling, "Let's go!," intent on resuming whatever game of tag or chase we'd been running in the backyard before this birthday business had interrupted us.

No one saw, but we all heard, when he burst through the glass door.

Looking back, I still can't quite grasp how that was possible. A couple of years ago I removed my own house's door, and found it consisted of tempered, 1/4-inch glass, at least double the thickness of most window panes. I needed two guys to haul it out to the curb.

What do five-year-olds weigh? Forty pounds? He must have been running full-tilt, head-first, to punch through that glass in one try.

The mothers caught up with him first and held the rest of us away. I remember seeing a big, round hole in the spider-webbed pane, crumbs of glass all over the floor, and a lot of activity as phone calls were placed to our own mothers, letting them know the party was over and we would all need rides home.

Fortunately, missile-boy didn't appear hurt except for a cut in the seat of his jeans, where he'd apparently fallen onto the broken glass. He clung to the lap of somebody's mom, bawling uncontrollably.

again, the lesson for me is, don't bother making nicey-nice birthday parties for your kids, with a bounce house or clowns or some such. They won't remember it. Instead, fire a stuntman out of a cannon, or have him stage a fake bungee-jump that goes unexpectedly wrong in front of everybody.

Also, have all the kids' parents stand by for pick-up once the horror concludes.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 08:23 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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