I would like to be able to say that I was a model child growing up, but I know that my parents and both my brothers would strongly disagree. When you live in a town of one thousand people, you run out of things to do real fast. And when your imagination is wilder than the countryside you live in, you’re bound to get into some trouble—or at least I was.

Maybe I could blame my bouts with grounded-ness on my parents’ strict rules, but, again, I don’t think that would necessarily be a proper depiction of reality. Whether it involved making my little brother eat mud pie, stealing my older brother’s golf clubs, or passing notes in school, the trouble always had one common denominator: me.

My parents finally got me back for all the headaches I had caused them. One fateful afternoon when I was eleven, after a cousin—I won’t name names (you know who you are)—told her mom about some artwork she and I had been doing on the picnic tables at the park. This “artwork” was more along the lines of graffiti, and it was actually pretty funny, but my parents didn’t think so.

Grounding me didn’t seem like a very good option to them anymore—they wanted to give me a punishment that I wouldn’t forget. So my cousin and I spent the next two weeks sanding, priming, and painting every single picnic table, Dumpster, and fence that belonged to the city. That was probably the only time in my life that I was glad to live in a town of one thousand people.

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