Cook Your Rat and Eat It Too

There are two very important life lessons I learned early on from growing up in a trailer park. The importance of loyalty and true friendship.

Most of the time, if you live in a trailer park, you are going through similar situations as your neighbors. Usually the parents are overworked and the kids are left to fend for themselves. What that usually means is that the kids in the trailer park create a bond like no other bond. It's a bond of understanding. It's a bond of loyalty. And even if are not truly "friends" with everyone, there is a bond of friendship.

I can tell you this. Trailer park kids know how to have fun.

I believe my imagination and creative side came from being a trailer park kid. We were always inventing new games to play...even if we didn't exactly have the right equipment.

One thing that we did everyday was ride bikes. I didn't have a bike to join in for a long time until my grandparents gave me one for a birthday. I'll never forget that bike because I hated it. It was a white and yellow huffy with a big yellow banana seat. How dare I have a banana seat bike and not a coveted 10-speed. I looked like I was riding a banana! But a bike is a bike...so I rode it all the same. (I must admit, I wish I still had that bike.)

I'll never forget my best friend Misty and I loved playing with our dolls (we pretended they were cabbage patches). One summer day we decided we wanted to take our dolls for a bike ride. So we did.

We took a laundry basket from my house, her brother's skateboard, and tied them together using a jump rope. We then used another jump rope to attach the skateboard to one of our bikes. In went a blanket. In went the dolls and we were off. When I look back on that memory, how happy, carefree, and proud we were of our invention...how we pulled those dolls taking turns with our bikes until the sun went down...I have to wonder...would we have done that if our situations were different? What if we had a wagon? What if we lived in a real neighborhood? I still feel like we were the only two kids to ever figure out such a contraption.

If you have ever been to a trailer park, you have probably seen some crazy unsafe things just hanging around. At ours we had an big empty metal tank. I just did a Google search and I cannot find what in the world this thing was...which tells me us playing on it was probably really dumb. But man was it fun.

It was pretty high off the ground from my memory. We would climb up, sit, and it became our very own imagination station. We loved the sound it made when we would clang our feet against the metal. It did kind of smell like gas come to think of it...I'm glad we didn't turn into a real rocket ship.

During the days of bike rides and climbing on the imagination station when the sun would start to go down, were weren't done playing. I remember me, Misty, her little brother, and other trailer park kids sitting around in a circle on the grass. I can still feel the soft grass. It was longer than most grass; it was like sitting on a pillow. We would sit there and sing. One of our favorites was "God Bless the U.S.A." by Lee Greenwood. I remember feeling proud and free during those days on the grass in between our trailers. I don't think I have felt that sense of pride and unity sense. That something special that we all shared living in the trailer park.

I have one more story for today that involves my friends Caren and Nick when I would go to her trailer park.

Her trailer park was much bigger than mine. They had a big field with a pond, a "forest", and blackberry trees. Caren, Nick, and I would adventure in the forest for hours and end our quest by picking and eating the blackberries. I have never had a berry so sweet and juicy in my life. We would head back to Caren's house with dirty feet, grass-stained knees, and berry stained lips and fingers. Caren's mom was like my mom. She was very cool. We didn't get in trouble for coming home dirty. We just had to wash-up for dinner.

Caren's mom was a good cook. I think I had Chinese food with them for the very first time. Caren was always a joker and she told me the chicken was rat. She was my best friend, of course I believe her. I was horrified. But the joke was on me. Before you knew it there was laughter and trailer full of kids singing about eating rat. Kenny, Barb, Caren, and me...life really couldn't have been any better.