Tab-Closing Follow Up Follow Up:Preppie Gone Wrong

Following up onContinuing (from just below) the theme of "where we once lived," this is the small town where we grew uplived until we were almost 11.

Then (before the last ice age, when mammoths still roamed the earth) as now there were neither sidewalks nor street lights. The reflectors causing so much trouble 11 yrs. ago were probably just a gleam in a traffic engineer's eye at that point.

There was a business in our time (may have been crushed under the glaciers) a shack (but in tasteful dark wood like the other buildings) in the civic center (the SP station & city hall/police dep't.) that sold Edy's ice cream. And a gas station on El Camino that was technically inside the city limits, also maybe.

We dealt w/ the Atherton P.D. once, at the age of seven or eight. We were standing outside our front gate (Waiting for the mail?) bored & restless as youth are in small towns where nothing ever happens, when an A.P.D. patrol car came by & we, out of the blue, pretended to throw something at the car. Ossifer Whoever actually turned the car away from the imaginary projectile, but recovered & then gave us a lecture, because we weren't smart/frightened enough to run up the driveway & close the gate after us. Just as well we didn't; if he'd had to follow us he probably would have made the expected move (marching us inside & informing whichever adult was home that they had bred a little anti-authoritarian who deserved a spanking) but as we stood our ground he just delivered his lecture ("I might have hit that wall, or another car, blah blah") & then drove off.

Didn't intend to go on like this, & we suspect we've related the premature anti-fascist off-the-pig story* sometime in the six yrs. (Sadly, one of our few acts of overt rebellion; it's not a question of "Why not milk it?" we have to, because there's almost nothing else to milk.) we've been applying the dull to the web.

Wonkmenter Citizen Kitteh gets credit for the SFGate link & other interesting Atherton info.

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*Seriously, no rhyme or reason; no fellow delinquent daring us, a completely spontaneous act. We're still mystified. A young suburban Euro-American in the cusp between the '50s & the '60s had no reason from experience to hate the police. Reasons to hate the police & be opposed to virtually everything are many, but there was almost no way an innocent eight-yr. old American could have known any of those reasons.