Anyone else ever play the shark game way back when you were a kid? It wasn’t a Hasbro game packed in a box with dice, cards, and tokens that you moved across a game board. This shark game came packed away in our heads. There were no dice, we were the tokens, and our parents’ bedroom was our game board. Plus, we made up the rules as we went along.
One particular boring afternoon found my brother and I were hankering for a game of shark. The object of the game this day was to make it all the way around the room without touching the shark infested linoleum floor lest you get eaten alive. We were having tons of fun up until we both found ourselves clinging to the one chest of drawers (or Chester drawers for some of you). The perpetual Hispanic chest cluttered with statues of the Virgin Mary, St. Paul, St. Anthony, and the like and a variety of candles my mother would light when offering up a prayer. We argued, as we clung to the front of the chest with the Virgin Mary staring down at us, over who would give up and fall into the shark infested waters when suddenly we felt the chest give way.
It fell forward in slow motion allowing us to scamper out of harms way as the chest and all its holy contents came crashing down bringing our parents running from the other room to see what had happened. Rudy and I stood wide-eyed and terrified, mostly terrified for the spanking to come and before I had a chance to react, Rudy ditched me and bolted for a safe haven under the bed. Rudy was well known for bolting and just as fast as he slid under the bed, my mother was quick to fetch the broom to fish him out. Instead of bolting, I stood frozen, watching my parents’ fruitless effort to extract Rudy from under the bed as he managed to move with the bed and avoided being poked by the broom. My dad eventually had a eureka moment, lifted the bed and sure enough, they were able to grab Rudy before he bolted out the door—where then they shelled out the punishment due to the two imbeciles playing shark on mother’s make-shift altar.
At which point, succumbing to the flesh-eating sharks may not have been such a bad thing, after all.
