They were big kids. Mean teenaged boys. Two of them. One with sandy brown hair, lanky and tall. The other of gargantuan proportions, dark-haired and beady-eyed. And they had weapons of mass destruction: water pistols. We had no idea where these kids had materialized. One day we felt secure, happy, and dry. The next day we were being chased down and squirted against our will. Grown-ups were no help to us at all. “Save us,” we’d squeal, hiding behind the most rotund adult we

Before the days of Wii, Xbox, and Gameboy, there was kickball. At the apartment complex where I grew up, the rules for this game were simple. 1) Kick the ball. 2) Run the bases. 3) If someone tagged you out, you could contest it with threats of violence. We had a small patch of grass afforded us. It sat within the confines of a building’s L-shaped formation. It worked perfectly as long as people didn’t park their cars anywhere near the vicinity. Back then, no one at the c