Baloon Party

We kids were having a grand water-fight when I stepped on it. Standing waist high in the lake, I knew whatever I was standing on wasn’t a stone, for it felt square and man-made. Reaching down to the bottom I retrieved a small yellow metal box, the type automobile fuses are packaged in. Sliding open its top, I was surprised to find not the small transparent glass fuses I had expected but a few milk-white colored balloons.

These were just what I needed to get an edge on my sibling combatants and turn the tide by escalating the contest to a water-balloon fight.

These little balloons were tough. They didn’t break on impact, just spilled their watery warheads leaving the rubber rocket’s fuselage intact for an immediate rearming and launching.

These were the hardest balloons I’d ever tried inflating. Even when I got one mostly blown-up, try as I might, I just couldn’t muster enough breath to inflate the narrow tip at the top.

When the sun began to disappear and the sky darkened we knew it was time to head back to our campsite. Enroute to Expo ’67, the World’s Fair in Montreal, we’d stopped for the night, securing the last campsite at the end of the busy campground’s main road.

Both sides of the road were lined with families outside barbequing their evening meals, as we joyfully skipped down the middle of the road, each of us with lips pressed tightly against the openings of our new found balloons, displaying varying degrees of inflation.

The adults first glanced our way briefly, then quickly looked back doing second-takes; the husbands stifling a subtle smile, their wives blushing then quickly diverting their eyes. We had no idea why we were garnering such attention, but it pleased us, so me made more noise than usual. Sometimes a father would point toward us and laugh while directing others to look. A teenage boy broke out in a fit of hilarious laughter only to have his father take a swat at his head and miss when the boy’s laughter caused him to double over.

Having passed some 50 other campsites, ours now came into view. Mom, eyes closed, laid-out on a lounge chair sunning herself; Dad sitting nearby, his face buried in the evening paper.

Like the other adults we’d already passed, Dad looked up for a moment, back at the paper, then did a double-take, squinting to get a closer look at just what his children had in their mouths as they approached. It was his chuckling that got Mom’s attention.

“EEEEEK!” she screamed. Grabbing a nearby beach towel, she covered her head much like a criminal on the evening news pulling their jacket over their head to conceal his identity. She had just looked down the road to see her three children marching gaily along with partially inflated condoms pressed tightly to their lips, a string of fellow campers lining both sides of the street behind her children, all staring with amused grins to see which lucky couple would claim ownership of the little participants of this condom parade.

Mom darted inside the pop-up camper, slamming and locking the door behind her. Concealed within, she began barking orders though the canvas, instructing Dad to handle the situation “his” children had created. She began demanding my father hook the camper up to the car and drive away with her still inside, so she wouldn’t have to face the neighbors. There’s no way the camper could be towed with the top up and ends extended, but she wouldn’t hear any excuses. The more she pleaded with him to just drive away immediately the harder it was for him to maintain his composure.

I assured my father that we had no intention of chucking our water balloons at our mother, and any fear that we would was an over-reaction on her part, for which we shouldn’t be punished. He laughed, and his eyes began to water with tears of amusement as he tried to confiscate our balloons. We weren’t ready to give them up, for we had found them fair and square and thus deserved to be able to keep them. Besides, these were the sturdiest balloons we’d ever had. Surely they’d last a long time.

Trouble was all too familiar to me, but usually at least I knew what I’d done to deserve it.

“What’d we do wrong?” I asked my father.

“It’s nothing you’ve done wrong,” he said collecting our balloons, “it’s just something that women get embarrassed about.”

He asked where we’d gotten hold of these balloons, and wanted to know if we’d found them rolled-up or already unrolled. He seemed relieved to hear we’d found them neatly rolled up.

We never did get the promised replacements.