This afternoon, i drove down the street where i grew up. I do that occasionally, just to remember what the house used to look like before the people who got the bungalow after us chopped down MY dogwood tree in the sideyard and moved the fence around the back up the 15 or 20 feet it took to make it even with the front of the house. Yeah, i usually look at that house i grew up in and sigh because it was small, and used to be a normal color, and i miss the beautiful little flowering dogwood that THOSE JERKS CUT DOWN.

But today i looked across the street instead, to the house where my neighbor grew up. Ah, the front yards on that side of the street never had fences, still don't, so that's where "Refrigerater" Perry and the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl a minimum of 73 times, and the Braves actually won GAMES (yes, we were 2 of the approximately 6 Atlanta fans in the world during the early and mid-1980s), and i lost count of how many pennants we won them.

It was a nice yard, where Fridge ran for so many TDs with half the defensemen in the NFL on his back. But it used to be bigger. I swear it was. Somehow they shrunk the yard. Darn it.

Mi "Of course, maybe it's just the extra pounds i've put on over the past 16 years--i mean, i was only 9 when we moved to a rural route" ke