Memories, the faded corners of my mind

It's strange what we choose to remember. Like, I can't remember what I had to eat yesterday but I can remember, distinctly what my Grandmother's pink bathroom smelled like. I can remember the smell of salty air hitting me in the face on the drive to Jacksonville Beach in the backseat of my mom's light blue VW bug but I can't remember to pick up my prescription that's been at CVS for the last four days. So if the mind is a terrible thing to waste, I can say with some confidence that mine has been wasted on vast amounts of useless knowledge. But important dates or people's names? Well, that'd be a negatory. Through the past few weeks or months, really who knows, one thing is for certain, embarrassing moments of my life have been pulled to the forefront of my braincase. The pooping myself story was embarrassing but not the first time as my memory would recall.
Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida was a kid's dream. Well, at least this kid's. I rode my banana boat bike everywhere, went swimming every day during the summer, hit the beach almost as frequently and was in walking distance of the Lil Champ convenience store. Life was good.
In the neighborhood where we lived there were a ton of kids. I had friends a-plenty (strange how that changes). One friend of mine lived a few houses down and another a few streets over. I could easily roam the streets and find a friend on a whim. Those were the days when you left your house at 10 am (after morning swimteam practice) and stayed out playing until the sun went down and you could hear moms and dads calling their kids in for dinner.
One day I decided to go hang at my friend's who lived two houses down. Now, I can't remember her name but I can remember a few details about her, one of which is this: she was sneaky. One time when I was over she had a card table set up in the living room (doubt she was having late night poker games but rather it was left out from her mom's bridge or canasta game). She asked me to lay flat on the ground with the upper part of my torso sticking out from under the table. She convinced me that she'd "pretend" to jump on me but would actually jump to my left or right side. I questioned her, but she very convincingly told me that I could go next. Why I believed her I don't know. I think I was just a good kid who assumed people were good and wouldn't do shitty things. (Still a problem today.) Now when I end up under card table it's not to avoid being jumped on.
With my upper body sticking out from under the table, my friend counted to three and jumped. Guess where she landed? Directly on my stomach. Yep, she took what looked like a 5 foot jump (from my view) and landed with all her stumpy might right on top of my stomach. Saying it killed is an understatement. I could barely get up and run to tell on her. When I told her mother what her daughter did she promptly quipped that it wasn't very smart on my part to lay there and let someone jump on me. I gave her my patented hairy eyeball and left. I didn't play with her again for a long time.
A few months later, I decided to give "Jumper" another shot. We had been in her room playing for quite some time when I suddenly felt the urge to go potty hit me like a wave. When I started to leave she asked me where I was going and when I told her she said I couldn't use her bathroom. At that point I had to go so bad I didn't argue. I jetted out the door, running with clenched butt toward my house.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived home only to find the front door locked. After ringing the doorbell in what could only be called a distressed SOS code, I started doing the poopy dance. I was at code red for my current frontstoop state of emergency. I started to eye the front shrub as my next option when my dad pulled up. Upon seeing him I was so overcome with a sense of security that I stopped clenching and pooped my pants. Uh oh.
When my dad asked me what I was doing at home I told him that I had to go to the bathroom but now we were dealing with a far more serious situation on our hands. This did not please my dad (please refer to past stories to reference how my dad deals with these kind of "situations"). He could not fathom how someone could poop themselves when they knew they had to poop. And he most certainly was not in the mood to help clean me up. He did however fill the bathtub with warm water and told me to sit in there until my mom got home so she could handle "this."
As I sat in the luke warm water with my poopy drawers still on,  I reflected back on how I got there and why in the world "Jumper" wouldn't let me use her bathroom. I was convinced that she had it out for me from the start. At that point my friendship with her could now be summed up in one word, shit.
And to think I had every intention to write about a family vacation in Mexico where I caught a barracuda when we went deep sea fishing.