Water War Zone

Five years ago today, just after we bought this house, I was outside enjoying myself in the sunshine. I've said before how the 24th is a holiday around here. So there I was, minding my business, when three or four of my neighbors walked into my yard. I had just met them days before and I would have thought they were there to welcome me to the neighborhood if they hadn't been dripping wet and carrying buckets and water balloons. Suddenly I remembered that there was a tradition around these parts. Every year on Pioneer Day a huge water fight breaks out in the neighborhood. I desperately bolted around the back of the house to the other side only to realize, too late, that they had me surrounded. Once I was drenched, and had spread out my wallet and it's contents on the concrete to dry, there was nothing to do but join them and spread my misery. We succeeded in coaxing another neighbor out of her house on the pretense that she was helping us to get yet another person out of her house.

It's been like that every year since, with me not prolonging the inevitable but just plunging headlong into the fray. But last year, I decided, was my last year. I had plans in the back of my mind to avoid the whole mess by packing up the family and heading out to the park for the day. Except that I forgot. Today I was downstairs playing my guitar and minding my own business once again when I heard a knock at the door. It was those dealers of a watery death, armed with fat, bubble-shaped guns, and buckets waiting for me to come up and face the unavoidable fact of living in this neighborhood. Only this time, I didn't want to. I told my kids to tell them I wasn't coming up. They came back giggling. My 50-something, grown-up neighbor, they said, was calling me a chicken liver. I said, "Tell them I don't want to get wet." I listened as my five-year-old went to the door and said, "My Dad's a chicken." I endured this a while longer, waiting as the ten or twelve aquaterrorists filled up at my hose. At one point I was able to sneak past the opened door and go upstairs to foolishly peer at them from behind the curtain. Finally, and with one last, "Dinky, you're a chicken liver," and a, "Tell your dad he's a coward," they were gone. I breathed a sigh of relief, called the kids together, and said, "Come on. We're going to the park."