While we were sitting on the porch and watching it storm, Tim reminded me of another story! After almost 140 true “kid” stories, I’m finally starting to run out of accounts. Tim always has more material for me! Throughout our kid lives, we had many hours of fun “playing in traffic” along the State Route in front of our place.  We spent many hours “playing mind games” with unsuspecting, hapless, innocent motorists who had the misfortune of being on the road passing our place during the time we were engaged in our “play in traffic” times. When we were really young (around 6 of 7), we would put little plastic and metal toys in the road and watched vehicles run over them. They would end up “flatter than a fritter” and be ground down into the asphalt if it were a hot summer day. One hot summer day we laid a small rope across on of the highway lanes and it was ground into the asphalt and stayed there for a long time. I recall one summer when they resurfaced the road and were spraying hot tar. We were too close and down wind while we were watching the operation and we ended up being totally covered with little dots of tar! Speaking of tar, we always heard a rumor that George Schmidt, our tobacco-chewing neighbor sometimes chewed tar! (I highly doubt it). George always had a big wad of “Workman” chewing tobacco in his cheek and his front teeth were shaped like a semicircle from years of wearing his teeth down by spitting tobacco juice (or at least that’s what Tim and I always figured). As we got older and started to go through the “Cherry Bomb Years,” we incorporated these in our “playing in traffic” fun. One night we were hiding in the hedgerow and were throwing cherry bombs at passing vehicles! No one ever slammed on their brakes as I recall, but we often wondered what the driver’s thoughts were when they heard a big KABANGO all of the sudden? (Maybe they were all locals and just muttered to themselves, “AHHHGGGH, those #@%&# boys!” The most memorable of the “Cherry Bomb Incidents” was when one of us threw a cherry bomb at a motorcyclist as they passed our hidden lair. It blew up right behind his helmet and he nearly lost control of the big Harley! We “cooled it” for the night after that! When we were High School age, we threw a lot of water-filled balloons at trucks, or small stones, or snowballs if it were winter. One time when we were at “Blen’s”, Tim threw a dead cattail head at a passing truck and it got stuck in the turning wheel rim and as the truck continued down Ceylon Road, millions of cattail seeds were flying off and trailing from it! (Cattail seeds are like small dandelion seeds; only there seem to be thousands of them!) We STILL get a good “gut laugh” recalling that! In fact, I had to stop typing for a short time because thinking of this gave me the “giggles”! This was one the climaxes of our “playing in traffic” times. The other climax was one night when we were high school age and Tim, Tom B., and I decided to play some “traffic games” one Friday night. We lay beside the road like we were dead and were snickering as several cars passed us. All of a sudden, one car passed us, then quickly slammed on his brakes, and stopped probably 1 or 2 hundred feet down the road from where we were laying! As he slowly started to back up, we all quickly took off into the hedgerow, which was only about 3 feet from us! This served as our “traffic games” hiding place our entire lives. The guy slowly backed up to the spot where we WERE laying, then got out of his car with a flashlight and started to look around the ground! After a short time, another car stopped and ask the guy if he needed any help since he probably though his vehicle had broken down. He said, “Hey, there’s 3 kids laying dead along the road back here ”!  (I’ve often wondered what the other guy who stopped to help that guy must have thought!). Tim, Tom, and I were within earshot of them, but all of us stayed perfectly still in the cover of the hedgerow (while trying with all our might to suppress the giggles and laughter)! Finally, after a minute or so, both drivers gave up, got back in their vehicles, and slowly drove away. When they left, all 3 of us really broke out in another “ground rolling laughter” episode! It’s a good thing this was long before the days of cell phones, or we would have had to no doubt elude the Highway Patrol, local police, County sheriff, the fire department, the EMT Squad and several curious onlookers! Thank goodness, we grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and not the 90’s, or we all would have had lengthy Juvenile and/or jail records for what was THEN “good, clean, harmless FUN!”