Time Flies

     I have noticed that I no sooner publish a blog post that it's time to write the next one. Time seems to be flying by faster and faster. I got thinking about when time didn't seem to go so fast - when I was a kid. The school years seemed to last forever and summer was luxuriously long. We had time to do so many wonderful things.
     My sister, friends, and I called ourselves The Fancy Five. We were always trying to come up with money-making schemes. We knew that we were about to hit the big time, but somehow, these schemes didn't ever quite pan out. For example, one summer day we decided to sell cookies that one of our moms had made. Sales were very slow, so we got the bright idea to give away a bottle of pop with each cookie sold. We raided the bar of my girlfriend's parents for the pop. When her folks got home from work, they were not very happy with us. I don't know if my friend got punished, but I remember being told to go home and not come back for several days.
     We knew we were finally going to make the big time when my Dad built us a car of sorts. He had gone to the dump and found an old wooden ironing board, mounted it on 4 wheels, put a box on the front to look like an engine compartment, an old bicycle seat to sit on, and a box in back for a passenger. The whole thing was steered with a rope that just pulled the wheels from left to right. And it was pedal powered - it would go as fast as we could pedal. Not content with just taking turns driving this contraption, we named it the Woody-mobile (after my Dad, Woody) and decided we would make money by using it as a taxi and giving kids rides to and from school. I don't recall anyone ever paying for a ride, but we had great fun giving each other rides.
     And then there was the time we formed a little circus; we had a parade, hoping to draw hundreds of people to watch us perform tricks on a swingset. We had exotic names, draped ourselves with scarves, and hung upside down from the trapeze. We swung as high as we could and jumped off, arms extended wide and graceful so that we'd look like we were flying. I think we managed to cajole a couple of our moms into coming, but other than that, those large crowds that would propel us to stardom never materialized.
     Undaunted, we never gave up. We temporarily reorganized The Fancy Five into a serious stitching group called the Knit Wits (we were so very clever!). Our plan was to knit these amazing afghans and blankets and sell them for hundreds of dollars.  As I recall, we each managed to make a dishcloth or two. Yet again, our ideas and chutzpah didn't quite match reality.
     What finally brought all these schemes to an end was puberty and the discovery that maybe boys weren't stupid or icky after all; our energies were directed towards attracting their attention.
And now, later in life after our biggest dreams of getting married and having kids and grand-kids have been realized, maybe it's time to resurrect The Fancy Five . . .