What was I thinking?

I ask myself that every day. My mom told me, don’t play with wires; don’t play with your father’s tools. Those rules were set in stone, or so least I thought.

I was seven years old. The sun beat down like my grandpa tenderizing his meat, but a cool wind was blowing. A pretty nice day if you ask me now. Of course then, I was playing with my sister. Inside. Watching T.V. What an active child I was. While I was not active I did have some friends. Their names were Bob, Rob, Bobby, Robby, and Jose. They loved water, and lived in my room…on my desk…in a fish tank. Yep, meet my former five best friends, the goldfish. Anyhow, there came a day when my sister wanted to see if electricity could make an animal “go x-ray” (blame that particular desire on Warner Brothers, specifically Bugs Bunny). Not too eager to try it on myself, I quickly suggested that we try it on my fish first.

As we walked up the stairs, a thought entered my mind. Where the heck was I going to get electricity? I decided to solve this problem later (and look at that, I procrastinate every day now. I really should’ve listened to my parents when they told me that habits you have when you’re a little kid don’t go away as you get older, unless you get rid of them yourself).

Of course, the problem had to be solved. As I thought up an answer, I noticed my father’s toolbox. He had been fixing a drawer that I had broken in an accidents on I-Ninety-running-through-my-room-while-playing-football-with-my-very-little-sister-five. Mom’s words fought my curiosity. No contest. In a split second I grabbed the closest pair of rubber-handled pliers.
I decided to try and cut/mutilate the wire that entered my fish tank (the wire for its light) with this weapon of mass destruction. Well, maybe more of a weapon of mass “ouch that freakin’ hurts” as I learned a few seconds later. As I twisted and squeezed the wire, my excitement built until…
Crack! Pzzzzz! The wire broke. I tried to step back, alarmed. Too late. An array of sparks cascaded down onto my foot. I felt a scream leap up my throat. It blasted out of me like a trumpet, so loud it could have woke the dead. I soon saw that it really did wake the dead, when my coffee-less mother leaped up the stairs like a deranged frog. She raced to the bathtub, put on the coldest water possible, and stuck my foot right in. That felt just grand for the first five seconds. After that, I feared frostbite more than first degree burns.
In retrospect, what I did was stupid than stupid. I not only did something that I knew to be stupid, I did something that my mom told me to be stupid. Little kids just don’t listen to their parents. They do silly things, like running with scissors, mutilating wires, procrastinating and leaving their 2nd draft for their memoir to the last minute, those kind of behaviors. Little kids are just a bit too curious for their own good. Kids should go about life trying to remember that their parents were kids themselves (an extremely unbridgeable gap of age, like the Sahara Desert only older and more wrinkled). When I grow up, I’ll have only one rule set in stone…
LISTEN TO EVERYTHING YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER TELL YOU WITHOUT QUESTION!
…
I’ll tell you how that turns out (when I have kids).