Nickname Onomastics

The unfortunate thing about nicknames is that you don't get to choose your own. Sure, you can try to get your friends to call you something cool like..."Chaz", but these kind of nicknames never really stick. [Except when your friends decide to mock you because you picked a ridiculous nickname for yourself (like "Chaz")]. This was proven once recently when I tried to give myself the name "Murgatriod" during our last laser tag outing. Fumbling with the phonics of my new nickname I penned "Mergatroid" on my registration. When laser packs were being assigned "Megatroid" got pack #7.

In contrast, a nickname with real staying power is usually bestowed by those that proport to be your friends. The nickname is often born from some episode in which you've distinguished yourself (usually in a not-so-famous way) or due to some unfortunate play on your name. I cannot adequately describe how much I loathe the marketers of Bengay for deciding on this particular name for their product.

It's not uncommon for an individual to answer to more than one nickname at a time. In second grade I was known by my classmates as "Bean" (again, due to another unfortunate mispelling incident) while my brothers affectionately called me "Admiral Nanny" (I'll let Jon or Allison address this one). Quinn was "Qwanbee" or "Qwan" and "Quinnafred". Alan was "Gloworm" and "Bagel" (Big-Al).

(I know this isn't really finished, but I just had another idea for a blog entry and this entry kind of got away from me already....)

Pickle Wars

Most major conflicts can trace their origins back to a key event. World War I can be traced back to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria while visiting Sarajevo with his wife. The American Civil War began when the newly seceded Confederacy attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

But some conflicts have no clear beginnings. Day after day minor retaliations escalate until you find yourself caught up in events that sweep you along with them. Though I'm not really clear on how the pickle war started, I vividly remember some of the battles which were fought

The lines were drawn between Jon and I shortly after I relocated my bedroom to the basement room next to his. Allison had left for college and with that departure Jon was deprived of a confidante and trusted ally. I unfortunately had been lumped with my younger siblings into the "young and naive" crowd.

Despite sharing a wall, a bathroom, and the satisfaction of being granted our own rooms in the basement, Jon and I found plenty of reasons to try each others' patience. At some point, physical retaliation was proved to have too high of a cost. First, we were starting to have more draws in our matches, and that meant that Mom had plenty of time to catch us at it and sentence us to cruel and unusual punishment (i.e. spending time with each other doing what the other wanted).

At some point it dawned on me that I could still make Jon's life miserable without laying a finger on him. I'm sure my young face twisted in a devious smile as I pondered how to best make him uncomfortable and cover my tracks. I let the thought simmer for several days in the back of my mind. I had almost forgotten this thought until one day while standing in the pantry rummaging for any leftover snacks I happened upon a jar of sweet pickles. I had learned a couple of years previous that I didn't like the taste of sweet pickles, but sometimes I would open a jar to smell and reconfirm these things. You know something like this:

BEN: (opening the refrigerator to browse): Horseradish? Ugh, disgusting. What does a horse radish look like anyway? I think I remember this stuff being spicy and hot, but maybe that was just my imagination. I think I'll taste it again to make sure. (sticking the tip of his tongue into the jar) Ugh! Ow, that burns my tongue! Yeah, that stuff is definitely gross. (Puts lid back on jar and replaces jar in refrigerator)

So, that day I smelled the sweet pickles again just to see if it still made me want to wretch. After my previous experiences had been confirmed, the timer in my head pinged to let me know that the pot simmering in the back of my mind was done. (Heh, heh, heh.) If the smell of sweet pickles could make me want to wretch, they could certainly make other people feel the same way.

I tucked the jar of pickles into a basket of laundry and headed back to the basement. As I passed mom in the kitchen she eyed me suspiciously. I gave her my best "I'm going to be a helper today" smile and trotted off without looking back. I'm sure she was calculating how many twinkies and fruit roll-ups I had fit into the laundry basket under the pile of clothes.

I ditched the basket of clothes in my room and stashed the jar of sweet pickles in my closet. Then I waited until I knew Jon would be out of his room for a couple of minutes. When I heard his footsteps heading up the stairs I fished out a pickle from the jar and tiptoed to his room. My eyes darted around the room looking for a place to hide the pickle. It couldn't be obvious, and it had to be somewhere that he wouldn't think to look. And someplace that he would visit frequently. My eyes had just caught on the model of a factory that Jon had built with my father when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Remembering there was a small hole in the bottom to insert a light bulb, I quickly grabbed the model and jammed the pickle inside. Setting the model on the shelf I had just enough time to dig through his folded clothes on the shelves and pretend I was searching for a lost trove of snacks when Jon walked in the room.

"Hey! What are you doing?! Get out of here!!"

I made an immature face and bolted from the room.

It was several weeks before I stashed the next pickle. This time I stuck it inside a folded pair of athletic socks. It was only days until he discovered this one. I'm sure it was obvious who had planted the pickle because I soon found pickles showing up in my drawers and closet. Eventually the conflict ended. Not because of a lack of places to stash pickles, but Mom simply never bought another jar. One day I found a partially empty tuna can on top of a shelf high up in my closet. I quickly threw my white flag in surrender. I marched to Jon's room and flashed him the tuna can. "I'm through. I don't want tuna in my room." Jon smiled at me deviously as he took another bite of his dry chocolate cake mix, and grimaced as I dumped the tuna, can and all into his trash can.

It wasn't until years later when we were looking through some of Jon's things that I noticed the model of the factory still on his closet shelf. I picked it up and turned it around and heard something rattling around inside. I peered through the hole and started laughing when I recognized the shriveled lump. "What?!" Jon demanded and grabbed the model from my hands. When he too saw the initial deposit that had touched of the war, he dropped the model and promptly left the room. Seconds later I could hear Jon's voice echoing from the stairs: "Mom? Do we have any tuna?!"

Hijinks on the stairwell

For some reason, I’m reminiscing about the hijinks that happened in transit from upstair to downstairs. I recall tray-surfing (not that I ever participated) and almost-daily leaps onto the landing from basement-bound Taylors, with the apparent goal of using the plywood landing as a bass drum. One day I had just finished a relatively peaceful descent only to have Jon (aka Spiderman) leap downward at me from his perch high up in the doorway. He had wedged himself up high by bracing his feet against the door jambs (he MUST have been wearing sneakers) and lying in wait like a spider waiting for prey. I can’t recall what I said, probably because I was startled speechless (well done, Spider-boy!). I think afterward Jon said, “ow, that hurt my feet, landing on the hard floor” and I probably told him he deserved it. I also recall that Mom stood at the top of the stairs and held the waistband of my just-washed jeans, while I held the leg hems and let my weight stretch out the wet denim a tiny fraction of an inch. Back then, I was desperate to keep my jeans from becoming high-waters, but my legs were just growing too fast, and we didn’t have the clothing budget to seek out longer and longer jeans. We probably only gained a tenth of an inch, but we kept trying. The most annoying thing that ever traveled down the stairs was sound. Specifically, the rousing strains of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” in the still morning hours, snaking its way into sleeping ears and waking us more efficiently than parental coaxing (or parental growling). Mom’s devious behavior won our surly attendance at the breakfast table (without her wasting any time nudging Jon and me repeatedly), but I can now offer grudging admiration at the efficacy of her solution. I’ve met other parents who employed the same technique, and we should be grateful Mom didn’t pool resources with them and give us polkas at high volume. Or Senegalese drum jams, or Jamaican steel pan calypso!

Raiders of the Lost Pantry

One of the most useful skills ever perfected in the Taylor house in Higley was how to carry off a successful raid of the pantry without alerting the parents. A successful raid could mean a stash of snacks to satisfy an entire week of late night munchies. Even more, it meant bargaining power with the other siblings. But with power came danger. Once your secret was out, the others had a bargaining chip that had to be quickly countered by equally condemning blackmail, otherwise you were sure to be thrown under the proverbial bus at any moment.

Despite the risks associated with carrying of a raid, the lure finally became too great when SAMs club opened in Gilbert and mom started buying lunch snacks in bulk. Once the boxes of snickers and crunch bars, fruit rollups, and CapriSun juice packets passed the threshold of the house, each of our hands began slinking its way towards the pantry door. Mom and Dad must have noticed that an invisible tractor beam in the pantry had been turned on because a hook and eye latch was installed at about 7 feet above the ground in short order. With most of us too short to reach the latch, we had to wait until we could catch the door unlocked. We sat salivating in our rooms.

Of course we dragged chairs from the kitchen table and stacked overturned trash bins on top of the chairs to reach the last few crucial inches.  As soon as the latch had been compromised, a swarm of boys would soon be at the pantry door.  Without bothering to ensure that the coast was clear we would tear into whatever high-calorie, sugary snack was most consumable at the moment.  Usually we would try not to stare into another's eyes as we stood there munching on chocolate bars as the sugar-deprivation shakes subsided.  Mom was soon aware of our secretive activities.  Several times she caught us red handed as we just stood there munching while chocolate melted in our mouths and our hands.  We were moths drawn to the flame with no hope of escape!

I'm convinced that Mom kept tabs on most of our pantry comings and goings, as most of the time it was obvious when a heist had been undertaken.  There would be a significant number of candy bars or twinkies missing without the associated wrappers-in-the-trash-can evidence.  When the supply of candy bars were cut short we resorted to containers of frosting and starlight mints. 

Necessity (aka our collective bottomless stomachs) was the mother of our invention, and the objects of our pantry raids became more varied.  Some of the new pilfered items were not so noticeable.  I remember one day catching Jon tucking a tupperware container back into a cupboard on his headboard.  Waiting until he had left his room I went in to investigate.  What I found was a chocolate pudding or cake mix that had been emptied into the tupperware and a chocolate encrusted spoon for shoveling.  From the looks of it, the cake mix had probably lasted a full week and it was less than half gone, probably on account of the lack of fresh milk in the basement.

After a while, the novelty of raiding the pantry wore off.  Looking back it seemed to coincide with when Mom threw in the towel and discontinued chocolate bars and the other snacks from her weekly grocery supply runs.  And eventually even the latch didn't slow us down when we became tall enough to reach it without the aid of a chair.  However, there would still be times when two or three of us would crowd the walk-in pantry and stare longingly at the empty shelves where the treats had been while we munched on what was available.  "Sure miss those snickers," Quinn would say as he crunched some raw spaghetti noodles over an over.  "Yeah, me too," I'd mutter while carelessly letting some uncooked cracked wheat drop to the floor.  "I loved the frosting on those Hostess cupcakes."  Suddenly, Jon's eyes would perk up and he'd dash past us out of the pantry and head down the stairs.  Quinn and I would glance knowingly at each other.  We'd count to five and then slink off after John.  Blackmail was out at this point but we still harbored hopes of catching him uncovering a stash of forgotten good.

Higley Hijinks - open season!

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

high jinks or hi·jinks (hī'jĭnks') pl.n. : Playful, often noisy and rowdy activity, usually involving mischievous pranks.


For a while now I've wanted to create a family blog where we could capture and re-live all of the fun family memories that made us who we are. Before you can have blogging, you need a blog and you need a web address.

In coming up with a name for a family blog where everyone from our extended family could post, I considered names that included words describing the Taylor gorillas, etc., but I didn't want to leave out all of the non-gorillas. I hoped to create a broader base which included the entire extended family, but how do you describe us all? Is there one adjective or phrase that captures who we are? We can't all be grouped under something like "Laird's Legacy" (for obvious reasons :-P). Even something as generic as "The Taylors" leaves out our Brandt and Shorty relations. I quickly realized that I wasn't ready to do something on so grand a scale. Instead I contented myself with something centering around our immediate family's experiences. [I'll defer a more expansive treatment of our family's experiences to another, more ambitious and capable person.]

With the scope of this project sufficiently limited, the title just popped out of my head fully formed. Higley Hijinks may seem somewhat narrow and exclusive for a title, and it's probably a bit dated in both time and location. However, when considering the entire Taylor family experience, Higley is our foundation, and it seemed fitting that it was part of the title (and space on the web). So, each of you have been enabled with the ability to post to this blog, and I hope you all do! I look forward to documenting and reading everyone's accounts of the shenanigans that took place while we lived under the same roof as well as the current hijinks that are a result of the people we became.

So, with this opening post, I declare it open season for Higley Hijinks!!!