The Things Children Will Think Up

Back when we still lived in our ‘hometown’ of Flint, Michigan (Cars, Bars, and a few Weirdoes) my brothers and I were wont to create our own games.  Mum and Dad were separated, and there was never the money to stretch far enough for new toys or games.

Reading had always been a part of my family’s life, starting with the earliest ‘baby’  books, up to sharing novels that we enjoy.  Because we swapped books back and forth, each other’s interests rubbed off.  We all learned to be interested in history from Grandma DeShaw, the Sciences from Mum, and the Occult Sciences (or Metaphysics) from me.

And the novels!!!  Oh all those glorious stories!!  I was reading, retaining and comprehending College-Level Genetics Textbooks at the age of 9 so I bypassed a lot of those simplistic books.  I think I went directly from “Dick and Jane” to William Peter Blatty, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and suchlike.

Yes, the whole family adores scary tales, the more believable and chilling, the better.  Which is where this memory comes from- 

All four of us had read a book of short stories aloud to one another, and one of them stuck more than the others.  In the story, a man ate or drank something nasty, and it changed him.  He turned grey and slimy as a Banana Slug, all of his senses were altered, and the disease passed through the population like wildfire.  The people that contracted it were called ‘Dermies’, and that was the basis for one of our favourite games.

It could only be played at night, with the curtains drawn and all the lights off, so the house was delightfully eerie.

Dermies was an offshoot of classic ‘Tag’; one person was ‘It’, but, instead of being ‘It’ they were the ‘Dermie’ and their touch passed the onus of ‘Dermie-ism’ on to the next player.

Like Tag, Dermies was a physical game, you ran from the Dermie to avoid being touched.  Instead of being played outside we played it in the house, especially on stormy nights.

We would all run through the house shrieking “Dermies” at the top of our voices.  Furniture was to be leapt over or bounced off of.  There were no rules to speak of, except for not being able to tag the person that just made you the dermie, and it was verboten to close any doors.

This game was never played in the presence of adults, oh no!!  This was a game we didn’t share with too many friends.  Most of the kids in the neighbourhood were…

What is a nice way to put it???  Their family trees had no branches, perhaps.  And they were more hillbilly than Jed, Ellie Mae, and the rest of their kin. 

Anywhooodles, None of us wes ever seriously hurt whilst playing Dermies, and even more amazing, the game never degenerated into a fist-fight.  Mum heard about it from our next-door neighbours, the McCanns.  So, we were forced to tell her why we were running through a darkened house shrieking like a trio of Harpies.

Mum, being delightfully Mum, laughed until she hurt, and told us to tell Mary so she wouldn’t worry about us. 

After we discovered that Mary McCann kept a loving eye on us while Mum was going to college full-time and working 3 or 4 part-time jobs to support us we added a mischievious fillip to the game.

Before we would actually start our game we would all bounce up and down on Mum’s bed and wave to Mary M. as we peeped over the curtains in Mum’s bedroom window.

Mary, being a ‘Universal Mom’, didn’t get upset over this, oh no!!  She laughed until she hurt every time we did it, and she would call her husband to the window to watch as well.

No one could ever accuse our family of lacking imagination and a sense of fun!!!!