The Jeans are coming

Friday evenings at the Colonia were always my favorites. Every Friday evening around 5 or 6 you would hear somebody say "the Jeans are coming, the Jeans are coming" and sure enough here they come around the corner in my Tio's Chevy. My Uncle Henry and Aunt Jean and there 7 kids in one car. We would run along side the car with our dogs and some of the other neighborhood kids. When the Jeans were in town there was always something going on. I don't know who gave them the name "the Jeans" but for some reason it fit. They spent the weekend at their Grand fathers house.Ol Gramps had a small house, kitchen,living room and a big closet. Ol Gramps liked to sit about 5 feet from the front of the t.v. and watch the Giants or the forty-niners with his cup of coffee, newspaper and a cigarette. sometimes he would leave the cigarette hang from his mouth and there would be an ash about 3 inches long hanging from it. One time my cousin couldn't take it anymore and he went and tried to knock the ash off his cigarette and he ended knocking the whole cigarette out of his mouth. Well I'll tell you what Ol Gramps has a hair trigger temper and you just don't mess with him. The next thing I know my cousin comes running out the door with a boot right behind him and a few creative words to go along with the boot.

There was this one incident that happened behind my Gramma's house that will follow us to our grave and beyond. It had to do with my cousins and my brother and I. We were just kids playing good guys and bad guys or something like that , well my cousin just happened to be the bad guy,so what do you do with bad guys ? you hang them right! and thats exactly what we did. We put him on this bucket and tied a rope around his neck, tied the rope to the tree and kicked the bucket out from under him,well thank god we didn't tie his hands, because when we kicked the bucket out he grabbed the rope so he wouldn't choke to death. At that time his sister came walking around the corner and sees whats happening and screams at us, we take off running and she chases us and leaves him hanging. to this day I don't know who got him down before he choked to death but thank god they did.

There was this other time that involved the same cousin. Seams we were looking for something to do and we had our b b guns with us and we were tired of shooting at whatever we were shooting at so I said lets have a b b gun fight and he says o.k. so I tell him you take off and I'll count to 100 and then I'll go looking for you and he agrees. At the time we were at the rice mill. We were the only ones there so we had the whole place to ourselves. Well he takes off and I count. I go looking for him and I'm being real careful cause them b b's hurt. I come walking around the corner real careful like and I look and all I see is these rice boxes stacked one on top of the other. They are made of wood and they are about 4 ft by 4ft and about 3 ft deep. Well when I'm looking over there I see some movement. these boxes are about 50 ft away. I'll tell you what, I was called dead eye by this old man that had this chicken ranch and sometimes he would give me free b b's for shooting the birds around his chicken ranch because they used to eat all his chicken feed. Any way I see movement in the rice box.So I'm looking at this knot hole in one of the boxes and I see this eye looking back at me so I just point and shoot. Now who would have ever thought I would make that shot but I did I shot him right in the eye lid. My cousin jumped clear out of that box in one leap and took off home. I'm there thinking, now I've done it, I knocked his eye out.Well lucky for him and I because it didn't do any serious damage to his eye and he didn't rat me out so I didn't have to deal with his or my folks. Did I learn anything from that ordeal ? no because a short time later we had a b b gun fight that involved 4 of us. my brother, my cousin, a friend of ours and myself. my brother got shot in the lip,my cousin got shot in the neck and chest and I got shot in the wrist and the corner of my eye. Someone sent my older cousin over to break it up because it was getting too serious, so he goes over and gets one of the b b guns and breaks it in half and that was that.