Knackered Takes the Back Seat with Benzos

   Hey there.  Knackered here. Growing up in the much Knackered household, the brothers, one and two, lived for the weekends.  Free from the shackles of the school day, they were glad for the opportunity to run amok.  

  Those were the real days of the boom years and kids seemed to be squirting out the front doors of each household.  

   Most parents did little to rein them in (the kids that is), and the streets were nearly impassable on Saturday and Sunday due to ongoing games and ‘wars’ of all kinds.   By pulling off a fence picket and stealing someone’s garbage can lid, you were armed for battle.  

   The Knackered parents let most of it go, but did insist on civility for the two ‘family events’ on Saturday night and Sunday afternoons.  

   Saturday night was devoted to ‘board games’.  We were instructed to sit on the living room floor in the ‘normal fashion’ and be decent.  Things always started out that way until the brothers got ‘worked up’ and started using the Parcheesi game pieces for missiles.  That, hastened bedtime and brought about another lecture  from the fatherhood.  

   All seemed to be forgotten by Sunday morning when smiling families cleaned themselves up and piloted their one and only car to the church of their choice. 

   The brothers, of course, had no choice and were forced to endure children’s church and Sunday school in that order.  Filled with a spirit which was holey they came home to the Sunday dinner.  

    Church day required church clothes at the table. We feasted on some type of meat, mashed potatoes, and canned vegetables.  Fear of getting ‘worms’ seemed uppermost in the minds of all parents and everything we ate was either canned or cooked until it was unrecognizable.  Dessert was always ice cream; Neapolitan, since everybody liked different flavors.  

   Mother Knackered dumped everything in the sink so that we could climb in the auto and take a family drive.  

   As father Knackered piloted us over the highways and byways of the countryside, the brothers practiced their wrestling moves in the back seat.  With no seat belts to contend with, we battled gallantly to see who could subdue the other.  The Knackered parents ignored them for the most part as they gazed and commented on the scenery flying by.      

   Meanwhile, they declared the winner by seeing who could sit on the other’s head first.  Eventually one of them announced that they needed to pee.  As my father had warned us ahead of time to take care of business, we were left to the mercy of the knackered mother who passed back the coffee can. When finished, she shamelessly rolled down the window and cast things to the wind. 

   Back home in time for snacks and baths, they laid out the necessities for the dreaded approach of Monday morning.  

   Young Knackered’s anxiety level ramped up three fold at the thought of spelling tests, board work, and math problems.  Always more math problems. The darn things were plastered on rolling black boards, and Knackered fretted endlessly over finding the right ones for his group. Growing more distressed as recess approached he frequently shredded his tablet paper as he erased and recopied. Unknown to him at the time, both the worry and the rewriting were early indicators of much bigger problems down the line.

     All that would be solved by the introduction of Benzodiazepines some years later.  They did the trick, until they didn’t. In the end, it turned out they weren’t his friends.  Of course they weren’t.