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HONEST HISTORIES OF KID KINGDOM
Our Only True Myth Is Childhood
The winters of our lives are deep and mean, and yet our hearts, somehow, are young and summer green
Published in
13 min readNov 30, 2024
In elementary school, we called our 8th graders the “Big Kids,” and we were right. We were so right that even decades later, they’re still the biggest kids we’ve ever known.
Let’s meet a few of them, then I’ll tell you a story:
- Friend Leffingwell (yes, his name was Friend Leffingwell) drank real beer and got chased everywhere by real cops while driving his dirt bike. If you saw a dirt bike go by without cops racing after it, you knew for a fact it wasn’t Friend on that bike.
- Josh Fry was a general in BB gun wars that never ended — they just turned to cold wars for a while before going hot again. He was responsible for all his friends setting off metal detectors with the BBs lodged in their bodies and for teaching them all to be forever jumpy around poppy sounds and for making them believe that when Death cameth to collect them, he wouldn’t need a scythe. Just a magnet.
- Manny Miles was six foot three during a time when all teachers were medieval in height because of the dark ages of nutrition they’d crawled through to get to adulthood.