Setting The Record Straight

Remember when Bobby and Cindy Brady decided they wanted to set a record? I do. They didn't get invited to Aunt Gertrude's wedding. After being shoved around and ignored by their siblings and suffering their various accomplishments and ego-feeding-frenzies, the two youngest decide to prove themselves on their own terms. They decide they should be able to compete for the world's mark for teeter-tottering. That brings the news cameras to their house. What a feat. Can you imagine? Can you imagine bouncing up and down for twenty-four hours with only five minute potty breaks every five hours? How about seventy-five hours? That's the real record. It was set in 2003. The one Cindy and Bobby can only dream about, since the best they could hope for was an asterisk and some sort of "junior's mark" that probably wouldn't get them that oh-so-coveted invitation to Aunt Gertrude's nuptials.
But that's the world I entertained when I was a kid. Any physical action that could be repeated, seemingly endlessly, was a potential record breaker: free throws, yo-yo, clackers, jump rope, tennis ball toss and catch. Once we even constructed a monster version of four-square that was actually twenty-six square, with a spot for every letter in the alphabet and every kid in the neighborhood. It was our wish that channel seven would come by, or even channel nine with their helicopter, but at least dumb old channel two. It was epic, this snaking trail of boxes drawn on the sidewalk and out into the street. Nobody came. Perhaps this was because no one ever bothered to call. It didn't occur to us that these sort of things relied on someone shining a light on us from the outside. Just because we took on the challenge of stacking soda cans all the way to the roof didn't spontaneously generate a media event. It was, instead, merely a bunch of kids finding new and generally pointless ways to waste time. Not that we didn't document our own achievements. Countless loose leaf notebook pages filled with won/loss records and hash marks scrawled on garage walls to track the inevitable proud moment when, beyond all reason, we accomplished the seemingly impossible. And, for the record, we never got invited to Aunt Gertrude's wedding either.