This Spring Break, Kalyn and I are both home in Menard. We’ve spent part of the week going through my Grandma Pierce’s old things that have been stored in the garage for a decade.

Now, many of you probably know some things about our relationship with my grandma. She was a little crazy—in a good way, and she was our babysitter growing up. We played very elaborate games at Grandma’s house involving these large GI Joe civilizations built in her dining room. We had presidents, cabinets, wars, treaties, trials, schools, funerals, transportation, newspapers, etc. Everything.

Anyway, as we were looking through her stuff this week, we found things she’d saved from our playtime. We found pictures we’d drawn. We found toys. We found our newspapers dating from second grade where I’d written my “Dear Blabby” column. We also found our rules.

Pretty well everything we found told us something about how we’d become who we’ve become, especially what liberal wackos we’d become. But especially those rules told us stuff. I’ll stick my comments about the rules in parenthesis as I go along.

1. No shooting in Washington. (Washington was where Kalyn’s people were. Strangely, Washington gun control is something in the news where we’re still quite liberal.)
2. No starting a battle for no reason. (If only Bush had played with my Grandma.)
3. No hostage keeping. (Ditto on that last comment.)
4. No rioting.
5. No killing, except in times of self-defense. (We were clearly not quite pacifists yet.)
6. No stealing.
7. No animal sacrifice. (I think Grandma insisted on that one.)
8. No hunting without a license.
9. No owning more than six guns. (We’ve always been very pro-gun control.)
10. No disturbing the peace.
11. No faking for welfare. (We did have welfare in our civilization.)
12. Must obey in court or else be helt in contempt. (We did have court often, presided over by a GI JOE that Grandma had renamed the Pope. That’s also how I spelt helt.)
13. No lying in court.
14. No driving a train without a driver. (Seems very sensible to me.)
15. Must drive a train with a license.
16. No more than ten horses. (We were communists, clearly.)
17. Must have a license to drive a wagon. (Washington, i.e. Kalyn, evidently made a lot of money off of issuing licenses.)
18. Must be organized. (Ha. Grandma was even less organized than me and Kalyn.)
19. Has to get 6 hours of sleep before traveling.
20. Must have a license to travel on a horse.
21. No traveling at over 50 mph. (I wonder how often we broke this one on that dining room table.)
22. No discriminating against different races. (This is the one I couldn’t believe.)
23. No taking any kind of drug (alcohol and tobacco, too).
24. No attempting murder.
25. No breaking out of jail.

Signed by the following personages: Captain Senator (the leader of my group of GI Joes/Cowboys), White Nofeet (the plastic Indian leader of Grandma’s tribe—his feet had been chewed off by the dog), Al Gorey (One of the GI JOES had a passing resemblance to Al Gore, Grandma thought. He was her vice leader.) Shepard (another GI Joe guy on my side) Dr. Marsh (Any doctor visited by a family member eventually had a toy named after him or her. Kalyn’s representative. Also the president.) Fireman (the vice president)