When I was a teenager, my buddy and I were really starting to sprout when it came to entrepreneurial undertakings. We both constructed turtle pens in our backyards with a compendium of odd-sized pieces of wood and some mesh wire and stakes. Now since we were so proficient at sneaking up on these creatures at the lakes and ponds and catching them, we had to have a place to keep them. At the same lake where we had used a leaky rowboat once, we had no lack of turtles to catch. There was even this one time, I remember, that walking out on some floating logs brought me some woe. I got real close to this one turtle and bam, the log started to roll, and in I went, up to my waist.

One Saturday, while at my turtle buddy's house, I became a bit disappointed. I noticed that he had one more turtle in his pen than I did. So what's a guy to do? My sinister plot was to go over to his house through the wooded area near his backyard when I believed his mother wasn't home and just steal one of his turtles. I successfully removed one of the turtles, but as I was doing so, I happened to look up at the kitchen window and saw his mother looking out at me with the reflection of her glasses. I just kept on going anyway and brought the turtle home and put it in my pen. When it started moving around, I noticed that it was missing one leg and one eye (must have been in a fight). I didn't realize it at the time, but what goes around surely comes around. Of course my turtle buddy found out about it through his mother first, but he just let it go, even though after this he always had to keep a closer eye on his turtle pen. What a pal of mine.

There was this one night when we slept out in a tent at his house. We snuck up to the local swimming lake about two in the morning via the golf course. In our mischief we dumped a barrel of trash into the lake near the T-dock. Pitiful but true , one of us had to defecate there; right on the T-dock. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go. A few days later we both went up to the lake to swim and hang out. Behold, the proprietors confronted us as we entered the place and said, "Hey, Warholic, you and da utter guy, you came at night and dumped trash in the lake. You put poopy on da dock. Ya broke into da place." Of course they didn't speak english very well. Naturally, we denied it. The old woman said, "Don't deny it, we've seen ya's." And so we just went on our way and never heard anything more about it.