The art of T.P.ing

Belonging to the Gator swim team brings with it the necessary evils of T.P.ing. There is an underground movement that only surfaces late at night, when most decent and unsuspecting folk have gone to bed. They strike with their hoarded rolls of toilet paper & chalk, leaving streaming trails of white paper dangling from trees and bushes, empty cardboard rolls stacked upon innocent car atenas and brightly colored messages on driveways, in their wake. Part of the fun, on the part of the T.P.er is the thrill of skulking around someone else's yard in the dark, cowering in the shadows when headlights pass by and covering as much lawn in toilett paper as is humanly possible without getting caught. Part of the fun, on the part of the T.P.ee is to hear the hushed whisperings and the giggling and to catch the culprits in the act. Turning on a porch light or opening a window and yelling out "busted" sends the pack scrambling down the street into waiting parked cars...cars, I might add, that are driven by adults! In my day and age, no decent, self respecting parent would be caught dead consorting with, let alone DRIVING these hellions to appointments with delinquency. Ahhh, but we live in a different world these days. Parental involvement seems to be required these days, necessary in fact in a world where we barely let our children walk ten feet to school without a chaperone!

As we approach the end of swim season and with Championships next weekend, the past few days have seen new heights in T.P. activity. In fact, our house was hit twice two days running by different bands of roving Gator buddies. In fact, while we were out T.P.ing others, our house was being hit. It's pretty much all fun and games and innocent fun. But, try explaining that to the neighbors. We live in an area were there are a lot of Chinese and Indian familes. The first time the sun rose over our barely recognizable yard strewn with millions of strands of white toilett paper, they immediately rushed over to console us, ready to call the police, soooo sorry that our house had been vandalized. We, on the other hand, stood on the front steps in our pajamas, grinning broadly trying to explain that, no quite the opposite, that this was a good thing and we were really quite happy and excited to have singled out by our Gator team for recognition. The boys, you see, get very excited by the whole ordeal, even though THEY are the ones the get to clean up the entire mess the next day!