Speaking of Stupid Kids.....

Off the top of my head, I can think of three stupid things I did as a kid. One directly, and two on the peripheral, but I was a participant, nonetheless.
When I was little, everybody played outside all of the time. You didn't even go inside to get a drink, there was a hose for that. We had the perfect kid creek just beyond the houses across the street. It never got deeper than our knees and most of the time was narrow enough to find a skinny place to jump over. The widest places had planks plunked across or a fallen tree to shimmy over. I remember one particular day, it must have been after a thunderstorm or nearby tornado (we were always having those dern tornadoes) my next door neighbor Jill and I (she's the one who's house I used to run over to barefoot in the snow) went down to play at the creek. When we got there we discovered a marvelous sight. It was 10 times it's size and had rapids. So of course the first thing we did was get in it. Jill got in so deep she had to hold on to a tree trunk. I stood a few feet nearer the shore and cheered her on. There she lay, stretched out full length with the current nipping at her ankles and us both laughing gloriously. It never occurred to either of us that she could be swept away never to be seen again. We just thought is was cool she could be parallel with the ground.
The second stupid thing I can remember involved a mysterious sound. On our way down to the creek on another adventure filled day, we heard a baby crying. Or so we thought. We followed the loud bawling and discovered a cat. Fonzie we called him because he was the meany of the neighborhood. Nobody could ever get close to him and none of us kids knew who he belonged to.

But there he sat, bawling like a baby and sitting very still under a bush. This was just too good to be true. I had to haul him home so my sister could hear this. I proceeded to gather him up in my arms, which he submitted to docilely enough. Once cradled he had other ideas however, and promptly twisted out of my grasp, only pausing long enough to bite my leg on the way down. It happened in a flash and I limped home with layers of fat hanging out of my knee. In my wake followed the rest of the neighborhood kids who automatically appeared whenever someone was fabulously wounded. Curiously, it did not bleed that much. The police showed up to scour the neighborhood for the offending animal and I was whisked off to the hospital for bandages and some sort of a shot with a loooong needle. I never knew what happened to Fonzie, but now I know his bawling meant he was in the early stages of giving another unseen cat a good whippin'.

One last stupid thing I did involved a sewer. For civic reasons I still don't understand, there was an access hole to the city sewer at the edge of our backyard. It surely wasn't meant to be accessed as was evident by the Olympic weight of it's thick iron lid and it's cement dome meant to keep out prying fingers. This was no match for my brothers however. Armed with a good idea, they had the lid off in no time, and were crouched over the depths below to see what was what. I watched and cheered them on as they lowered a shoebox on a string into it's abyss. It was so dark, they couldn't see what possibilities lay down there, so they had fixed a candle on the shoebox to light the way. That's about all the trouble we could get into with that one. Mostly because an adult discovered what we were doing and shut the operation down. "Stupid kids.." he muttered as he walked away. Now of course, I realize it was only a matter of fortunate air currents that shifted any sewer gas away from the open flame.
These are just some of the stupid things I did as a kid, I'm sure the list goes on ad infinitum.
I'd like to hear some of the things on your list. Please, share in a comment....