How Styrofoam Peanuts Almost Claimed Our Lives

I am notorious for having bad luck and mayhem follow me.  My life, since day one, has been a series of mishaps, accidents, incidents, blunders and disasters and my mother can certainly attest to this fact.  I am fortunate that these are usually minor incidents and no one is harmed.  Most often, these incidents are either immediately hysterical to me or take me telling the story to someone else before I find the humor, but I do always find the humor in just about every disaster.  I've always been this way.  As much as I would love to blame the kids, the truth is it didn't start when I had children, it started when I was born.  Of all the incidents over the years, there are a few that stay fresh in my mind no matter how much time has passed.  One such incident started on a hot summer's day...

We were casually cruising along a highway in New Jersey in the 80's on our way home from our annual beach vacation.   I was about 8 years old and in the back seat of the Cadillac having the time of my life as always.  No seat belts meant the back seat was essentially a playground as long as you didn't bump the driver's seat, spill the beer, get burned by a cigarette or get within smacking distance of an adult.  Using the leather seats to slide back and forth from one side of the car to the other only got me through the first 40 minutes of the drive.  I then turned to entertaining myself with a toy that I won on the boardwalk.  It was the coolest thing ever.  It was a stuffed animal inside of a balloon on a bed of Styrofoam peanuts.  Well, at least that's what it was when I won it.  By the time it was in the backseat of the Caddy, it was a stuffed animal shrink-wrapped by a balloon and packed with Styrofoam peanuts.  I still don't quite understand how it came to be that the deflated balloon created a suction around the stuffed animal.  Very strange.  So while I am playing in the car cruising down the highway, I have this great idea that I will "free" the stuffed animal from the balloon.  Since the air already was out of it, all I would have to do is rip the balloon open and get the toy out of it.  That's what I thought anyway.  

When it happened, my uncle was driving peacefully with his arm on the door, oldies playing softly on the radio and his baseball cap perched high atop his bald head.  When it happened, my sister was curled up on the front seat overly irritated about nothing and everything with the hot summer air gently blowing her hair around like a dance.  When it happened, it scared the ever-loving sh!t out of all of us.  What happened was when I pulled apart that balloon to let the stuffed animal out, it popped. ..and LOUD.  So loud that I swear my uncle almost swerved off the road. It was like a gunshot, and that wasn't even the most shocking part.  

You see, he had no idea I even had this thing back there.  All he knew was that he was enjoying a drive on a hot summers day one second, and a split-second later, the whole inside of his car was covered in Styrofoam peanuts.  They were on the dashboard.  They were on the seats.  They were even sitting on the brim of his hat. They were absolutely everywhere.  It's a mystery for the ages how such a small balloon could hold enough Styrofoam peanuts to essentially coat the entire interior of an 1982 Cadillac.  After regaining control of the car, his shaken reaction was "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!!!?"  His eyes had a look of both terror and anger as they darted from my sister to me and back again.  My initial reaction was shock, followed by a rush of fear and then immediately followed by a fit of laughter that almost got me left on the side of the road.  I was laughing so hard, I couldn't even tell him what happened.  

I laughed myself delirious for the rest of the hour and a half drive home.  To this day, I still don't know if he knows what really happened!  But all I know is that I still have that stuffed animal nearly 30 years later and I still can't help but laugh every time I look at it!