Sunnyside, Sunnyside, Sunnysi-i-i-i-i-i-ide!

Earlier today I mentioned the country store near my house growing up named Sunnyside.  Here's some pics et al.  Click HERE if you wanna hear me telling my aunts about when I got caught necking behind it.  Oh oh! I was a bad boy!

From my memoirs:

THE COUNTRY STORE: was called Shackleford’s when we moved there. Was a kid’s wet dream; penny candy as far as the eye could see. Do kid’s have wet dreams? I never did, I was never that lucky. I had to work for everything I’ve gotten in this life. Also they had KISS and Elvis bubblegum cards. Then there was a big fire, and it changed hands and became known as “Greys.” Not much really changed, though the new owners for some reason had an obsession with the comic strip “Herman” and had them plastered everywhere, just like the Bible pages stuck everywhere in the dead priest’s room in The Omen. I guess like the priest trying to ward off the devil with the Bible, the owner was trying to ward off laughter by having such a lame comic strip around everywhere. Then eventually it became “Sunnyside.” I will hold my Sunnyside tales for later, though I will mention that after 9-11 the county tried to boycott the place cause a guy who “looked like a terrorist” was working there. Must be a nice moment at the terrorist meeting, right? Assignments being handed out, your buddies get the World Trade Center, the Pentagon etc and you get Sunnyside Grocery in Kino, VA. Killing the infidels one “Kino Dog” at a time, I guess. “This sucks; I should’ve gone to tv repair school like Mom said.”

So it was mostly hunting & fishing people whose families had been around forever, and then us smack dab in the middle. It’s bad enough my dad was a cop, but my parents being Yankees I’m sure drove them all crazy. From an early age I understood that we were different, that we didn’t really fit in with these other families. So as I looked towards  turning 5 years old, I was 1) part of a family of outsiders 2) aware that my brother was the brilliant golden-child genius to whom I would be Odie to his own Garfield, and 3) desperately trying to learn how to masturbate. The following years would turn out to shape me into the man I would eventually become: adding new family members, throwing me into school and organized sports and the birth of the Chicken McNugget in 1983. Was shaping up to be quite the thrill ride, and I was looking forward to it.