When I was little - from about 18 months until I was about 8 years old we lived in a city in New Jersey called Prospect Park which nowadays you can't walk on certain streets there depending on your race without being shot. At that time it wasn't a great place to live, very cheap and full of lower income families but nothing like it is now. We lived in a three story apartment home. My family lived on the first floor, another family, The D'Angelo's, lived on the second floor and the third floor was just about condemned! We had a good sized yard that we shared. I went to school in Prospect Park from Kindergarten through part of Third Grade before we moved to Lake Stockholm.

At the end of the school year every year my father always made sure summer came with a big bang! The weekend before school was going to end he would setup a small pool in the yard for my sister and me and the two kids upstairs. The last day of school he would go to work in the morning and be home before we got out for the day. That evening we would have a big BBQ outside with the D'Angelo's to celebrate summer starting. Then Dad and Mr. D'Angelo would always disappear at some point and re-appear on the D'Angelo's balcony porch pegging all of us with water balloons. Some would be full of water and some would be full of whipped cream. The yard and all of us would always be such a mess by the end. But it was always such a fun way to start the summer! My father, who is still a big kid at heart all of the years later, says that he always wanted us to remember the fun summer days of being a kid....and I do! :)

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