It was a beautiful Chicago summer day.  The birds were singing and the sun was shining.  It was a good day to be alive.  I was in kindergarten at the time and my babysitter, Moren, decided that she was going to take me to the doggy beach downtown for the day.  When I heard her tell me the news, I started dancing around my house. I had never been before, so I was very excited.  I got all my materials ready.  I had my sunblock, my shovel to make sand castles, my swimming goggles and lastly, dog treats.  I wouldn’t stop begging her to leave.  It got so bad to the point that Moren said, “ask me one more time, and we won’t go at all.”  What can I say, I was a young kid who had a passion for dogs.  Excited was an understatement.

Ever since I was young I have loved beaches and dogs.  With my main nationality being Italian, we like to get dark in the sun.  I have my father’s genes, and boy does he get dark.  Being small, I wanted to be just like him.  I would follow him all around at the beach.  I would lay out when he lays out, read when he reads, and make sand castles when he makes sand castles.  I looked up to him like a role model.  I also had a passion for dogs.  Coming into this world, my family already had a dog.  His name was Mike, and he was a short haired Border Collie.  He was two at the time.  We became best friends right when I laid my eyes on him.  I was with him all the time.  So much, that I wasn’t making friends with anyone in the neighborhood.  My dog was all I needed.  You could imagine how excited I got when I heard I get to have my two favorite things in the world combined into one.  I was ready to take on the beach.

Finally, we left around 11 A.M. to leave for the beach.  Unfortunately my babysitter told me we would have to leave my dog behind because she didn’t want to be responsible for him.  At first, I was a little mad but she calmed me down and told me there would be plenty of dogs to play with at the beach.  At this point I just wanted to get to the beach already.  I remember pulling into the parking lot of the beach perfectly.  Right when I stepped out of the car, I felt the sun's rays beaming down on me.  Gosh was it such a beautiful day.  Hundreds of dogs running around and paying.  Tall ones, short ones, fat ones, they had everything.  I was convinced I could find any type of dog on this beach.  I took my shoes off and took my first step onto the sand.  The sand was so hot that it was like walking on lava.  The water was light blue and the waves we crashing into the shore.  It looked too good to be true.  I sat there and took it all in. I said to myself, “this must be what heaven is like.”  I had finally made it. 

The first dog I encountered was a big, Yellow Lab.` I asked the owner what his name was, and she replied, “Rex.” He was on the larger side and was a bright yellow color.  The only reason he came near me was because I was holding a colorful frisbee.  He wouldn’t leave my side, so I decided to play with him for a while.  I would throw the frisbee and he would retrieve it.  Things were going great, until the giant Lab stepped on my foot.  Instantly the pain rushed to my foot and I lost all feeling.  I fell to the ground in excruciating pain screaming my babysitter’s name. “Moren! Moren! Help I broke my foot!” I yelled.  I had never experienced something like this.  Moren walked over taking her time.  “Get up”, she said.  Did she think I was faking? At this point I was screaming at the top of my lungs.  “Take me home! Take me home!” I screamed in pain.  But she didn’t answer.  She helped me up and sat me on the curb.  She finally decided it was time to head home, so she packed everything up and started walking towards the car.  There I sat on the curb, wondering if she was going to help me to the car.  Moren turned around and yelled, “get up or we are leaving you behind.”  I got up and struggled to the car.  How can you do this to a cute little kindergartener? This was cruel.

I got home and told my parents what happened and they too didn’t believe me!  Did they think I was faking? One week went by and they still didn’t believe me.  Here I am, a poor little kid, struggling around my house.  I would drive around in the car with my leg hanging out the window.  I told every kid and there grandma that I had broken my foot.  But still no one believed me! It was going on week two, and the pain was getting worse.   My mother finally decided to take me to the hospital because she saw me crawling to the bathroom in the middle of the night.   Finally someone believed me!!  We arrived to the hospital and I was seated in a room waiting to take my x-rays. I took a couple pictures on my foot, and was moved to another room where a doctor would come in and go over the x-rays with me.  After about an hour, a doctor finally walked into the room.  His first words were, “well, sure enough the kid broke his foot. I don’t know how he has been walking around for two weeks...that is unheard of.”  You should have seen the expression on my mother’s face.  She felt like the worst parent in the world.  You better believe I got whatever I want for the next month.  I said in a salty way, “I told you I was right mom!”
How could you not believe a cute kindergartener? I never brought harm to anyone.  For the next month I walked around bragging to everyone in my neighborhood.  “I was right you were wrong,” I sang over and over again.  My parents were not gonna hear the end of this.  Sometimes you have to believe the boy who cried wolf.  This is my favorite childhood memory and to this day I still harass my parents about it.