Lumpkin Jennings

I have known Lumpkin Jennings since I was a little kid.  She used to live down the street from me, but we were mortal enemies at the time.  I have a distinct memory of her eating candy at the bus stop in the morning, and my parents have confirmed this.  Laffy Taffy or some sort of chocolate.  Maybe marshmallows.  I also have a weird memory of her standing there at that same bus stop having a daddy-long-legs crawling on her, like on her head, and she didn't know it was there.  I do not know if that memory is real or not.  Either way, she is still eating candy at inappropriate times, and is often infested with insects, so not much has changed in that respect.

Anyway, we were enemies back then.  Or at least that is how I remember it.  I remember stealing Lumpkin's Silly Putty and walking around the neighborhood squishing ants into it, so that it was like a ball of ant corpses. I thought this was the most evil thing you could do to a person.  The sad part was, I brought this up to her years later and she had absolutely no clue what I was talking about. However, she did have a serious fear of ants at some point afterward, so maybe I had a subtle influence.

I don't really know why we were enemies, there was no actual event that I can recall.  It was a neighborhood gang rivals thing, us verse them.  I was friends with a few girls on the street, and then Lumpkin was friends with this other girl.  Once one of the girls in my gang pushed Lumpkin off the monkey bars in someone's backyard, and Lumpkin broke her arm!  The other girls were better at evil doing than I was, apparently. (We are all still friends to this day).

Time passed, we moved away from each other, then close to each other again, then we became reacquainted in Hebrew School! And then we became real friends! I remember thinking Lumpkin had the BEST style.  This is hilarious, because this was like 1995-1996, when bell bottoms and polyester clothing, and peace signs and ying yangs were totally awesome and cool for middle schoolers.  Lumpkin had things from Contempo, and other mall stores, and she was one bad ass mothaa fucka!!  She had a pair of silver platform sneakers.  She was my hero.

She taught me how to get in trouble in Hebrew School. We had middle school dramas, we went to sleep-away camp and had sleepover parties.  At camp, her travel trunk was completely full of snack foods, and midway through the summer, it started to reek with the most disgusting stench.  It ended up sitting outside the bunk house on a giant rock for a week.  Favorite sleepover prank:  Get underwear wet and stick them in the freezer!

At some point, her parents went away on a vacation and she was alone, so she ate nothing but Pez purchased from JoAnn Fabric's for a week.  As a result, she developed some sort of weird growth on the inside of her mouth.  She still appears to subsist on nothing but Pez, Symphony bars, white cheddar popcorn, marshmallows, sardines and samples from Whole Foods.

One time, she got us all in her car and wouldn't tell us where she was taking us.  It was a surprise.  We ended up at her orthodontist's office, where she was getting a new retainer made.  Thanks a lot, Lumpkin!   She had a lot of retainers back then because she would lose them regularly.  I remember one had a teddy bear sticker inside of it, and one was colored like a watermelon with seeds and everything.  

Once she was at my house, cutting her toenails. She left them scattered on my bed, so I put them in a baggy and sent them to her in the mail.  I think she appreciated it.

She broke her face at some point when she slipped in the bathroom, and has a metal plate in her cheek.  She also almost lost her left hand in a car accident, and was not even squeamish about the GRUESOME pictures of her opened flesh.  Imagining her with a hook instead of a hand is only somewhat disturbing.  She could totally pull it off.  Later, she was upset that her incredible, hot-orange Member's Only jacket had to be cut off of her and was covered in blood, rendering it unwearable in the future.

Her survival in general is somewhat of a medical mystery.

In summary,
Lumpkin Jennings is TOTALLY AWESOME and I LOVE HER!!!!

HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY!!!!