University Mall - Part 1

Sometimes we walked to this very mall 3 times in the same day.

There was very little that Paul and I would not do at the mall. One thing that we wouldn't not do involved a game that we invented wherein we would fill our pockets with pennies and plot to induce individuals into picking them up after dropping or throwing the penny near the individual but only if we were on a tile floor. Carpeted floors don't ring with the sound of dropped coins, you know. Another method was to leave the penny in a highly visible location and wait for someone to pass and collect it. An elaborate scoring system was invented based on which people were least likely to pick up the penny. Children and custodians were worth only one point. Teenagers were worth a whopping 5 points. Everyone else was worth 2. If a fight broke out, 10 points were awarded. This was not as uncommon as it sounds. We played this game often enough to come up with a name for it in order to reference it while not directly engaged in said game. The name we came up with for the game was "The Penny Game" and it was very fun. In this aspect it was very unlike the game that Paul made up where you grab a handful of orange berries off a bush and drop them one at a time in front of you as you walk. The point of his game was to step on the berry and squish it before it bounced twice. I think. It was a very, very bad game though I would be surprised if Paul told me he had ever given it up completely. He was very fond of this game. I tried to convince him on every occasion that his game was bad but he remained unconvinced somehow.