Battle of the Bulge

In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school,  while at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, two friends and I invented (or thought we did) a game we called Rate-a-Bulge, which is exactly what it sounds like. This was in the mid-80's, an era during which even non-Speedo trunks left significantly less to the imagination than the board shorts that are so common today. This bulge rating was going on within easy earshot of my long-suffering mother who was sitting on a blanket nearby, flipping through a magazine.

As I remarked in my spiral notebook journal later that night, on a scale of 1 to 10, there weren't any Tens, but there were enough Eights to make looking worthwhile.

One of those Eights had just wandered by to the accompaniment of our hysterical nudges and whispers, "Guys! There's an Eight! An Eight!"

My mother glanced up, saying, "Where?" And when we pointed (oh-so-subtly, of course) him out, she said, "How is he an eight? He's not fat at all."

Apparently, my mother thought we had been spending the afternoon rating belly bulges.