The house I grew up in had one of those slightly more than half finished but not fully second floors, where the ceiling was a little short and the walls sloped in. Technically I guess it’s a converted attic or loft, but a loft implies you can look down to a room below, and that’s not what we had. Maybe the original house was one floor and then somebody updated it with the attic conversion, but my whole life the upstairs had a small bedroom to the left, a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, and a long bedroom stretching off to the right.  Twice as long as it was wide, with a single window at the far end. The walls went up about four feet and then started sloping towards a low ceiling. When Jim got older he moved into the “guest bedroom“ on the left, but when we were young kids we shared the big room to the right. We had captains’ beds that have a chest of drawers underneath them so the beds themselves were relatively high; the height of a dining room table, I guess. That meant that the slope of the wall-ceiling came right across the bed and really made it feel like I was sleeping in a big wood lined tent. Oh yeah, the whole room was knotty pine boards. As mentioned, the room was long and narrow, and laid out so Jim was on one side I was on the other, and there was a no man’s land walkway/canyon  from the door to the single window between our two beds. That one window and the wood paneling made for a pretty dark room.

All of that is just to help you picture the heist game we invented.

We would unroll the blind down from the top, so the room was as close to pitch black as we could get it.  At the end of the room, under the window, we’d place some object on the floor  that represented “the diamond“. The iconic thing I remember using was a big green plastic dart about the size of my hand, with a suction cup. Imagine a Nerf-gun dart, but this definitely predates Nerf guns. I’m sure we use other objects because it was just a symbolic thing.  Anyway so there’s an object on the ground under the window at the head of the bed. One of us would lay in the dark on one of the beds and be “the guard.” The other one would start outside the room and be “the thief“. The thief’s  job was to creep/crawl as slowly and silently as possible the entire length of the room past the guard and get their hand on the jewel. Obviously the guards job was to stop them, but you had to catch them in the act. We both had these big, red, metal swingarm bedside lamps that let us read at night. If I was the guard, I would lay there listening for the sound that might be my older brother’s breathing or catch a different texture of shadow on darkness really close below me, and then turn on the light and yell “gotcha!” Or I’d lay there in the dark driving myself crazy, hallucinating those light-sparkles and  listening for every sound and trying to decide how close the thief was whether it was time to make a move.  Sometimes a thief would be successful and you would  just be laying there tensing when he’d yell “I got it and start laughing with glee. 

As the thief, I’d have to decide how to balance quick with quiet and wonder if the creaky floorboard was as loud to the guard as it was deafening to me. When I was far away I could keep the location of the goal and it’s guard in one field, but as I crept closer, I would be forced to divide my attention between the “diamond” on the floor, and the the guard, who’d be looming over you on that high bed, almost behind you for those last precious, tension-filled inches. The joy of triumph impending triumph paired with the fear and adrenaline spike of getting busted.

We could play for hours taking turns being the culprit or the watchman. The absolute best times were when we would be engrossed in the scenario, immersed in our roles, and our big wonderful dog, Budgin’ would galumph up the stairs and excitedly investigate and start sniffling and barking and reveal the thief’s exact location by jumping on them and licking them all over the face.