One childhood habit that explains so much.
As a kid in the latter half of the 1960s, the only thing that beat the Mister Softee truck traveling through the neighborhood was the mosquito truck. The one that ran through our town was yellow with a flashing yellow light on the top, presumably to differentiate it from the police cars, who had red lights and didn't frighten mosquitoes at all. The lure of the mosquito truck was the plume of cloudy mist that spewed out of the back. It smelled like gasoline, and everyone knows that gasoline kills mosquitoes. Like the fresh mimeographs that were handed out by our teachers, we couldn't resist getting our noses as close to it as possible. Although, to my knowledge, the only thing the school's mimeographs killed was our will to live. Mosquitoes lived merrily on. When we saw the truck off in the distance - or smelled it, which usually happened first - we would rush to a strategic launching place and ride behind it on our bicycles. In the mid...