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Aaron tells the story of the day he tried—truly tried—to run away at age five, fueled by righteous anger over a forbidden episode of GI Joe and a backpack full of peanut-butter crackers. What begins as a funny childhood rebellion slowly reveals a deeper truth about grief, confusion, and a kid trying to make sense of a family unraveling. This is a story about the moment you realize running away isn’t the answer—and why coming home matters more than you knew.
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The Team:
Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Calafato
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Theme Music: thomas j. duke
Additional Soundscape Design: Isaac Gehring
TRANSCRIPT
I ran away—
or at least I should say, I attempted to run away. And right after the music, I'm going to tell you why I thought I did… and then tell you why I actually did something entirely different. I only figured it out not too long ago.
I was five years old when this happened.
Before you laugh, you know what a big moment that is. If you take yourself back to when you were five, six, seven—maybe eight—you remember that feeling of, I’m getting out of this place. I’m leaving this house, and no one is ever going to see me again.
It’s very Macaulay Culkin. Very Home Alone.
Except I never wished my family would disappear. I never hated them. I just had a moment—one that went too far.
My mom and I were in a fierce debate about the show GI Joe. I wanted to watch it badly. All my friends had the lunchboxes and the action figures. But my mom drew the line. She said I wasn’t watching it because it used guns and modern warfare. It glorified war. It was part of the military industrial complex.
She said war was awful, and she didn’t want me watching shows that promoted it.
I pushed back.
“It’s almost 1990,” I said. “Everyone watches it.”
Her answer was simple:
“You’re not everybody else.”
I didn’t understand. She let me watch He-Man. Prince Adam turns into a guy with a giant sword fighting Skeletor. That felt like violence to me. She broke it down: He-Man might use a sword, but he’s usually cutting a rope to drop a bag of rocks on someone. It’s not warfare. It’s not modern weapons. And even though violence is still violence, she explained that close-range, human-to-human conflict forces you to confront the reality of what you’re doing.
She was making a good argument.
But I was still mad.
At some point—internally, at least—I said,
“Well, if that’s how it is, you won’t be seeing me around here anymore. I’m out of here. You’ll miss me. You’ll regret this. You’ll wish you let me watch GI Joe.”
I was fully committed.
Emotionally, I had crossed the line.
The problem was… I had no plan.
I had a bike.
That was it.
So when my mom wasn’t looking, I snuck into the fridge, grabbed an apple, then found those peanut-butter cheese crackers—the orange ones that don’t taste like cheese but are incredible. I put them into a bandana like I’d seen on TV. I found a stick in the backyard, tied the bandana to it, grabbed a juice box—100% juice, because my mom was on her organic kick—and slung it over my shoulder.
I looked like a cartoon runaway from the 1940s.
I hopped on my bike, one hand steering, the other holding the makeshift bindle. I rolled down the driveway, looked back once at the house, and prepared to enter the “unknown.”
You may have seen a safe suburban neighborhood.
I saw a jungle.
Where would I eat?
Who would make grilled cheese the way my mom did?
Where would I sleep?
What about my books?
What about the stuffed animals I still secretly played with?
Could I really leave all of that behind?
Did I even have money?
Was I supposed to get a job at five?
None of the math added up.
I stood at the end of the driveway staring into the big world, and my courage evaporated. I looked back at the house, and my mom was standing in the window. I felt embarrassed. Sad. Defeated.
But I couldn’t show her.
I marched the bike back into the garage, threw the bandana sack on the ground, walked inside, and headed straight up the stairs—silent, stoic, dramatic.
My mom said,
“Hey, Aaron.”
I didn’t answer.
I was performing heartbreak.
She said again,
“Aaron.”
“Yes, Mom?”
“I’m glad you’re home.”
I didn’t smile on my face, but I smiled in my heart.
“Me too.”
Then I went to my room and cried one of those huge cries—the kind that seem to last forever, the kind where you can’t catch your breath, the kind so private you’d never dare tell anyone.
The kind that’s between you and your maker.
As the years went on, my mom and I laughed about the day I ran away. It became a funny family story.
But recently, while looking through old pictures, I realized something.
Just a few days before my big “runaway incident”…
my dad left.
My parents split for a while.
It was rough.
I remember watching him back out of the driveway and disappear down that same street—the one I stood at with my bike, staring into the world and feeling terrified. I didn’t know if he was coming back or where he was going. I was five. I didn’t understand any of it. I just prayed he’d return soon.
Maybe it wasn’t about GI Joe at all.
Maybe I was sad.
Maybe I was angry.
Maybe I wanted to take my bike, ride into that unknown world, and go find him.
But I couldn’t.
I was five.
And the thing I’m most grateful for now is this:
When I couldn’t run away—
when I couldn’t pull the trigger—
my mom kept the door open.
She let me come home.
I’ll talk to you next week.
