When I was a kid growing up we lived in the country. It
was extremely boring as it was before cell phones or PlayStations so my
youngest brother Steve and I would come up with our own fun. ‘Fun’ is loosely
used here, I guess what I mean is we came up with games that we were lucky to
survive. My dad golfed so we had golf clubs to swing and golf balls to hit but
fetching them after we’d hit them was not something either of us wanted to do
so we had a better idea. We decided to stand opposite each other on the far
sides of the yard and hit them back and forth at each other, or to each other,
depends on how you look at the game. We did this for a while and it was a lot
of fun, until I got hit square in the middle of the forehead and passed out. I
awoke with Steve looking at me from above and telling me I had little golf ball
dents in my head from where the ball smacked me. Survived that one. Yay me!
Another excellent game we came up with involved the bows
and arrows that my brothers got for Christmas. Yes, this is a story of
childhood stupidity or a child‘s view of invincibility, either way. Behind my parents’ house was a cornfield and
a couple of rows of pine trees. What we decided to do was to split up and shoot
the arrows over the trees to/at each other and then when one hit the ground we
would run to it and shoot it back over to/at the other person and keep our game
of extreme William Tell going. We did this for quite a while and it was so much
fun, we were both laughing and firing as fast as we could. However, I decided
to end this game as I saw my life flash before my eyes. I ran over to an arrow
that had just hit the ground, I grabbed it from the ground, stood to shoot it
to/at my brother and when I fired it I heard something. Another arrow was right
in between my feet. It had missed me only because I had stood up straight just
as it was rocketing back toward the ground. Glad it didn’t sever my spine while
I was bending over or pierce my heart once I had straightened up, it would’ve
been hard to return fire or scream for help and that would’ve surely ruined the
game.
For Christmas one year my mom wanted my brothers to have
BB guns. This story ends badly but not with someone losing an eye, this is not that
‘Christmas Story’. I was on the phone in
the kitchen and I had been chattering and walking back and forth in front of
the sliding glass doors that adorned the back of the house. I was paying no
attention to my two little brothers who were also in the kitchen and were
fighting. They always fought so today was nothing special except for the fact
that they were fighting over one of the BB guns. It went off. It whizzed right past me,
shattering the seven foot tall glass door. I remember there was yelling. A lot
of yelling. I decided that this was not the best moment to tell my dad that
even though the panel of glass was shattered and that we were in the dead of an
Iowa winter that on the bright side was the fact that the door was very pretty with its brand new
spider web motif. I told my mom later that it was pretty, she agreed.
My grandma had told me a story one time about their car
breaking down when my mom and mom’s older brother were children. Their family
was driving home and it was dark out, the car broke down and they had to walk
home in the cold. My grandfather carried the older boy, Grandma carried my mom.
They wrapped the kids up so that they’d be quite warm for the walk home. Since
my mom was such a little girl, maybe two years-old, Grandma hugged her close
and talked to her all the way home. When they got home however, Grandma
realized she had made a little mistake and had talked to Mom’s feet all the way
home. She had carried her upside down and mom, being the even-tempered girl she
was, never said a word or squirmed.
Another favorite of my mom’s stories from youth was the
day she and my uncle had decided to play keep-away from their mother by
climbing up on the chicken coop on their farm. They were in trouble and my
uncle had told his little sister, my mom, that they needed to climb up so that
their mom couldn’t reach them so therefore couldn’t spank them. That worked
really, really well, until their mom went around to the back of the coop and
climbed up it. They both got swatted with a switch all the way to the house
once she got them down.
My grandfather Bailey was a carpenter. He was at my parents’
house one day working on something in the garage with my dad. My mom and grandmother
were in the house and I was a very little girl. I was going between the house
and the garage just being with everyone and being curious about it all. Grandpa
needed help with something, he had lost one of his tools and was rather unhappy
about it. I decided that I would help. I went inside and announced to my mother
and grandmother that Grandpa had lost a special, certain hammer. It was
important enough to him that he had a name for it. ‘Grandpa can’t find his
f-ing hammer’ I told the ladies, proud that I had gathered help for the hunt
for ‘the’ hammer. As the story goes, Grandma was out the door to speak with her
husband and I stayed in the house with the girls for the rest of that day.
You’re welcome, Grandpa, glad I could help.
When I was little, sixth grade maybe, I played little
league softball. My mom and dad decided to take me to the park to help me work
on my fielding skills. Mom was yp pitch to Dad and he was going to hit the
balls to me and I was going to run, field them and return them to the pitcher.
Easy enough it seemed but I was not going to have a chance to practice that
day. Mom was getting ready to pitch, Dad was ready with the bat and before she
let the first pitch go he laughed and said ‘I’m going to take your head off’.
Her head did remain on her shoulders even though he hit her in the head and
knocked her out cold. I can still see it as if it was yesterday. Such a fluke,
stupid thing. We never went to practice fielding again, as you can imagine.
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