The circle of life

Now, don’t go thinking this has any thing to do with Disney’s Lion King flick! This is another one of those personal remembrances that has (hopefully) some identification with modern life and its day to day turmoil.

A dear friend of mine and his wife just had a baby last week, and I love young’uns (as long as they’re well behaved, but that’s another story) so naturally my mind has been running along the lines of kids and how they grow up and become people that you either love or hate.

While in the process of pondering these mysteries, I was chatting with another friend of mine and recounting for him how my teenaged son wrecked my brand new four-wheeler a few months ago. And we got to chatting about The Parent’s Curse: you know, that’s the condition of having kids who behave about like YOU behaved when you were a young’un! Now let me tell you, this thing is REAL! I have two boys, aged 19 and 25, and they are without a doubt two of the most destructive creatures God ever put on this earth. Shoot! If you were to drop those two in the middle of Afghanistan tomorrow, chances are high that the war there would be over in about a week.

So dear reader, this should then give you insight into the childhood predilections towards destruction of yours truly: GunRights4US. I was just plain mean and destructive as a young’un. Now thankfully the fruit of my loins have not displayed the degree of meanness that was my stock in trade, but for sheer destructiveness they’re hard to beat.

Allow me to enlighten you. My oldest boy (DEVILMENT) has wrecked something like three cars so far, and that’s not counting the damage done when he crashed into the rear of his mother’s car when they were both getting on a freeway ramp. My youngest boy (MEANNESS) wrecked his own truck in my driveway one day while simply in the act of moving it out of my way! I needed to get out, and he had me blocked in. So I asked him to move his truck, and while I was sitting in my truck idling, he crashes into the pine tree at the end of the driveway!

MEANNESS is the one that wrecked my brand new four-wheeler and tried to play it off like nothing happened. The thing had less that 30 miles on it when he crashed it into a tree (hmmm is there a common theme here?) and tried to say that he’d merely run over a sapling. Turns out that it took over $2,000 to repair that little sapling’s damage!

I suppose I should relate at this point how my father came home one day, and walked over to me where I was playing and showed me a brand new ball-peen hammer he’d just bought. “Boy! Don’t let me catch you playing with my new hammer!” he says.

Weeeeellllll now….. that sure sounded like a challenge to ME! Being that nearly forty years have passed, I don’t rightly remember HOW I broke that hammer. Suffice it to say that I broke it within hours of its arrival at our home. And what had seemed a challenge BEFORE the damage was done quickly morphed into a major OH NO! after the damage was done. So I flung the broken hammer as far down into the back field as my strength would allow, and steadfastly insisted on my innocence when accosted later by the Dad.

Roll the clock forward about 15 years to a point where Daddy was near the end of his life, but he still managed somehow to get down in the field and plow a few rows to plant vegetables. In the process of harrowing the dirt he turned up the rusty hammer head with the broken fiberglass handle still sticking out. Though he was long past the point of spanking me, he still remembered the hammer and the accompanying lie about its destruction. I will never forget the shame of being shown the evidence of my deceit. Nor will I ever forget the twinkle in his eye barely hidden behind the faux frown.

There were many such incidents in my youth, the relating of which would fill volumes. Just as there are many similar incidents in the lives of my own sons. Wrecked cars, damaged lawn equipment, burned carpets, and other such things litter our lives and waste our dollars. I long ago gave up counting how many weed-eaters, lawnmowers, edgers etc. I’ve bought over the years, just as my father doubtlessly lost count of how many doors I broke down or gates I crashed through. “Doors you say?” Yeah…doors. Allow me to explain.

My father and brother both spent lots of effort frightening me with tales of the evil old man who had owned our house previously, and how he died there. I later learned that old Mr. Hankins was not evil, nor had he died in the house. But in my childhood, every strange sound in the house or among the outbuildings was ascribed to “Mr. Hankins”. On my older brother’s part the ruse was merely for fun. On my dad’s part, it probably was intended to keep me out of his workshop – something I was forever guilty of.

Once when Daddy had just put a HUGE new padlock on the shop door, I determined to find a way inside while he was away. I noticed that the wall in the back of the car garage did not go all the way to the roof, and I carefully climbed a pile of paint cans and made my way over the wall, and down into the shop.

Ahh success! But the joy was short lived. In the dark quiet loneliness of the shop, with the door locked from the outside, I heard the faint scratching sound of ….MR HANKINS! (A rat named Mr. Hankins in all probability). But oh the horror… the sound came from the area in the rafters I would have to climb back through. Couldn’t go back the way I came, that’s for sure! Oh well I think….I can just bust through the door from the inside, and figure out a way to repair it before Daddy comes home. Backing up to get a good head of steam, I dashed through the shop and crashed through the door. Come to find out the door was far weaker than I imagined, and it split half in two from top to bottom. Needless to say, so did my fanny when Daddy came home and found it!

Some other time I'll tell you how I tried to drill a hole through the neighbor’s floor from below with the intention of loosing a snake into their house. Or maybe I’ll tell about how I shot out their kitchen window with my first BB gun while the wife was standing there washing dishes. Or maybe I’ll tell about the punji pit I dug, complete with sh*t-smeared spikes sticking up that my other neighbor almost stepped in because I camouflaged it so well. Or…

Oh well, I think you get the picture. And maybe I should count my lucky stars that MEANNESS and DEVILMENT never reached such degrees of destruction in their lives as their old man did in his youth!