By now, you’ve read Part I of this edge-of-your-seat story of my really stupid escapades during a one-year period when I was about eleven years old. If you haven’t, for pity’s sake, why? But if you must proceed, fine.
After nearly knocking myself into oblivion by falling out of the window of one house under construction, naturally, I had to follow up that adventure with another equally dumb move. As I wrote, there were plenty of houses under construction right around my house, so there were oodles of opportunities for me to do myself damage. Wouldn’t you know, I found another?
Before I continue with my fascinating story, I want to pause to remember the public service messages aimed at kids during Saturday morning TV back in my youth. There were quite a few, such as not running out into the street between parked cars–that sort of thing. But one I remember vividly had to do with the subject at hand: construction. We kids were warned not to touch blasting caps if we found them while going about our childhood routines. We were to inform a responsible adult of the discovery. Now, looking at this issue in retrospect, here’s my question: What the heck were blasting caps doing lying around where kids could find them and pick them up? They are little explosive charges used to set off dynamite! Were there no regulations to prevent their being left scattered on the ground? It seems that’s where the effort should have been, not just warning us not to mess with them, wouldn’t you think? Imagine that scenario today: What’s that sound? Why, it’s all the lawyers coming out of the woodwork!
Okay, on with my story. There was a house under construction behind us–one of many, in fact. But this particular one had a tremendous attraction to it on various occasions: the guys burned stuff in a heap at the back corner of the lot, just over the property line from my back yard. One afternoon, two of my buds and I were back there watching things burn, when one of them tossed something into the fire. I wanted to get a closer look and moved up to see better. What I failed to realize was that I had climbed onto the mound of the fire, which was not burning–on the surface–and was quite solid–up to a point. A few steps in, and the surface gave way, and there I stood–thigh-deep in burning embers. Think that was a shock? Think it hurt? Yep, to both.
As before, when I realized what had happened, I went running up to the back door to my mother, who was already standing there, yelling at me for messing with the fire. I went to my room, lay on my bed, and kept my legs moving to cool the pain. My father, always a big help, came in and swatted me on the bum, I’m sure to take my mind off the pain in both my legs, while my mother called my doctor. This time, he was in.
We went to his office, and he applied ointment to the burns, which, by the way, were mostly first- and second-degree, with one bonus third-degree burn on my inside right thigh. Can you say, scarred for life? He also popped the gigantic blisters on the sides of my feet and then wrapped everything in bandages. By the way, I was wearing long pants, which helped, but my tennis shoes did not offer much protection. Thus, the giganto blisters. Then, again, we went home.
The bad news was that I couldn’t participate in any activities at school; the good news was that I also couldn’t go to any formations or drill. As I’ve mentioned before, I was in military school. Shucks. So, for the remainder of the school year, I wore slippers instead of shoes and limped around campus, going directly to the dining hall and elsewhere without having to march or any of that fun stuff. I handed out programs at Competitive Drill in May, and, by the end of the school year, I was just about ready to wear regular shoes again–but stay the heck away from those houses!
One last note of interest: This was the same year (seventh grade) that all of us at school were given IQ tests. I scored 132, which falls into the gifted range. Moral of the story: being smart doesn’t preclude doing dumb things, Grasshopper.