Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
And I thought my parents were overprotective.
In yesterday’s post, my sis asked if I’d ever given my father a heart attack — you know, me doing dangerous things, the way Jake climbed to hair-raising heights on those damn slippery rocks.
I’ve thought about her question, and, um, NO.
My father should have worried about all the toxic chemicals I was cooking back in my “lab.” Not just my alchemical experiments with mercury salts, which I’ve already told you about, but all the funsies I had with copper, nickel, and cobalt compounds, and God knows what else. And I didn’t stop at home. In high school, I once gassed out Mr. Abbot’s chemistry class by doing something or another with concentrated nitric acid. Nitric oxide? Something like that. Brown. Pungent. Nasty.
In college, when I interned at an herbicide-manufacturing organic chemistry outfit, I blew stuff up. Really. The Powers That Be shifted me to another lab, because the PhD I was with was obviously not keeping me sufficiently busy. The job got a lot more boring after that. (I really missed that first PhD, too. Dude was cool. Imagine a heterosexual William S. Burroughs with an advanced degree in organic chemistry.)
My dad also should have worried about my love of body surfing. For me, “body surfing” meant throwing myself bodily into a wave large and powerful enough to pound my face into the ocean floor. A beach trip was not a success unless I had to blow sand out of my sinuses well into the next day. It was all about the danger, you see. Forget amusement park rides, because even as a little kid, I knew you would have to work overtime to get yourself killed on a roller coaster. But the ocean, that was a coldblooded killer.
Long-timers here are well aware of the fact I can’t swim. I don’t float particularly well, either.
My closest brush with death came at San Onofre Beach. There were these potholes. And riptides. You had to feel your way along the sea floor, testing your footing each step of the way, and heaven help you if a wave picked you up and dropped you down over a pothole. As I was fighting the pull of the riptide, I took one step back towards the shoreline, only to find myself under several feet of water with no wave to push me to safety. I must have flailed mightily, because a lifeguard saw me, saved me, carried me back to dry land, and plopped me down near my mom. Anomalous as this sight must have been, it didn’t register with Dear Mother.
“Going back in?” she said.
“Yeah, I think so.”
And I did, too.
But the MOST terrifying thing I ever did was drive around with drunken, stoned, teenage boys in high school. And my dad knew this, or must have suspected. I would come home drunk. Drunk! What did he think — that we’d had a designated driver?
So, yeah, he should have been afraid, but I guess by the time you reach kid #3, you figure you’ve done your Darwinian duty whether the third one survives or not. Maybe that’s why Jake has such an easy time scaring me — he’s my one and only.
Be careful — you’ll garrote yourself with that floss!
I hope you know what you’re doing up there, young man.
D.
When I was 12-13, I had scars on my back from branches I’d ducked under and almost cleared while driving the tractor, usually while mowing the orchard. We had the ’60s equivalent of a brush hog, a 70″ mower with two rotating blades, each about 24″ long and made of steel 3/8″ thick. If I had been pushed off the tractor, it would have been instant, horrible death.
I don’t know what my dad was thinking. I would never allow my children to do something like that.
I don’t recall your being saved by a lifeguard, so it must have been on one of those trips I didn’t take with the family.
I can tell you this…they made a lot of their mistakes on me (since I was first born), and by the time you came, they were just flat out tired. No “bend over and grab your ankles” for you…you turned on the water works.
And there was that whole “boys will be boys” thing going on…boys just get to do more.With me, they were just lucky I was a frigging wallflower…no chance of drinking, smoking or getting pregnant. They were sooooo lucky with me.
Yikes, Dean, you could have been mulch!
Sis, oddly enough, my memory suggests I was there with M by ourselves. But she would have never driven down that far! Maybe Randy drove and dropped us off at the beach while he went to do whatever.
Tired . . . that’s a good word for it.
As for them being lucky with you, what about the time you were arrested for making book on the Santa Anita races for the other high school kids?
Kidding! Kidding!
I believe my father never had a heart attack because I was smart enough never to tell him about the dangerous things I was doing.
Jake will probably be just that smart when he gets around to doing some of those things, too.
I remember my brother and I trying to figure out how to get our bikes up on the roof–we never did accomplish that one. Lots of climbing around in barns and on farm equipment, trees, in and out of windows, and the 3-mile bike ride (in bare feet and shorts!) to my aunt’s pool.
I do understand why my mother-in-law took up drinking, though. The stories I’ve heard of Carl and his brother’s childhood…. Yikes.