I was a pretty good kid growing up. I tried to stick to the straight and narrow. Oh sure, I did learn to smoke when I was four and then I let my cousins Jamie and Donnie teach Glenn and me how to pee off the roof when I was six, but other than that I kept it pretty calm...although the peeing incident reminds me of how my cousin Mike and I used to write our names on the side of the house by....you know. Mike had fits trying to dot that "i". But, all in all, we were good kids. It amazes me to look back on those early years and remember how much trouble I seemed to stay in.
I had it okay before my brother Glenn came along. If you remember your Bible stories I was Ishmael and Glenn was Isaac. He could do no wrong and was without question the heir apparent. When things got broken it was usually Glenn who broke it and me who got blamed for it. I did learn early in life that being the reporter on the street was not a glamorous job. Daddy would come home and ask, "Who broke this?" I would calmly answer, "Glenn did it!" After a while the story got old I guess. One afternoon when he came home from work he found the gate torn down. It wasn't a great gate. In fact, whoever built it must have spent a good fifteen minutes putting it together but it did keep our dog, Lady, in the backyard. The way Daddy discovered the broken gate was having Lady greet him in the street out front of our house. As he was putting the gate back together he asked no one in particular, "Who in the world could have done so much damage to this gate?" I assumed he wanted an answer so I told him...."Glenn did it". And he had! I saw him do it! I reckon I should have kept it to myself. Daddy turned around from his work and yelled at me, "I guess you don't ever do anything wrong, do you? I guess you are Mr. Perfect and sit back and watch Glenn do everything!" I guess I shouldn't have answered "yes" because it made him even more mad. To be fair, I hadn't ever told him about the smoking.
After this affectionate conversation between father and son, I decided to keep my mouth shut. The three of us used to spend the fall evenings raking up oak leaves into a huge pile and on Friday nights we would have a bonfire to get rid of them. Great times! Even greater were the Saturday mornings when Glenn and I would sneak out to play in the pile of ashes. We would ride our imaginary horses "over the ash of the battlefield" or wrestle in the ashes like the cowboys on TV who always got in fights around the campfire. One Saturday morning we were playing around and Glenn found the hammer our dad had been missing. Unfortunately, he found it in the ash from the fire the night before. I have heard that hickory makes a wonderful handle but I have to say it burns up just like any other wood. The hammerhead was left but we didn't think this was going to please Daddy a lot. Glenn told me to take it. I said, "No way. You found it. You take it." Glenn 'playfully' threw it at me and hit me right between the eyes. A knot the size of a walnut rose up on my forehead and I went screaming into the house. Daddy asked what happened...I told him I got hit by a hammer. He asked who hit me. My brain was fuzzy from the hit but still working. I remembered the earlier conversation so I told him I did it myself. He looked at me like I was an idiot and asked how in the world I hit myself in the head with a hammer. I was a fast learner but a terrible liar. I told him I threw it up in the air and tried to catch it. He stared at me for a few seconds then said, "You're an idiot".
Another accident revolving around those leaf ashes actually wasn't Glenn's fault. It was all my fault but darn it, he didn't have to laugh so hard. One morning he pointed out some smoke rising from the ashes. We were surprised because Daddy was always good at soaking the embers down to nothing the night before. Instead of reporting the small situation to headquarters, I told Glenn I would take care of it. Just like all my cowboy heroes, I stomped down on the smoky spot at which time my foot sank a foot deep in ash and down to the live coals. A small ember fell into my shoe and I let the whole neighborhood know I was on fire. Everywhere I jumped the ember went with me. I jumped and hollered all over that backyard until Glenn stopped laughing long enough to tackle me and help me get my shoe off. I had a huge burned spot on my sock but not too much damage to my skin. I would survive. I took both socks off and threw them in the trash can. I suggested to Glenn we keep that story as our little secret.
There are more examples of the equality of early life in our household. I won't tell the story of the Playboy magazine smuggled into the house by Glenn when we were teenagers. Suffice to say that after an hour or two of brutal questioning, Glenn confessed because he could tell I was about to get it...and I didn't even get to see the stupid magazine.
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