Particularly Stupid Things Childhood Friends and I Did
I don’t think my childhood friends and I were particularly stupid. We did do, however, some particularly stupid things.
Of course, we did the usual things boys did back then. We played with fire. We used firecrackers to blow things up. We shot at each other with BB guns (wearing heavy coats and two pairs of jeans to cover our torsos and limbs, but of course leaving our faces — and eyes — completely unprotected). We played tackle football without any padding. We road bicycles, Flexy-Flyers, and homemade skateboards — then go-carts and then motorcycles — as fast and as recklessly as we could. Etc.
I’m talking here about unusually stupid.
One of the stupidest things we did was to hang a dartboard from a piece of cordage tied around the waist of one of us, so that it covered his butt. He then ran around the yard while rest of us would throw darts at the board.
One of my friends had a serious bow with steel-tipped arrows. One thing we did was to gather at dusk on the large, open playground of the local elementary school and shoot arrows straight up in the air. We would then run around, hoping not to get impaled when one returned to earth.
(That same friend eventually started buying cars. It was a good car if, in his words, “it runs, the radio works, and all the windows are in it.” For him, decent brakes, much less tires, were options. To leave the driveway in one of his cars was an act of pure faith.)
In our neighborhood there was a park with a creek with a earthen bridge covering a culvert that was big enough for us to stand up in it. There was a pool of water where the stream entered the culvert. One of us would stand in the opening of the culvert while others would throw the biggest rocks we could find into the pool of water as hard as we could to splash the one in the culvert with water. Inevitably, someone — me — stuck his head out of the culvert at the wrong time and was hit with one of those rocks (which, yes, probably does explain a few things about me).
Yet, here me and my friends still are, seventy and more years old and all of us almost completely intact.