Stories From Under A Bootheel (Rants, Laughs, and Tears)

Chapter 1 Did You Learn Anything? Part 1 Crap Happens

    "It's the fogging machine!" was the cry heard throughout the neighborhood as all of us kids scrambled for our bicycles to join the parade of others behind the large slow-moving truck as it passed down our street. Fogging machines is what we called the trucks that drove all over town spraying a dense blinding fog of insecticide behind them to control the mosquito population.

The arrival of the fogging truck was often the highlight of an otherwise boring summer day. There were sure to be bikes running into each other or into some of the kids without bikes who were joining in the melee. A few wiping out on the loose gravel road was almost a guarantee. There would be a lot of skinned knees and elbows, the childhood red badges of courage.

Let others reminisce of childhoods running through grassy open fields, clear fresh air, and the smells of honeysuckle and jasmine. For me nothing compared to flying blind on a gravel road through a dense haze of toxic fumes, dodging each other on bikes and the smell of DDT. Ahh, joyful childhood. 

 Okay, DDT is colorless and odorless, maybe it was just whatever they mixed with the DDT to make the spray or the exhaust fumes from the poorly maintained diesel truck that I'm remembering. I'm old. It was a long time ago, and no doubt the chemicals absorbed in my youth including the mercury we enjoyed playing with have had an impact on my memory. Cut me some slack.

The mercury was my dad's. I've no idea what he used it for. He kept it with his blasting caps and other paraphernalia for his construction company that should have been kept out of the reach of children. We kids used it for polishing coins and to just stick our fingers in it because it felt so weird. I'm sure some was absorbed into our skin.

"Getting that close to those sprayers can't be good for you." Was the only warning we ever got. A warning that like most others fell on deaf ears. We kids figured that what our parents didn't know wouldn't hurt us. There were plenty of activities like this that our parents didn't know about.

I guess this is what the experts nowadays would call "Free range parenting." It certainly wasn't "helicopter parenting" which folks back then would have called being "over-protective." Not to say that the mama bear instinct wasn't there to protect children. It was just that mama bear was busy helping to provide for the family and didn't have time to hover. Besides, kids had to learn. Even if learning meant getting beat up by the neighborhood bully or risking one's life in the pursuit of fun.

In short, the socially acceptable standard was for kids to fend for themselves.

"How did you get that knot on your head?" My dad asked. His tone expressed more curiosity than concern.

"Some kid threw an old Coke bottle at me," I explained. Actually, it was an Orange Crush soda bottle, but in the South the generic term for soda is Coke and so any soda bottle was called a Coke bottle. (Kids, before there were aluminum cans, all soda came in thick glass bottles that were normally recycled. No, your generation did not invent recycling.) The bottle was heavy glass, filled with mud, and marked with a faded Crush logo. It might seem odd that I remember the bottle so well, but it figuratively and literally made quite an impression on me. The mud was from numerous storms. The kid didn't intentionally fill it. It was just something he found in the drainage ditch that ran next to the alley that ran next to our house.

"Did you learn anything?" dad chuckled. This was his go-to question for me.

I considered several possibilities. Maybe I should learn to duck? Stay out of the alley? Wear a helmet when I go out? Honestly, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to have learned, but I chuckled too and acted like I knew what my father was talking about. This was my go-to response to his go-to question.

I hadn't done anything to provoke the incident. Fortunately, it was just a little kid who had thrown the bottle; so, it was not thrown very hard. It caught me right at the birthmark on my forehead. The bruise probably would not have been noticeable if it weren't for the swelling.

The kid who threw the bottle was a couple of years younger than I, maybe three or four. He had only done it to impress some older kids he was hanging out with. Did the kid learn anything? You would hope he had learned not to throw bottles at people, but more likely he just learned that random acts of violence are one way to get noticed. Twenty years later, I heard that the same kid was killed in a raid on a meth lab. Getting noticed is not always a good thing. A lesson that kid learned a little too late?

I guess all I really learned was that —to put it politely — crap happens.