Have you ever reflected on your childhood, recalling all those crazy things you did and wonder how you ever lived as long as you have?
If you recall the article about "Piggy Pond," if I had fallen through the ice where it was over my head instead of waist-deep, a real ghost writer might be doing these columns.
When I lived in Jersey, it was at a time when there were large tracts of woods that had not been developed yet.
Every now and then someone would say "Let's go for a hike," and everybody would scatter to get lunch. I would always have a couple of tins of Vienna sausages, which as the label clearly stated was nothing more than "potted" meat. (I always hoped that this meant that the pig was so drunk that it didn't know it was walking into a slaughterhouse.)
We would hike to some wooded destination, hunt for stones to make a fire ring (in true Cub Scout fashion), gather some sticks to build a fire and sit down to have lunch. Everybody shared.
Most of what we ate was whatever had been lying on the refrigerator shelf, so sometimes lunch was a little weird.
We all voted that Limburger cheese was not going with us ever again.
We ate delicacies like brown lettuce leaves with tomatoes that were so soft they had a built in "dressing."
We ate tons of bread, some of which contained blue-green dots. I like to think that it was penicillin and was the only thing that kept us alive.
The Hershey bars had been warmed sufficiently in someone's pocket so it could be opened at one end and you could "drink it down."
We would get a few long thin sticks and open the Vienna sausages.
This was like beef Wellington for us. You had to be sure to use a very thin stick or you would push all the potted meat out of the artificial casing.
Hot Vienna sausages were like the nectar for the gods.
We would smack our lips and everybody said to make sure that I thanked my father since he provided them from his meat market in Jersey City.
Full bellies make for mischief. One of the gang said, "Look what I have," and pulled a big handful of bullets out of his pocket.
"What are they?"
"Bullets!"
"Wow, they sure look big."
"What do you do with them? Shoot lions and tigers and bears?"
Around this time someone said, "Let's throw them in the fire."
And before you could say "duck your head," they did. I ran to cower behind a large boulder that was about 50 feet from the fire.
I was just going to raise my head to see what was happening when all heck broke loose as the bullets, heated to extreme, exploded. It was like being in a war movie.
Finally after the first salvo I lifted my head to see if it was all clear. Bang! A bullet on the fringe went off. I wondered if there would be more.
"Did anyone count the number of bullets we threw in the fire?" I shouted.
"I think it was 12," a voice responded.
"Did anyone count how many bullets have exploded?"
Dead silence.
It was about this time that I could picture myself standing up just as some spastic slow-to-heat bullet would go off, piercing me in the forehead and killing me on the spot.
My friends would carry my stiff lifeless body on their shoulders home to my mother who would yell at me: "You've been throwing bullets into a fire, haven't you?" (How did she know that?) She would then give me a good licking with her wooden cooking spoon and then call the undertaker. My friends would cheer her on.
As I read this, I think I should have chosen friends more wisely _ they were always getting me in trouble.
It started to get cold and I started to shiver. I figured that if I kept my body behind the rock and the fire, I could slowly back away to safety.
I discovered something that day. While crawling backwards, you have got to keep your legs together or else you can get into bizarre situations with a bush full of those small, round sticker balls that clump to each other like mad. I ended up with a clump in the crotch of my pants that looked like the very large puff of a rabbit's tail but it was on the wrong side of my pants and I couldn't get it off.
When I got home my mother took one look at me with the crotch of my pants infested with sticker burrs and she never said a word. She made me take the pants off and with my sister's eyebrow tweezers pick the burrs off one by one.
As time went by, my mother decided that some questions were best left unasked.
Henry Geerken is a three-time NYSUT award-winner writing humorous articles addressing retiree and senior citizen concerns. He can be reached by e-mail at hgeerken@stny.rr.com.
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