TAKE A LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP..

‘Lessons learned’ should have a section all it’s own. There is a long list, for me, at least. Every group of kids can find a way to keep entertained and too often destructive in many, many ways.

At one time when I was about 11 or 12 living on 14 1/2 street in Rock Island we went thru a faze of slingshots and rubber guns. We made them out of scrap wood and rubber bands or inner tubes. Whatever we could find. We used small rocks or marbles and one favorite was hairpins. They would loop over the rubber band which made it easy to use. One day, while standing in the street and aiming at things to shoot at, Donny, one of the kids in our bunch, shot a hairpin from his slingshot randomly across the street toward a girl standing on her porch. Alice E. was her name. The chances of hitting anything on purpose was very small. However, this particular time the hairpin found its way into the left eye of Alice. She went to the ground screaming. Donny was besides himself. Kept saying how sorry he was. We all were. After the dust settled Alice had lost her eye. I don’t remember any of us using our slingshots after that.
One instance in a lifetime. One second in time. For Alice it was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. For Donny it was a moment in life that he would give anything to do over. These lessons in life happen to all of us in some degree.

My friends, Wayne K. and Harold B. and I, were out hunting rabbits one day when we were about 14 or 15. We had shotguns. We were scattered about 20 or 30 feet away from one another. Wayne was on my right and Harold on my left. None of us knew much about hunting or guns. At one point someone yelled “there goes one” and I saw it running through the field to my right. I turned my shotgun to my right at the rabbit and took a shot. At that very instance Wayne screamed. He was right in the way of my shot. Thanks to God or someone, I didn’t hit him but he said he could hear the shot go by him. Not true but it was that close to him. It scared the crap out of me as much as it did Wayne. I, and Wayne were lucky that day. The lesson was obvious. Don’t knee-jerk when you have a gun in your hand. Better yet, don’t have a gun in your hand, period.

While working in a Iron Shop when I was younger, meaning about 35, A few of us were taking a break outside the open door. It had snowed and we were throwing snowballs around. I thought it would be funny to throw one at Benny, our layout man who was about 65 yrs.old and see how close I could come without hitting him. He was standing with his hands on the plate in front of him. It landed right between his hands and it startled him so much that he fell back against the wall. I thought he had had a heart attack or something. He was alright but it was scary enough for me that it made me think when I thought about throwing something or seeing someone else doing it.
‘Horseplay’ is not good and can lead to disaster in the right circumstances. I guess the only thing you can do is not to repeat these mistakes or bad judgements you make in your life.