Father Does Worst
Keep your friends close and your Father not so much
One of the essays I wrote while on the Isle of Skye, and that I also read to a group of 50 or so at a recent Tipsy Talk event in Newport, Vermont. Sometimes the path to the good life is messy.
I‘ve never shot a gun. Other than a BB gun, that is, and I’ve done plenty of that, but not since I was 12, when my friends and I would play army in the woods near my house on Liberty Lake, WA.1 There were a few rules: no aiming at the face, a maximum of three pumps, and no pellets (only small, round BBs). We, at best, followed one of them. Once rules were established, we’d split into teams and go to war.
The hardening I would get from war would be useful later, when I took a pellet to the head. Not during one of the BB-gun wars of middle school. This was much later, when I was in high school and had moved 3000 miles from Liberty Lake. My bedroom was in the basement, sort of a split-level, with half the room below ground and half above. One night, my friend and I were listening to music in my room when smoke poured in through my open window. Before I could get up to close the window, my room was filled, and I could hardly see in front of me. My friend and I were coughing, so I opened my bedroom door to let the smoke out into the rest of the downstairs living area. Eventually, I opened my window again to let fresh air in. The cause of the smoke in my room was a smoke bomb strategically placed right next to my window for maximum airflow into my room. It was a good prank, and a good prank like that couldn’t go unpunished, especially when my younger brother pulled it off.
Later that night, I took the ladder from the garage and quietly leaned it against the house below my brother’s room. His room was on the house’s second floor. I climbed the ladder while my friend held it steady at the bottom. My plan was to scratch his window, and when he came to check out the noise, I would scream or pop my head into view to scare him. What I didn’t take into consideration was that he would be cleaning his pellet gun at the time, so when I scratched on the screen of his window, he loaded the gun and pointed it in my direction, so that when I peeked in for the scare, he instinctively pulled the trigger and caught me approximately an inch above my left eye. That was my brother’s story. The jury is still out, approximately 45 years later, whether he knew it was me outside his window all along. I fell back off the ladder and onto the grass. My friend laughed at first, then realized I was hurt. He sprang into action and helped me into the house, where I announced, “I’ve been shot!” Maybe that wasn’t the best entrance.
Chaos ensued at that point, and I don’t remember if my brother came out of his room first or if my stepfather went in after him upon hearing the news. I went into the bathroom and attempted to squeeze the pellet out of my head, like popping a zit. I was unsuccessful partially because the pellet was lodged into my skull pretty well and partially because a couple of my family members were frantically calling from the other side of the bathroom door to see if I was OK. I hadn’t locked the door, so my Mother was the first to enter and see the damage. Meanwhile, my stepfather smacked my little brother around a bit before taking his gun and, if I remember correctly, throwing it into a wooded area across the street from my house. Then he took me to the emergency room, where I had the pellet dislodged and the wound bandaged up.
I had survived the pellet to the head as well as those dark days of war in the woods near Liberty Lake, under the constant barrage of slow-moving BBs, with only my survival skills, multiple layers of clothing, and easy access to my house for snacks and drinks to get me through, but having a small pellet removed from your skull will change a man.
The first time I almost killed a man, I was 16 years old. Except it wasn’t a man; it was a young child. Let’s call him Jimmie, who was six or seven at the time—old enough to brag to my friend and me that he could run around my house and never get tired, and too young to know that he was incapable of doing so. Challenge accepted, he ran laps around my house while we cheered him on and mocked him when he began to slow. “You’re not quitting, are you?” We would say, “Wait until we tell all your friends.”And so, skinny little Jimmie ran around my house until he collapsed in a tiny heap on my front lawn. He could not speak and could barely catch his breath, his chest heaving up and down as if controlled by a hydraulic pump. We watched Jimmie lying there, hoping his next breath would come, while I began to ponder where I was going to bury his body. Jimmie lived, and I don’t recall seeing him much after that. We moved cross-country not long afterward, and I heard much later that Jimmie wouldn’t make it to 30.
It would be another 15 years before I’d almost kill another child. This time, my daughter. My wife and I were on vacation with another couple in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. My daughter was a month or so from her third birthday, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. As I had many times before, I carried my daughter on my shoulders as we walked around, taking in the sights. She liked to see over most of the crowd. My friend was doing the same with his daughter. At some point, we stopped to enter a store, and I attempted to dismount my daughter by reaching my arms up, grabbing her on each side of her rib cage, and flipping her head first in a somersault to land squarely on her feet in a perfect dismount. However, my daughter was laughing with her friend, so she was squirmier than usual, and I didn’t get a good grip. I dropped her a quarter of the way through the somersault, about six feet above the ground. Unlike a cat’s uncanny ability to land on its feet after a fall, Felicia fell face-first. Her chin hit the ground before the rest of her body. I immediately scooped her up. She was screaming. I saw blood gushing from her face, so I tucked her face into my chest and rushed to find her mother. Someone nearby who worked at the park witnessed the scene and escorted us to their on-site urgent care. Felicia, barely three years old, bravely took six stitches to the chin without moving or crying. She was courageous, sure, but how about some points for my creativity and degree of difficulty? Eventually, she would let me carry her in the same manner in a get-back-on-the-horse-again spirit. We both agreed to reduce the complexity of the dismount.
Years later, I would show Kalia that revenge for her headbutt to the bridge of my broken nose is best served when it involves her severe peanut allergy. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon while at a neighbor’s house for a barbecue. I was inside talking to my friend when my youngest approached me and asked, “Dad, can I have this?”
“Sure, honey,” I answered while only glancing at what she had in her hand. A few minutes later, I heard my wife’s voice from the backyard, “Who said you could have this Drumstick?” like a good attorney, already knowing the answer.
“Dad,” my daughter answered.
A Drumstick is an ice cream product made by Nestlé. Vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone, covered in chocolate and sprinkled with peanut chunks. I’ve enjoyed them since I was a kid. They are delicious, and apparently, the peanut chunks sprinkled on top of the Drumstick are part of the peanut family and therefore potentially deadly to my youngest. I remember the incident unfolding like this: My wife snatched the ice cream from my daughter’s hand mere moments before she took a bite. My wife remembers it a little differently: That our youngest took a bite and broke out in hives, which is what my wife noticed. We then force-fed our daughter Benadryl and waited to see if she would die, thus killing the buzz of the party. Her story is more believable.
The last time I almost killed a child, it wasn’t a child, and there was more than one. They were adults. My youngest was one of those adults, along with her boyfriend at the time and one other roommate. I was visiting and decided to cook dinner for their household. I cooked Gumbo, one of my specialties—I have two. I made a good batch that night, and everyone enjoyed it. After dinner, I was cleaning the stove and accidentally nudged one of the stove’s gas knobs enough to cause a leak, but not enough to hear or smell it at the time. We all went to bed, and one of the roommates woke up early that morning to the smell of gas and checked the stove to see if that was the culprit. He saw that the gas was on and immediately shut it off. It had been on for at least 10 hours, and most of us in the apartment, now awake, had a headache. We opened the windows and doors and let the fresh air dilute the gas, and eventually the air returned to a breathable level. No one died, but at least one person admitted to having wild and vivid dreams.
It’s been over 10 years since I last endangered one of my children, or anyone else, for that matter. I seemed to have finally lost the taste for carnage, discovered so many years ago after surviving a pellet gun shot at point-blank range to my skull. I no longer engage in BB gun wars in the woods or challenge six-year-olds to run around houses until they pass out. That said, I now have a granddaughter, who, as of this writing, is seven years old, has allergies, and lives only a mile away from me.
The opportunities are endless.
That was true when I wrote it; however, my wife and I visited friends in Taos, NM, a few years ago. At dinner one night, they invited their neighbor, who grew up in the area. We ate, drank, laughed, drank more, and smoked some weed along the way. The talk of guns came up, and I mentioned my BB gun-only experience, and the neighbor decided he wanted to change that. So, one of my friends, the neighbor, and I walked deep into the Taos woods at midnight with a large flashlight, a target, and a .22-caliber pistol. Thankfully, and surprisingly, nothing bad happened. We set up the target, shone a flashlight on it, and took turns shooting at it. It was fun, and I could now say I'd shot more than a BB gun. I was proud. On the way back through the woods, I stepped off the trail and fell into a hole a few feet deep. After being pulled out by the other two, I felt ok. Hopefully nothing broken or pierced, maybe just bruised. The next morning, I realized I had lost one of my favorite hats while out in the woods. My friend and I decided to go back in daylight to retrieve the hat. We found it at the bottom of the hole I fell into. We also realized how close I had come to cracking my skull on sharp rocks just above where I had fallen, and discovered that had I fallen a little sooner, I would have rolled maybe 20 feet down the mountain, onto more rocks. I hopped down, grabbed my hat, and felt sudden relief. This was my favorite hat.