Another Exciting Dumb Day

none | Old Professer

[Old Professer]

Summer came late that year, slowly uncurling and with seemingly great effort, she rose from the frost-covered grass, wiped her eyes clear with the last bit of passing fog and looked down upon the small boy and his cock-eared dog scurrying about on the remains of what appeared to be a homemade battlefield of sorts.

There, on the ground ,were bits and pieces of white plastic, tattered paper shards, a few greyish-white, silver dollar sized discs of single-ply cardboard and literally dozens of displaced tiny craters of splotchy dirt.

The dog, nose to the ground, was sniffing determinedly about while the boy was curiously retrieving a piece or two, here and there and holding them against the welcoming and suddenly warming skies as though he were fitting together a giant puzzle.

The boy ran to the dog and grabbed the one good ear and tugged him to the edge of the chopped-off hill that divided his side from the enemy who lived below on the other slope, the big kid with the big house and the rich parents and all night every night to lay such a devious trap for a younger kid fresh from the country and about to enter middle school that fall.

The boy bade the dog lie still and then, one by one he laid before the dog, Fido, for that was his name the pieces that he had spent the last few hours collecting and reassembled all that he had found.

Fido, being dutifully impressed, wagged his shaggy tail -- all except that last bit of the tip that got left in the fence that night the rabbit suckered him into following him through at full throttle when he was caught napping the winter before; with rapt attention Fido's droopy ear served as a placemaker as before his very eyes there appeared a half-gallon milk carton and more.

Fido began to lick thirstily but soon disappointedly as the milk had all been greedily drunk weeks before as the rich kid who lived in the big house... etc, had set his landmines all over No-man's land, the now abandoned all-purpose field atop a small rise that might as well have been the railroad tracks of dime-store paperbacks of days gone by.

This field, once an old man's garden, rich with flowers, fruit, lush green leafy plants and stalwart stalks of corn had passed into disuse along with the old man who tended it for the years when the sap ran high and then coursed back much slower but surely still; till now it was but a place to gather when young spirits ran high and battles were to be won, and hard white balls were meant to fly.

But that big kid who lived in the big house on the other side had plotted and planned all that winter and spring and even right up to the discovery one dawn when the boy and his earlopped dog stumbled out to meet a lazy summer's morn; they romped, they ran, they cried with joy and wept with glee and in their freedom they both came afoul.

For where ever they strayed from the bases and lines old summers worn, they came a cropper -- their shins bruised and torn -- that nasty brat, the little rich kid with nothing but time and a devil's mind had spent the whole winter digging and hiding juice bottles, milk cartons and even balloons filled with dank water and girl's perfume all over the field where the boy had run wild the late autumn before in his mad dash to make friends before the iron grip of January's cold forced him inside.

Wet to his knees, shamed to his core, the boy swore one day he'd get even and just now remembered it once more as summer is leaving and he knows that the rich kid's always just on the other side of the hill and just outside the door.

[Old Professer]

We've been there before.

As Debra Saunders once credited her dad, "a hundred years, all new people."

[ConservativeMind]

Old Professer, you are missed.