Posted on 06/21/2022 12:43:59 PM PDT by Morgana
Different last name than his mother??? Hmmmm.
LOL.
I burned a hole in my brother’s shoe with a magnifying glass. He was wearing the shoe at the time.
mumbly peg? Oh yeah.
We made cannons from bamboo and huge firecrackers. They could shoot a cannon hundreds of feet.
And I caught tarantulas and scorpions and pythons. Good fun.
And we had a rope swing that went far out over a cliff. We called it Tarzan’s Rubber Band.
Once I created a hot air balloon... It was great until it landed on a roof of a house under construction.
Never tried lighting a soccer ball on fire, thou.
I used to do that also but it makes great napalm. Light it and throw it and it will stick and burn.
We used Lawn darts and bow and arrows.
Sounds fun and familiar. Gives a guy hope in the future.
Who do you think designs new rockets?
Heh, that is too funny! Absolutely predictable!
By the way-love the characterization of the “Little Flashes”...that’s great!
I wondered about that. As a kid, with my luck, I would have done something like gotten a spoon from the kitchen, scooped out a heap and lit it on fire, then tried to use the spoon like a mini-catapult, only to have it refuse to leave the spoon until it was on the downstroke, where it would then send a flaming glob right onto my bare knee.
Which, of course, I would try to swipe off, simply increasing the burning area on my leg as well as having a hand on fire too.
Sigh. That is how those things went for me back then.
I have a funny story that is like that.
When we moved to my dad’s last duty station, and the base quarters we moved into were kind of dirty, run down, and nasty, my mom wanted to spruce it up, so she got some yellow curtain material (color of daffodils) and made some cute curtains with a valance across the top to go in the window above the sink.
She was quite proud of them, and they looked cheery.
One night while my parents were out, one of my older brother’s friends came over, a wonderfully goofy guy who vaguely resembled in both looks and disposition the Straw Man from the Wizard of Oz. He liked my younger sister, and I think they had a thing.
Well, he was clowning around, as he was wont to do, and had a can of Ronsons Lighter Fluid. He would pour some in his hand and light it on fire where it would burn and evaporate so quickly that it wouldn’t burn his hand.
Well, trying to impress my sister (I think) he put larger and larger quantities of the fuel in his hand, and then when he had it good and loaded up, he lit it on fire.
Well.
It didn’t burn out and evaporate quickly, and became a boiling hot puddle of flaming lighter fluid in his hand.
With an “Ah-ah-ah, he involuntarily whipped his hand around trying to get rid of the burning fluid, and a shower of little burning droplets flew through the air and landed on my mother’s yellow curtains above the sink that she was so proud of!
Like some kind of miniature anti-personnel weapon, the burning droplets landed on the valance that went from side to side across the top of the window and began to burn upwards where they landed.
He ran over and frantically beat at the yellow cloth, but there were a multitude of little holes burned in it.
As he and my sister agonized over what to do (She and my mother were constantly at vicious war with each other, she being a headstrong and good looking 15 year old who liked boys like my brothers friend) and they decided that they could cut out the burnt part with scissors, slide the two sections to overlap, and it wasn’t really visible unless you grabbed it.
Later that year, as my dad retired after 30 years in the Navy, we were packing up to move, and my mother wanted to bring her cherished curtains with her to our new home, so she went to take them down and was staring at the pieces in a puzzled manner: “Huh. I don’t remember making this valance in two parts.”
I turned and rapidly left the room, lest she look at me and read something on my face that couldn’t hide even the most innocuous secret!
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