“Blood Drops” By Chad Robert Parker

Stitches, , , , ,

I was the fastest kid on the block. I never did try out for track. It was sort of a pride thing. Some said I was faster than anyone my age they had ever seen in a foot race. The next test for the neighborhood, as the kids gathered around, was to see if I could outrun a bike.

They picked my brother for the challenge to take me on. He is just a year younger than me. It was a perfect way for him to prove himself so he wasn’t going to go easy on me. I suppose he was a little nervous, as well as excited for the opportunity. No one wants to be outdone in a sprint when you have the advantage of a bike. Our adrenaline was pumping.

One kid stood off to the side and counted down. Ready! Set! Go!

I took off like a shot. It took my brother a moment to get the pedals going, but once he was up to speed he zipped right by me. I couldn’t run any faster. We were already past the halfway point, but there was a chance I could still win. I built a couple twists into our race. We would have to go up the Rudiger’s driveway, turn around and come back to the start point. I knew he would have to slow down to make the turns and negotiate the hill. I didn’t plan to do the same.

The kids were cheering when I passed him at the bottom of the driveway. I looked back as I returned to the bottom of the driveway again to see he hadn’t finished the turn at the top. I had a chance. Then I slipped on pine needles and split my forehead open.

I cried all the way back to the house, holding my bloody forehead. I distinctly remember my older brother and his friend counting behind me…42, 43, 44. I felt faint. I didn’t know what they were counting until I got inside. Apparently I left a lot of blood drops in my wake.

 

 

 

“At the Apple’s Core” By Chad Robert Parker

Heat Exhaustion/Stroke, , , , , , ,

The Scout motto is to “be prepared.” I often hear stories of mothers packing their kids bags full of everything, much more than they would ever need. Maybe there is something good to that and maybe it is a little too much coddling. Kids need some space to grow confidence in their own abilities and prepare to leave the nest altogether eventually. But all too often I hear stories where the Scouts and the leaders were not prepared enough to greater detriment. It’s a balance to manage the learning experience. Still, as long as everyone is safe, sometimes it goes along with sayings such as “no harm no foul,” and “let’s do better next time.” That’s how an innocent 10-15 mile hike turned out for me.

No kid wants to carry a lot on a hike. Our hike got extra long one hot day when I was twelve years old. There was more than a dozen of us boys and a couple leaders. During a stretch of plains and hills without any cover of trees we had sweat off all of our energy. Our few canteens were long since empty. Kids were dragging their feet. No one even bothered asking how much farther it was anymore.

My Scoutmaster asked if anyone had any water or even food left. I hadn’t thought about food. I had an apple. I held it up high and freely gave anyone who wanted a bite. It’s funny how germs don’t matter as much at that time and besides I got the first bite. It was amazing how much one bite of an apple reinvigorated our bodies and spirits.

Our leader had a little song he taught us–a blast from his childhood past. One kid would sing, “Apple core.” Another would reply, “Baltimore.” Another would yell, “Who’s your friend?” And the one with the apple core would shout, “He is!” And then he would throw the core at a target darting away from him. We played that game with some pep in our step all the way back to camp.

“Scent of a Man” by Chad Robert Parker

Sense of Smell, , , ,

A typical date is dinner and a movie. A cousin of mine once gave me some advice about the downside to that. He told me, “never take a ‘cute date’ to a Mexican restaurant.” After dinner, he was feeling great pain from the rotten air in his stomach. He kept it in all through the movie.

Like a gentleman he opened the door for his date and let her in. Then he figured he had his chance. He discreetly let the gas out and fanned his backside as he slowly crept around the car to the driver’s side. When it seemed safe he got in the car. Then he smelled the most awful scent. Naturally, he thought it was her. “Was that you?” He blurted out rather pointedly.

Figuring the Mexican food had caused her the same problem, he thought they could both laugh at their shared fiasco. Boy was he dead wrong. The smell had followed him into the car. She thought him rude. I suppose he figured one thing right. He was probably dead to her now. If a girl doesn’t talk to you the entire ride home, you probably aren’t getting another date. He didn’t tempt asking for one.

“Stand-in Blind Date” by Chad Robert Parker

First Date

A college neighbor frantically knocked on every single guy’s door looking for someone to fill in for his buddy—who dropped out last minute—and go on a blind date. He had promised his girlfriend that he would set her friend up on a double date and did not want to disappoint her, knowing full well his brand new relationship might be on the line. In fact, he had confidently hyped up his ability to arrange this perfect match, so he had to make good.

That’s where I come in. I wasn’t doing anything that night. I thought, why not? Maybe she will be as cute as his girlfriend. Although I knew it was more likely just an opportunity to go have fun. I figured I might as well make it a nice evening for some unsuspecting girl. So I threw on a coat for a hike up a snowy canyon. The guy swore me to secrecy not to tell my date that I wasn’t the guy she thought, but he didn’t have time to tell me much more than that.

She wondered why she knew all about me but I didn’t seem to know anything about her. That made me laugh. We teased our setter-upper that it was his fault. In fact, I used that to get him back. In between snowball fights I waited for him to put his hands in his pockets, and then I gave him a shoestring tackle causing him to face plant in the snow. He knew I got him good when I told him that it was for not telling me anything about my date.

She had them ask me the next day what I thought of her, but she had more chance of her real match coming clean and asking her out.

“The Sponge Bath Best Option” by Ray (Spanish Fork, UT)

Worst Jobs

While working for an industrial roofing contractor on the west coast, spraying asphalt emulsion (water based tar) with a fiber glass binder onto industrial roofs, the material had to be sprayed to the very edge of the building. A half piece of quarter inch plywood was pulled along the outside edge while the Sprayman would run along behind the board and put down a layer of material. This sealed the edge of the roof. The purpose of the board was to shield anything over the edge from being over sprayed like equipment, materials, cars, etc. Occasionally a breeze would come up and the person holding the plywood was completely at the mercy of the wind and got covered by the overspray blowing back onto them.

It made them appear to be a tar baby. It coated everything it touched; ears, hair, eyes, clothes, everything. The overspray would set up in seconds and then have to be scrubbed off. The problem was it couldn’t be removed with soap and water, but only with hand cleaner which was extremely slow and not very efficient, or a sponge bath in a five gallon can with about a gallon of gas in it. Since we worked from dawn to dark and dinner was suspended until after cleanup, spending a lot of time to cleanup was not desirable for a hungry crew, so the sponge bath became the best option.

“High Level Marketing” by Chad Robert Parker

Worst Jobs

Editor’s Example:

Dangling from 70 feet in the air and keenly aware of terminal velocity, I questioned once again if this was the right job for me.

After a 9 month search for the perfect position, I took a job at the ground level to work my way up. So there I was posting advertisements high above Salt Lake City’s skyline. I was lucky enough to get a job in Marketing, but you see hanging from billboards was not exactly the exposure I had in mind.

Winter is the worse season, but hot summers aren’t much better. I learned about momma bird season (they protect their nest and make quite a mess to work through) and wasp season (I was averaging two bites a day and often running perilously across the board swatting at the air).

I was told it was only a matter of time before injury. I was told one had fallen from a height of 35, or so, feet, broke both ankles and never walked the same again. I myself had nearly electrically charged a board and all its occupants. I prayed that I would not fall victim.

On this occasion I was working on one of the 40% of bad boards that were falling apart. Despite signing a contract that I would tie off 100% of the time—so my boss could appease OSHA—I found myself facing an exception that had to be made. An angle iron fell loose and I hung on for the ride. In order to swing to the side platform I was going to need to unhook my lifeline tethering me to the broken board and keeping me just out of reach of tying off to safety ahead. Well, I lived to tell the tale and worked another year in that job.

“Know Your Roots” by Chad Robert Parker

Broken Bones

My oldest brother had to climb an extra five feet off a 35 foot extension ladder to splice our rope swing back into itself, over a perfect huge overarching branch. We braided the bottom of the rope adding four or five knots for hand and footholds.

After a while we knew every trick there was: like how to swing around neighboring trees, land on platforms, or fly upside down. We were running out of ways to one up each other. That’s when my brother started practicing pole vault maneuvers. I just had to find a way to outdo him. Big mistake!

I admired my brother’s obstacle. He had tied another rope across two trees at the far end of the runway. Then he hoisted himself upward and over, swinging and vaulting himself out toward the forest. Gravity would take over and he would fall safely into knee-deep mud. Soon he had raised the rope—his bar—to as high as running speed would allow him to go over.

The only way to exceed him was to climb up, wedged between two trees, as high as someone could reach the swinging rope up to me. I measured everything perfectly (well almost): the rope swing, the rope standard adjacent to me in the distance, and where I would have to hold to whip myself over my goal. As I jumped into swinging I remembered the giant root poking out of the ground at the midway point. There was no backing out. I tried to hold myself perpendicular to the ground while holding at the very bottom of the rope swing. Bam! My tailbone smacked directly on that root and I bounced across the ground to an inglorious halt, writhing in pain. It hurt to sit down for the next year.

“Fish Jam ala Gross” by anecdoting.com

Exotic Food

Editor’s Example:

I tried a lot of exotic fruits during my 2 years living around the island of Cebu, in the Philippines. Tropical fruits are yummy! Rambutan, anyone? How about mangoes? You won’t find better! But this story is not about those. I shudder to think if I tried dog meat, knowing that would not be uncommon, but I did not always ask what type of meat I was eating. I could tell you about trying chicken feet, Buwad (dried fish hanging out on clothes lines and later boiled in grease), and Ostrich eggs. Those are interesting! But this story is not about those, either. None of those had a lasting impact on me.

I could tell you about Balut (an unburied egg with a duck embryo developing inside that is then boiled and sucked out like a soup, only it is crunchy at this point with feathers and beak intact), but in truth I could not stomach trying that one, since I did not have to, and I did not bother to.

I will just tell you about Ginamos (a sort of raw fish jam), at least as it is called that in the Visayan region. It is a fish sauce with lots of salt and is left sitting around in its juices for days on end. Some call it a fish paste because it gets all slimy, and sometimes more viscous, when broken down, and then actually takes on a gray color like a cement mixture. It’s not so bad on day one, but in my many visits to a friend’s home, and my desire not too offend, I felt awful sick by the third day in a row.

Chalk it up to my weak American stomach, or whatever, but I think I was throwing-up for a week.

“Dumb Blonde Slams own Finger in Door” by Robyn (Spanish Fork, UT)

Broken Bones

When I was 16 and a true blonde. I volunteered to help with a group of children on an outing to the park. Seems simple enough, however, when you let children out of the door and shut after, one must remember not to stick their own finger in the way. When I break a bone I choose tiny bones. The end of my finger bones. The very tip of my finger behind the nail. Even this tiny bone can be broken in the worst way. A double compound fracture. This mistake left the top of my finger dangling. Pushing it back into place I immediately screamed for help. The Doctor sewed stiches through my nail and did his best to reattach, though a little crooked.

Though all this, my finger hurting and nearly chopped off, was not my greatest concern. In true 16 year old fashion, I was more worried that I would have to cancel my date to prom that evening. Now this wasn’t just any Prom. This was my first date ever prom. This was my first date ever with the senior who I shared Typing class with. This was my first date ever with the senior boy in my typing class that I bored holes through the back of his head with my eyes.

Let’s just say the pain of the finger would never match the pain of missing this date. So I didn’t!