Naivety: Part Two

Even after the egg incident, my innocence knew no bounds. Paul David told me one day that he could pin a glass of water to a concrete wall. Thinking to myself that I was not naive enough to believe that one, I told him to show me. He just smiled and filled a glass with cold water from the tap and then showed me the big pin he’d borrowed from Mom’s sewing kit.

We went outside to the pump house, which was the only concrete structure on the farm. Paul David positioned the glass next to the concrete and pressed the pin against the wall beneath it. I was watching closely when the pin slipped from his fingers.

“Oh, can you get that for me?” my brother asked sweetly.

Of course, I could. I quickly bent down to pluck up the pin, at which point Paul David poured the glass of cold water over my head. I came up spluttering to see him convulsed in laughter. I wish I’d stuck him with the pin, but I was too naïve to think of it.

I’m not that naïve anymore. 

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Naivety, Part One

I was something of a naïve child, a trait that my older brothers often exploited mercilessly. Take Paul David, for example. He once taught me to juggle, which I at first took to be quite a wonderful thing. Little did I realize that it was only a prelude to a prank.

Paul David taught me to juggle using tennis balls, and I got quite good at it, although I could never do more than three at a time. One day, my brother asked me to demonstrate my skills and I proudly displayed them using our well worn set of tennis balls.

“Hmph,” he muttered.

“What?” I demanded.

“Tennis balls are easy,” he replied.

“I can juggle three acorns,” I said. “Or three rocks.”

“Sure.  But….”

“But what?”

“Come with me.”

I dutifully followed my brother into the kitchen where he opened the icebox and took out three eggs. He offered them to me.

“Juggle these,” he said.

I took the eggs. They were cool and smooth to the touch, and smaller than the tennis balls. Of course, the eggs would break if I dropped them and the balls wouldn’t. But I figured it couldn’t be that much different and I had lots of experience.

“All right,” I said, and started to walk past him into the back yard.

“No, no,” he said. “Do it here.”

Irritated, I decided that I would just show him. I tossed the first egg up, prepared the second, panicked at the thought of dropping them, and as quickly as that two eggs went splat on the kitchen floor.

Paul David laughed and laughed.

I got to clean up the yolk.

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Remembering Things

I guess it's the nature of memoir. A few weeks ago I put the finishing touches on a memoir of mine entitled "The Adventures of an Arkansawyer." It's only been out a couple of weeks but I've already remembered other funny incidents that I should have included. I guess someday I can do an expanded version, but for now I'll just share the gist of those events with my blog friends. Here's one involving me learning how to ride a bicycle.

We didn't have a working bicycle when I was young but there was an old rusted one out back of the barn. The tires were flat and half rotted and the chain was off the sprockets. I asked Dad to fix it up for me at one point and he promised to do so. But I was impatient. One afternoon I pushed the bike up the hill above our house. There was a dirt road there and I hopped on the bike and started down. I had no idea what to expect. It was a wild careening ride, with pieces of rotted tire flying up in my face and me desperately trying to keep my balance so that I wouldn't fall over into the rock strewn dirt of the road.

As I neared the bottom of the hill I began to really panic because the garden was coming up in front of me and there was a barbed wire fence around it.  The yard fence was to one side of me and the barn to the other. To avoid the fences, I tried to steer for the barn, hoping to hit the doorway and land in the hay. I didn’t quite make it. There was a big bramble bush just outside the barn door and some of our chickens were clucking around there. I hit that bush on the bike and hurled myself deep into the brambles in an explosion of panic stricken chickens. 

After that adventure, Dad got the bike fixed up and taught me how to ride it. On a flat road and not a hill.

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What I’ve Been Working On

I haven’t talked much about writing here lately, but I have been doing some. For fiction, I’ve had some problems finishing things. I’ve started close to a dozen stories, a western featuring a hero with a burned face called “The Scarred One,” another story about my heroic fantasy character Krieg, called “Where All the Souls are Hollow,” an urban fantasy piece, a sort of schlock horror piece called “HogZ,” and the list goes on.

I still have a number of pieces in various stages of completion from last year, three western tales featuring a character named Lane Gabriel, a YA fantasy tale featuring fox kits called “Farhaven,” and a prequel of sorts to “Under the Ember Star.” I like all of them but haven’t touched any of them in months now.

The Krieg piece will be finished but it’ll probably be a couple more weeks. I’ve had a very busy time at school with the research committee that I chair. The rest of the pieces? I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel when the Krieg story is done.

However, I did make very good progress this summer on another project, which is completed. Quite a few folks seemed to enjoy my humorous memoir, “Days of Beer,” and I wanted to do a print version of it. However, it just wasn’t long enough so I figured I would add some more memoir stuff about growing up in the south. Once I got started, a whole lot of stuff started coming back to me and I ended up writing another forty + thousand words of material about wacky adventures I’ve had. The vast majority of this had no relationship to beer drinking, although I did add a few items to the original Days of Beer material.

I decided to call the collection “Adventures of an Arkansawyer,” and I’m now going through the proofing process on it. It will include the Days of Beer stuff but add that extra forty thousand words. Initially it will appear in print form only, but I will do an ebook version of it down the line.

The reason for starting out in print is because of what happened with Days of Beer as an ebook only publication. I had hoped the book would attract more attention around my home town of Charleston, Arkansas but it really didn’t. A few people did read and enjoy it and let me know, but for the most part it went nowhere. I know a lot of folks in that area aren’t yet into reading electronic materials so I want to see if the print book does better there. Anyway, I’ll announce further information about this work as it becomes available. 

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