A Vintage Life Lines from 2018.
In my Sunday school class awhile back I was teaching Exodus 19, where God’s presence is about to descend on Mt. Sinai and He warns the people not to touch the mountain. If they did, He said the power of His holy presence would kill them.
“I’m afraid I would have touched it and died right there,” I confessed.
“Yep, you would have,” someone quietly agreed from the back of the room.
I was the kid who touched the stove after my mom had warned me, “No! Don’t touch! Hot!”
I had to see what Hot! felt like. Yes, it scorched my fingers and I yelped for awhile. But then I knew what Hot! felt like.
A week before my ninth birthday I was roller skating around the sidewalks of my school on a Saturday when I saw an alluring little dust devil whirling the sand out on the playground. I watched it for a minute before I stepped off the sidewalk onto the dirt in my clumsy strap-on skates. I just had to find how it would feel to sandblast my legs.
I didn’t get that far. After a couple of steps, my skate twisted and fell to the side. So did I. In a few seconds, I had snapped my tibia and lay sprawled on the dirt wondering how I got there. My friend, who was skating with me, took off his skates (smart move) and ran to get both of our mothers to load me into a car.
As it turned out, I had sustained a corkscrew fracture, cracking the bone in nine places. It might have been worth it if I had made it to the dust devil, but that was an opportunity I missed.
I had a cast to the hip, and my dad rented a wheelchair for me until I could get a shorter cast. The wheelchair rental included a little inflated rubber cushion to sit on. One day I was parked on the front porch, bouncing on my rented cushion, watching my dad repair the swing. He had gone back inside to answer the phone. I was bored.
I removed the rubber donut cushion from under my backside and began to study it. What would happen if I stuck something into the cushion? From where I sat I could stretch my foot out far enough to roll one of the nails from Dad’s project toward me.
I picked up the nail and thought about how it would feel to press it into the rubber. Without any more thought, I plunged it in. Several times. The cushion deflated slightly, not enough to be a very exciting experiment. I tossed the cushion onto the swing, my attention already drawn elsewhere. What would it feel like to drive the nail into the porch floor?
By that time my dad was back. He noticed the cushion on the swing.
“What happened to this cushion?” he demanded.
“Happened?” I asked, all big-eyed innocence. “I don’t know.”
Was I above lying at age 9 to save my skin? Absolutely not. And I had detected a dangerous edge in my dad’s voice.
He didn’t ask anything else. Instead, he took the cushion to the big pan of water in the yard where we watered the dogs and submerged it. Water spewed heavenward from the 10 holes I had poked in the rubber. My heart sank.
He was furious. “Do you realize that I will have to pay for this cushion?” he asked. Actually, that hadn’t been a consideration when I was experimenting with it. The only thing that saved me that day was the fact that I was wheelchair-bound and put on my “I’m-so-pitiful” face and that I hadn’t driven a nail into the porch. But at least I learned what happens when you poke holes in a rubber cushion.
Sometimes I did things just to call someone’s bluff. One day my aunt was helping us move into a new house. I must have been whistling while she helped me straighten my room.
“I have such a migraine that I think I would scream and die if anyone whistled much longer,” she said tactfully. I went on alert. She would scream AND die? I loved my aunt, but that would be something to see!
I whistled as loud as I could. She did scream and clap her lands over her ears. She didn’t die. I was slightly disappointed.
When Becky Burgers came to Magee, I got one. Seeing its impressive size I thought, No human being could possibly eat a whole Becky Burger!
But what would it feel like if a person could? So I did it. I paid for my curiosity internally for days afterwards, but I knew then what it felt like to swallow a mountain of hamburger meat.
People tell me to put things in my column that they think should be said but they don’t want to say them. They know I’ll say it. They don’t care if I have to go to the slammer for voicing their opinions.
Though I’ve gotten myself into a lot of trouble over the years and paid for my curiosity many times, I think this kind of experimentation helps us to grow up.
And if I ever do grow up, I’ll let you know.
