(Or It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time)
I spent my “formative” years on a small Micronesian island in the Pacific called Kwajalein. The children on the island were mostly ignorant of the business being conducted there and spent much of the time innocently investigating the surroundings. The truth is that we brats were probably as invasive a pestilence as the wharf rats that came on the cargo ships.
We generally got into everything that wasn’t locked up, and one of those things was the dumpster behind the activities building. This building, designed to prevent “island fever” in the less inventive or imaginative inhabitants, contained diversions as diverse as a library at one end and a bowling alley at the other. (Good planning there.)
It didn’t take long for us kids to discover that the cracked or chipped bowling pins were discarded in the dumpster at the alley end of the building. Soon we had collected enough pins to organize our own bowling alley in the road in front of our house. We only lacked a ball. Then we remembered the shiny black bowling ball in the zippered bag on the floor of my father’s closet. Set’em up!
After spending the afternoon sending my father’s ball bounding down the roughly paved road and chasing the scattered pins and runaway ball we tired of the experiment. He would be home from work soon and we had to return the ball to the closet. But a transformation had gone unnoticed by us scamps in our excitement. The shiny black ball now looked like a rottweiler’s favorite chew toy. The dusty ball was a mass of scratches, divots, and had a few good-sized chunks unaccounted for.
What to do? Well, there were five boys in my family, so it was often an ultimate strategy to ignore the damage and keep your mouth shut. So back into the bag the ball went. Zip. Zip.
About this time my father became an avid bridge player. I guess there’s only so much you can do with a deck of playing cards.
Did you, in your childhood innocence, ever unwittingly wreak havoc?