Youthful mishaps and toy product testing

When it came to my Mom and toy guns “You’ll shoot your eye out” was just the beginning. 

She was sure that if I played with those “devils toys that glorified killing” I would become a mass murderer of epic proportions, using neighborhood children, innocent babies and little fuzzy kittens for target practice. 

While there were certainly some children in my neighborhood that should have been used for target practice, I never really thought of it until she put the idea into my head.

I knew she would never buy me a gun, even if it was just a toy. So when I was about ten or eleven, I devised a plan to finance my very first gun. At the risk of stunted growth and future weak bones, I planned on boycotting milk for lunch. By saving the milk money my Mom gave me for school lunch, I was sure to be able to own my very own gun, eventually. Being impatient, and a cheapskate, I bought the first gun I had enough money for. It was a small, toy derringer gun...part of a key chain, I think.  It had small, soft plastic bullets, that shot out when you fired it with caps. Note the name.

I used to line up my little green plastic army men and shoot away at them. 

The gun was not the least bit accurate, but it’s hard to miss when your firing into a crowd. The gun was tiny and designed to shoot the bullets with caps.  
A cap. 
One per bullet. 

At least that was what was intended. I don't now if they still make them but there used to be caps that we called greenie caps. Yes, they were green but they came on a sheet. 

Not the red ones you took a whole roll of and hit them with a hammer on the sidewalk to make small explosions that sent concrete specks into your eyes. 

The greenie caps peeled off and you could stick them in your gun, or on things, as desired. 

Well, I got the great idea of sticking them on this derringer until I couldn’t fit any more of them in the cap area. 

                                Kids, do not try this at home! 

I really figured the first cap would pop and the rest would fizzle. I carefully aimed, and squeezed the trigger. 

A bomb went off in my hand. The sound inside the room was deafening. I could hear the soft plastic bullet ricochet back and forth across the room about three times, each time barely missing me. 

When the acrid smelling smoke cleared, and there was plenty of it, I looked at the charred mass of metal in my hand. The pistol had split at the seam and all the nice chrome was black. 

I soon heard my Moms worried voice exclaim up the stairs, "What was that?" 

"Nothing Mom!" I called back as I opened the windows and tried to fan the smoke out, dropping the now useless gun in the trash can.

I am proud to say that I am now over 50 years old and have never shot any fuzzy kittens or neighborhood children. Even though I have known some I wished I had.

Verbal Slippages

My Mom was pretty strict when it came to many things, but she really hated to hear curse words coming out of our little boy mouths. 

Even the word ‘Geez” was considered to be a variation of taking the Lords name in vain. “Holy Cow” seemed to be okay for some reason. At least she never said anything about that one. “Fart” was a definite no no. We were supposed to say “passing gas”. 

Actually, we weren’t supposed to even talk about that, but if we did, that was the preferred phrase. I don’t know anyone then or now, who says “Oops, I just passed gas!” 

Lets face it, usually you say “Geez! That damn dog farted again!” 

But we knew if we said the wrong word at the wrong time, we could bet our mouth was going to get cleaned up with soap. Yuckeroo!

One time we were being forced to get ready for Church again. We were going through the usual sharing of the bathroom and trying to find our good Sunday clothes from the back of the closet. I was in a really bad mood and was dragging more than usual. 

As it got closer to time to go, my mood seemed to get worse. Nothing was going right. My shoe laces had knots in them. I had trouble finding a shirt that was spot free and unwrinkled enough, and yet still had a neck big enough not to choke the living crap out of me. 

When my Dad yelled back to me to tell me to hurry up for the fiftieth time, My anger couldn’t contain itself any longer, and I blurted out at the top of my lungs “I can’t find my Damn tie!”

The world stopped for just a moment. 

The only sound I could hear was my brothers jaw dropping open, and it was very quiet. I could feel my heart drop to my stomach and my stomach drop to my knees to make room for it. My knees got wobbly as I waited for the wrath of God, or at least my Dad, to descend upon me. 

No lightning bolts came down to smite me, even though my brother stepped back as far as he could to allow for it. 

Usually when we did something really bad, my Dad would take his belt off, fold it in half, and snap it as he came down the hall. It was a dreadful sound that made your ass smart...

...no matter what dumb thing it just got caught doing.

Apparently he didn’t want to be bothered redressing either. He opened our door and quietly asked “What did you say?”

Now, even though the door was closed, I knew he knew exactly what I said. Heck, I was sure the neighbors down the block knew exactly what I said. I had sure yelled it loud enough. I repeated exactly what I said, but very sheepishly this time. I am sure the fear was quite evident in my voice.

All he said was “I think you really need to go to church. Now.”  I think he was trying to stifle a smirk or a laugh when he closed the door. I quickly found a tie that wasn’t good enough a few minutes ago and clipped it on. I ran to the car to find everybody waiting for me. Very quietly.

I got in and never said a word. I was quite amiable the rest of that day. The sermon must have been on forgiveness, because nothing else was ever said about my damn Sunday outburst.

Have you ever had a "verbal slippage" that you instantly realized you should not have uttered?

My youthful introduction into religion

As a young boy growing up in Florida, my parents used to drag us to church on a regular basis.

We frequently visited our Grandmother on weekends, so we would attend her favorite church, or at least the one that was closest to her house.

The only time I didn’t mind going to church was to attend a Southern style funeral. I know this sounds bad, but everyone in the community would get together and bring a covered dish to share. 

Apparently, they had determined long ago that binge eating was a good way to send someone off to the next world. It certainly was a good plan as far as I was concerned.

I can recall attending one of these funerals to find tables of desserts lined up for a quarter mile down the road. YES! My favorite food!

My 10 year old arms hadn’t grown strong enough to carry all the tasty treats I was sure I could eat. My legs tired half way down the line of tables, so I just stopped there and sat in the warm Florida sand with a plate piled so high I could barely see over it. I figured I would empty this load and continue the trek in a minute. This would be the fist time I would understand the pain behind the phrase; "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach."

While I did a good job of scarfing it all down, I had little desire for more. The main dishes held no interest at all.

But those were my only good memories of Church and those Southern Baptist sermons we were forced to attend. Can you say Hell fire and brimstone?

Geez, I never knew I was such a sinner until I attended one of those southern Baptist sermons. There was this preacher that stood at the front of the church and he used to yell at me all the time, and he didn’t even know me!

"You will go to hell if you don’t repent your evil ways!" He would rant on and on about this, pacing back and forth, waving arms and pointing fingers.  How many sins could a 10 year old possibly have committed? I don't think I was even aware what they all where. He really seemed upset at how bad all of his parishioners were. 

I used to wonder if God sent all of us to him as his punishment.

I do remember there was some kind of pool built into the front of the church. It wasn’t there all the time, but sometimes they would try to drown people, saying something about Baptizing in the name of the Lord. 

There were times when I wanted to go jump in the pool and swim around during the sermon. We were not allowed to do this no matter how hot and humid a closed church in Central Florida got on a hot August day. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were wearing our Sunday best clothing; hot suits tied tightly at the neck with nooses called ties. 

The stained glass windows only opened a little bit at the bottom;  Just enough  to let in wasps and bees, but no breeze. Nobody had air conditioning back then. The place was cooled, and I use the term loosely, by old osculating fans mounted to the wall. These were the old fashioned types with a decorative wire grid that wouldn’t keep an entire hand out, much less a kids fingers.

However, they were mounted high enough on the wall that nobody could reach them. They were also high enough so that you couldn’t feel any air movement. However, the bees and wasps would occasionally get caught in one and get mad enough to go look for somebody to sting to even the score. 

The upright wooden pews were like sitting on rocks. To me, Sunday church felt like I was already in Hell. I started wondering if I should sin now to make up for all the time I had already spent in church.

The really funny thing about all this? 

The church was in a small town with the ever so non sinning name of Fellowship!

What was your introduction into religion like?