Well, madupont, I was only four and we were walking - pre-car days. It was bitter cold. I asked where we were going, my dad said to jump in the lake. I turned around and started back to our living quarters by myself. I guess you had to have been there...
BUT, the Georgia gator story reminded me about being towed around the Dow Chemical lake semi-near Houston by an alligator who snapped at my casting plug and snagged it in his jaw. A 30 minute tour of dead tree stumps, underwater snags, fabulous birds, but no ivory-billed woodpecker, before he spit the plug out.
Heck, people, I can do the Appaloosa thing all day!
Carol, I was there. Four has that particular intensity of misunderstanding the references or maybe even the scenario. One of mine occurred when the kindergarten teacher announced on the sidewalk between the playground and the concrete steps back into the school building: "Anyone
who wants to go home right now, step out of line!"
So, I did.
It is the literalism of "four". Since I really didn't get it, consciously. I went back into the building with everybody else, having learned you don't go home just because someone mentions you have an opportunity.
But I got even, during "music" in a crowded afternoon kindergarten room, possibly more enrollees than "She" could handle, I found room for myself under the grand piano and then promptly passed out for lack of air, or "the Magic Chord", whatever.
I got to go home.
My dad used to do thoughtless things as well, perhaps they all do; it has been a conundrum that women have been trying to figure out for ages and have never resolved. It is usually a very small misunderstanding about something emotionally big; another tv commercial comes to mind.
This one with the grown man, who is part huckster and part hustler, giving a little girl a hard time about whether she would like a pony;he then gives her the easy out, turn-down we are tired of hearing on the phone or reading on-line about "exceptions" you can inquire about between the hours of such and such only every other Thursday, my god, that was today! if you jot down the number that seems to be missing something.
Personally, I think that is a very painful commercial. Thank god, I missed out on the alligator imitation of a water-ski speed-boat. IN THE WATER, WITH THE ALLIGATOR !!!
Were you fishing on your own? Yes, "we", used to go fishing too. Instead of alligators, it was "Watch out for the Bull" ! because this was done in the early morning with dew on the grass, to catch our breakfast.
Something tells me this was not so much to avoid causing Gram to think she had to make a breakfast; but, now that I have lived long enough for the thought to occur to me, possibly she didn't provide breakfast readily when they were five boys and two girls without a father?
You've got to admit, Appaloosa did have a Nature enthusiasm that was more colorful than the writing of other posters, sort of a nytimes.com Klinkenborg type of a younger generation. Although I was surprised to learn that Klinkenborg was not nearly as old as the impression I had because of his subject material. And that may have been from my own expectation that only a man two generations removed was that knowing about the beautiful mysteries of the Natural world's secret.
Which reminds me, I have a book to cover on that.
