Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherry

The Old Man has a couple of hearing issues. Some time back, I began wearing a hearing aid in my right ear. It seems that there are some things going on (or not going on) that make me less able to hear "instructions and guidance". When this first became appearant, I searched the memory banks for reasons. Suddenly, without warning, an episode from my childhood occurred to me.

One night in August, I was walking home from a Cub Scout meeting. I hadn't made it up to full Scout status yet, and yes, you could feel very comfortable walking alone in 1940's Bedford. Something caught my eye lying in the grass beside the sidewalk. I picked it up and it was a Cherry Bomb, soaked with early evening dew. I casually stuck it in my pocket and continued on home.

When I got to my room, I put the bomb in a drawer where I kept my special treasures; my Sky King decoder, my half used tube of Red Ryder BB's, and my deed to one square inch of land in the Klondike from Quaker Puffed Wheat. It took residence there until early December.

One day, I was out of school and felt boredom set in. Bad sign. I picked up the Cherry Bomb and found that it had long since dried. Experiment time. I took the bomb into our bathroom and figured that I would turn the water on in the sink and "test" for dryness by lighting the fuse. My plan was to immediately stick the end of the fuse in the running water before any catastrophe could occur. Bad plan now joined bad sign as the rule of the day.

After three "sticks" under the running water, slow boy finally realized that Cherry Bombs Burn Under Water! I had just enough time to drop the thing in the sink and turn my head before critical mass was reached.

The resulting blast took out a shelf above the sink where my dad kept his Kreml Hair Tonic, and shredded several slats of a metal Venetian blind adjacent to the sink. The gunpowder mixed with the water and covered me until I looked like the Tar Baby in the Uncle Remus cartoons popular at the time.

Now, my mother was a stout woman but she cleared the steep steps in about a nanosecond. She screamed, "Are you alright?" At least she said later she did...all I heard was a persistent bell ringing. The bell continued for a couple of weeks.

Mother later admitted that she first thought I had concocted some fiendish substance with my chemistry set. I wish that had been the case. I would have been hailed as a boy genius as opposed to the opposite.

So, mystery solved. This probably explains the hearing aid as well as my seeming reluctance to follow instructions. Some days I just nod and grin. And now and then, from somewhere far away for just a minute, a bell rings.