It was one of those times when I was just plain broke. I had been out of work for a while and I wasn't finding any new jobs. I was self-employed as a handyman and I had called several of my past clients who would be most likely to have some work for me. But everyone seemed to be out of town or just not needing any help. I had paid the rent, which wiped me out of my cash and the last of my savings. I was eating whatever inexpensive food I could buy after going to the grocery store with the pocketful of coins I had gotten from my coin-jar at home. Now, all the coins were gone and I was dead broke. I flipped through old books in my room hoping that I might have left myself a hidden gift of a ten or twenty-dollar bill. No such luck. No-one owed me money and I wasn't in the habit of borrowing money from anyone. My truck insurance bill arrived a couple of weeks earlier and if I didn't pay it soon, my insurance would expire. If that happened, I wouldn't be able to drive my truck. As a handyman, having my truck was vital for future jobs, so I was feeling desperate... and hungry... literally. I needed a minimum of $100 to pay my insurance and have food for a couple of days while I tried to find more work. What to do? What to do? The last option was to go check my post office box. Maybe there would be a "Hail Mary" check there... some unexpected money from an unexpected source. So I drove to town, went into the post office, put the key in the keyhole of the P.O. box door and opened it. Empty. Sigh. I walked to the exit, pushed the door open, looked down on the sidewalk and saw a dollar bill. "It isn't much, but maybe my luck is changing," I thought to myself as I bent down to pick it up. Examining it more closely, I realized that it was a $100 bill! I looked around and there was no-one in the post office lobby and no-one within a half-block of the post office. The money was mine.
He was 16, I was 15 and we were friends, two bored high-school boys on summer vacation. It was 1968. We were hanging around his mother's house, in the backyard, trying to think of something to do. A large cow pasture met the end of his back yard and a barbed-wire fence separated the two. I suggested we climb over the fence and wander around the pasture - maybe we would find something to do over there. He agreed. Soon, we were in the pasture. There were no cows there that day so walking around was safe. The farmer's house and barn were too far away to matter. It was a sunny day with a wide open sky. An animal had burrowed, leaving a few rocks exposed to the surface. I suggested that we have a rock-throwing contest. Who could throw the highest and the farthest? It was really no contest. I was scrawny and he was bigger and much more muscular. We each chose a rock that fit our throwing hand very well. I told him to go ahead and throw first. I wanted to see how high and far he could throw so I would know what I needed to beat. He pulled back his arm and threw the rock as hard as he could. It seemed to take no more than a second for the rock to climb about 20 feet high when there was a loud, metallic "CLANK!" and the rock did a dead fall from that point. We quickly turned towards each other with looks of panic and ran as fast as we could back to the barbed-wire fence, scrambled over it, sprinted into his mother's house and hid in the basement for two hours. There were no trees, telephone wires or anything else that we could see in the sky. I hadn't even thrown my rock yet. I will always wonder what invisible, metal thing that rock hit.
| ArchivesSeptember 2013 Categories |
RSS Feed