| To
me, and I can only speak for me because I’ve tried speaking for someone else in
the past and it didn’t, I repeat, it didn’t work. Not very well! I got slapped
in the mouth, half way to insanity, by, not the complainant but by the defendant.
Don’t we all know experience is a very good teacher?
But to me,
April Fool’s Day is second only to Halloween. How do you feel about that? Because
both can involve tricks; one very minor, light hearted, fun type tricks. The other,
more serious, malicious and mean spirited type tricks. Those type tricks that
can do property damage, or even personal injury to someone.
Look over
there! Did you see that bird drinking from our office water cooler? APRIL FOOL!!
Or, Mildred told me the boss said everybody could take the afternoon off. APRIL
FOOL!! Or, like Chicken Little said, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
Actually I think that was a fun little ole April Fool’s joke from a half insane
chicken. Don’t you?
Oh, and here’s one! I said, “Did you ever see a cat
fish?”--- She said, “Of course I’ve seen a cat fish! What do you think I am, naive?”---
I said, “How did he hold his pole.” Needless to say, I got slapped in the mouth
again!
These are tricky, fun and foolish little things. The very opposite
of Halloween that can involve more serious stunts. Stunts that can turn out to
be not so very funny.
Halloween is like; well, as a teenager I knew some
boys that, in the quite of night slipped up to a house in the dark and moved the
porch steps way down to the end of the porch. They then purposely made some loud
disturbing noise and laid back to watch. When the home-owner came running out,
off the porch he went. He fell flat off the porch out in the yard and nearly broke
his neck. Serious stuff, but funny to the teenager tricksters. That home-owner
was the high school principle.
Another Halloween, we country boys decided
to try and fool some night-time passing motorist on the highway. In the barn we
found a clean, pretty good looking old discarded automobile tire. We taped a small
paper label or two on it to make it appear new. Then tied a long wire on it and
placed it on the highway, right next to the traffic lane. We laid back in the
ditch ,weeds and bushes waiting for cars to pass, at night.
As we held
on to the wire, a car or two passed, never stopping to look at the tire. Before
long a motorist decided to stop and pick up the tire. As he stopped and was backing
up on the road, we pulled the wire and removed the tire from the highway and out
of sight. Laying low, we could hardly keep from laughing.
That guy backed
up to where he thought the tire was and stopped. He got of his car and looked
all around the road, on the shoulder and everywhere, looking for the tire. Of
course he couldn’t find it and apparently thought he must be half way to insanity
and must have been seeing things. Jumping back in his car, he sped off down the
road. We kids came out of hiding, just laughing and rolling in the weeds.
Soon,
we repositioned the tire on the road and the joke started all over again.
I
can remember a few bigger high school boys stopping their pickup truck along a
country dirt road and picking a bunch of bois d’ arc balls; known as horse apples.
Bois d’arc balls are about the size of a softball, or a little larger, and just
as hard, or harder. They are just the right size for throwing a hard pitch with.
And that is what they would do on Halloween.
Maybe the mean older boys
would throw those things at peoples houses, on the roof-top and places like that.
Where-up-on, when the balls hit and rolled off a tin sheet-iron roof, it sounded
like holy thunder and would scare the Halloween spirits out of the devil. Now,
that’s half way to insanity.
All these things are just half the fun of
country boys growing up in NE Texas.
© Nolan Maxie
"Nolan
Maxie"
April 1, 2010 Column
piddlinacres@consolidated.net |
