Growing Up Michigan Part 1: Have Grown-Ups Always Been This Mean?
I was only five years old – a kindergartener – when I was scared by an old man in a creepy black car who threatened “I’ll take you with me.”
That is something I have never forgotten. This would be my second sour encounter with these things called ‘adults’ with more to come throughout childhood until I graduated high school...after that, I was able to deal with them on their level.
I’ll relate the tale about the old man after I tell the tale of my first brush with a crabby adult. I must have been around three or four years old. My parents had bought a birthday present for me – a bow and arrow set that had suction cups on the arrow tips; you know which ones I mean, right? Now what damage could a 3-4 year old do with this toy? I would line up the arrow, pull back the bowstring, and let it go. The arrow maybe went about a foot in front of me then collapsed onto the ground near my feet. Not much muscle in a kid that age.
I proceeded to walk around the neighborhood, shooting at trees and usually missing every one unless I was about an arm’s length away. I spotted a sparrow way across a neighbor’s yard, sitting high atop a three-story barn, at least 100 feet or more away. I pull back the arrow and let it fly...BLOOP. The arrow landed just a couple of feet in front of me, not damaging or hurting anything. The woman in the house comes out screaming her fool head off, “STOP SHOOTING MY DAMN BIRDS!!!” The bird on the roof looked down on her as if she was an idiot.
“I’m not shooting your birds” I answered back. After telling me to get off her property, she was heard muttering something like “that damn little kid”... What a great example of an intelligent grown-up.
Okay, now about the old man.
I was five years old and had become friends with one of the little girls in my Kindergarten class. She lived just down the block from me at the end of the street. One afternoon I was down at her house and we were outside, doing not much of anything. Bored, we started picking up stones from alongside the road and began tossing them across the street. This was not a major street, just one of those smalltown back-neighborhood streets with hardly any traffic. We saw a car coming so we stopped throwing and stood there waiting for it to go by so we could throw more. To our surprise, this black car screeched to a halt and the driver, a creepy old man, rolled his window down and glared at us. After a few seconds, he snarled “if you throw those rocks at my car, I’ll take you with me!”
We just kind of stood there stunned as he just sat there for a short time, possibly hoping we would do just that. He finally began to slowly creep away and leave. The girl and I looked at each other, threw our stones down, she zipped into the house, and I ran home.
At only five years old, I was starting to wonder “is this what being a grown-up is supposed to be? Are they all this way?”
As my childhood and teen years went by, I discovered to my dismay, that yes..... many of them are. More to come...
Angry Adults and Kids
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