| This is yet another account of one of Tim's scars caused by me. (Hey, some people just have the gift). I loved to "play with fire" and was responsible for accidentally (HONEST) burning down more than a few structures on the farm. Now that I look back, there's no doubt I was a normal pyromaniac (at least I was normal in one area). They always said (in those days), that kids who play with fire also wet the bed. I did until I was 16, hummmm, you can "connect the dots"! This day I was assigned the task of "burning the papers", as we referred to taking out and burning the trash, or garbage to you "refined" types. (Have you ever stopped to think that crude oil is also "refined")? As I was as usual "playing" with the fire, I noticed there was an old red plastic toy fire truck starting to burn and melt. I grabbed a stick and poked it into the molten mass (just like the old man in the movie The Blob). I lifted up the stick with "the blob" on the end of it and started to whirl it around and showing Tim, who had just arrived on the scene, the neat "smoke trail" it was making "just like a shot down WW II fighter plane". The description was complete with the appropriate sound effects too! As I spun it around faster and faster, the mass started to stretch out further and further. Suddenly, without warning, the elongated mass flew off the end of the stick like a bolo. Tim was standing 4 or 5 feet away from me and the spinning "bolo" strand of molten plastic wrapped itself right around Tim's ankle! Since it was too hot for him to grab hold of and pull it off with his hands, he ran screaming into the barn some 150 feet or so away and grabbed a pair of pliers to pull the hot mass off from around his ankle! He has a "neat" round scar all around his ankle compliments of me! (AGAIN)! |
