Keep Your Eye on the Ball - Day 10

The Rise of the Ankle-Biters

I was the eldest kid in the family by a couple years. I didn’t belong in the smoke filled mushroom-clouded kitchen of the grown ups playing cards and drinking beer topped with black pepper. I didn’t want to be upstairs with now expanding pack of sibling and cousin agitators.

My Dad, at about this time started referring to this little mob as the ankle-biters and the primary ‘game’ I remember playing with my sister and cousins was called ‘Kill Jimmy.’ Anyone with kids or nieces or nephews know a variation of this game. It involves a closed bedroom door and a bunch of kids trying to kill each other by any means necessary. When an occasional dresser would fall or someone would cry in pain or hurt feelings there would be a disapproving voice at the bottom of the stairs followed by a short intermission.

Kill Jimmy was fun but it often spilled out of the house and could spontaneously commence at any given moment. In general, there is a complete unawareness that little people can cause pain to bigger people. I know this better now that I have an infant that touches me oh so gently on the face with her fingers and then follows it with an attempted fishhook through my lower lip.

One afternoon in Mountaintop when the ankle-biters were in their prime my Dad was taking us through the fundamentals of Wiffle Ball when young Mugger approached bearing the skinny yellow officially-licensed wiffleball bat. The bat was about as tall as him, but he was a wily coordinated dude even back then. He choked up on the bat as instructed, raised it above his shoulders, established his target and swung as hard as he could. By the time he was working through his follow-through, he had hit me in the groin about as hard as he could with the bat. Before I folded, I grabbed his face and threw him as far as I could. Before Mugger even hit the grass, my Dad grabbed my face and tossed me as far as he could. I think the lesson was to pick on someone your own size, or something like that, but after being double ambushed by both parties, big and small the moral of that lesson has always been lost on me.

This was Mugger’s (and my own) earliest known combat training.

Tomorrow

The Formative Years