Growing Up Southern: August 24, 2017

 It seems to me that a grown man, say one reaching voting age, is a miracle. I know I escaped “death by stupidity” many times. For my more adventurous friends, it was even worse.

Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that kids sit around these days staring into a hand-held device or talking into it. At least, the boys are not drag-racing, daring one another to climb to the highest branch of the tallest oak tree around, or wading into bayous looking for snakes. And the girls are not accepting rides from a stranger who looks like the loser in a Charles Manson look-alike contest.

Oh, I know grown men aren’t immune to the “hold my beer and watch this” type of challenging the Grim Reaper. And women still marry boyfriends who have beaten them senseless in the past. Choosing poorly is the Great American Pastime. Just look around.

But for the total abandonment of any sense of mortality, you have to hand it to young boys of past generations. They’ve even been known to tie themselves to young bulls to prove their manhood.

Yes, I said, “tie themselves to young bulls.” It’s not a “tale told by an idiot.” No, if fact it was told to me by my late father-in-law. It’s a tale told about ordinary young boys afflicted with the common masculine syndrome of temporary idiocy. In other words, typical young boys of the Arkansas Delta.

Seems Julius—that was my father-in-law’s name—and some young friends grew bored, sometime maybe in the 1930s. It was during the Great Depression after all and paid entertainment was practically unheard of in the rural farmlands of our state. The Internet says that less than one percent of children could afford cell phones back then, so that must be true. Boredom ruled.

I suppose it was after crops were “laid by” or the miscreants would have been busy chopping cotton. I don’t think there was an “app” that located free farm labor back then.

What to do? The declaration, “I’m bored,” spoken by a young boy is probably second in destructive force only to “I dare you.” These boys were fairly eaten up with boredom, as they say. So, they attacked the delima with their deepest level of concentration, a depth only measurable by electron microscope. We can almost hear the collective "Hmmm." Well, most families had a few cows. This led to calves. That led to young bulls, and that led to the image of cowboys riding grown ones. Now wasn’t that something?

One must understand the workings of an adolescent male mind to comprehend what follows. For that mind, there is no concept extant that involves linear thinking. There is simply a lightening-like flash in the brain that says “do.” A better angel called “reason” is shunted aside like a Gideon Bible at a beer-bust. The mental journey from cowboys riding bulls to let’s ride a calf was shorter than a reach across a small table.

Turns out, though, that riding a young bull wasn’t that easy. Each lad tried. Each lad failed. Each lad’s mind began to ease away from the effort to a less demanding way to entertain one’s self. Of course, one lad didn’t see it that way.

You know him, he’s the kid when we were growing up who would make a stink bomb out of  a ballpoint pen and a match and set it off in Study Hall.

Yeah, he’s the very one.

“I’ll ride the son-of-a-bitch. Find me some rope.” That’s all it took. Danger is no problem for a young boy if he is not the one about to face it. Within minutes, they had the largest of the young bulls fastened in a pen, the daredevil astride him with legs tied beneath the creature’s belly.

I can’t do justice to the telling of what happened next, and my father-in-law is no longer with us to do the job. Let’s just say the episode ended with a calf pen nearly destroyed, a young daredevil covered in cuts and bruises, a defiant young bull, and a band of accomplices, having finally removed the ropes and set their friend upright, lighting out for their respective territories.

Don’t worry. History had not finished with them. They’re the generation that crossed the Rhine River into Nazi Germany in March 1945. Maybe it takes a little idiocy to create heroism.

The Great Story-Teller
Front row center