This blog entry has been inspired by something I remembered from my childhood while driving back from St. Cloud earlier this week. I was thinking about things that have happened to me as a child that could be retold in my blog with the hope of squeezing some kind of life lesson from it. We’ll see if I come up with one by the end of this story.
Okay, so I have this cousin David (I’m HIS favorite cousin). He is about 7 months OLDER than me. We probably have loved each other since the moment we met. I’m sure if I had been older and wiser than the newborn that I was, I would have known better and done something to chase him away saving myself from a life of torture.
My dear David pretty much filled the shoes of the older brother I never had. As those of you who do have older brothers know, this can be a blessing as well as a curse.
When together we were in constant trouble. Two great minds that really didn’t need the others help to get into trouble. If our grandfather Herb were alive I’m sure he could tell some great stories about the two of us at the Langdon farm near Burr, MN. I’m sure he could tell stories about ALL of his grandchildren. We were quite the bunch when together at the farm.
When David and I were about 5 or 6 years old my family was visiting his family (our mom’s are sisters). For some unknown reason they had two pairs of boxing gloves and for an even bigger unknown reason we decided to put them on to do a little boxing. The whole time we are putting on our gloves he’s telling me all I need to do is keep my hands up.
Here I am this tiny, sweet, innocent, little thing attempting to box this big mean, oafish bully. What on earth was I thinking? I’m pretty sure he promised me that I wouldn’t get hurt and of course I believed everything he said. And it wasn’t like he’d EVER done anything in the past to hurt me. Right! And just because I was a girl it didn’t mean I couldn’t do EVERYTHING the boys did.
So here I am struggling to get these big, heavy boxing gloves on when WHAM! he punches me right in the face and knocks me down. I didn’t even have my gloves on yet! What kind of cheat does something like that? I screamed bloody murder. The screaming was more of a reaction to the shock of getting hit than the actual pain. Even though I was screaming my head off he wanted me to get back up and finish getting my gloves on so we could really box. But my screams had brought the adults running and that was the end of the boxing match. It was lucky for David that the parents came running because I had only one thing in mind and that was to pummel the snot out of him for blindsiding me!
This is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood. No wonder I’m such a messed up adult.
If David does happen to read this (which I will make sure he does) I’m sure his version of this story will be slightly different than mine. I would welcome his version of the story to be told in the comment section below. None of it will be true but his version of the story makes me laugh even harder than my version of the story.
Okay, now I need a moral to this story: “When getting ready to box someone, make sure you keep one eye on them at all times.” There really isn’t much of a moral to this story. It’s just a funny story I wanted to share.
PS I’m also kind of thinking this may be the reason one of the things on my “bucket list” is to do some boxing?
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