Accurate Aim

Raised with two older brothers and a somewhat shy and perpetually busy mother, David had no ready access to or advanced understanding of issues of gender difference. Unlike my own third child, Freddy, born knowing more than he might ever have wanted to about girls, thanks to his two older sisters, little David was awash in ignorance and misconceptions when it came to the opposite sex. Once playing naked in the sprinkler with a young neighbor girl, David was shocked to see that she’d lost her penis. He recalled feeling quite sorry for her until his mother Marguerite succinctly informed him that girls neither had nor required such appendages. Later, in discussing the family’s pet yellow canary with his mother, he alluded to the bird’s feminine gender.
“What makes you think that Peetie’s a girl, David?”
“Because she’s got no ears…girls don’t have ears.”
David was again shocked when his mother gently drew back her hair and showed him her ears! Who knows? Perhaps these early forays into gynecological attributes set the stage for future professional pursuits.


My most favorite story dating from this era, however, has to do with a five-year-old boy, a rock, a windshield and a sailor suit. San Carlos Avenue, in the days around 1928, was in a state of near constant repair. As crews with horse-drawn steamrollers worked to repave the street after laying sewage pipes, the area in front of the Wolter’s bungalow amounted to temporary rubble, which provided David with ample inventory in the form of loose rocks with which to practice throwing. He was getting quite good at it when one of the few cars that ever passed that way happened by. “Wouldn’t it be fun to throw a rock and hit that car?” David thought without a hint of foresight. Sure enough, his practice paid off as his missile landed squarely on the hood of the car, bouncing into the windshield with a disquieting crash. As the startled driver got out to survey the damage and pursue the perpetrator, David took off running down the hedge between his house and the lot next door, entering the residence through the back porch. It’s debatable whether criminal minds are born or made, but his next move seemed to suggest the former. David hot-tailed it into the family’s bedroom where he found a pile of freshly folded laundry. Quickly casting off the blue homemade sailor suit he was wearing and kicking it under the bed, he donned a clean white one, just in time to hear a persistent knock on the front door. As he fiddled with the last button, he heard a man’s voice address his mother at the other end of their small house. David shyly sidled up to his mother’s skirts in time to hear her say, “Well, that could have been my little boy…what did he look like?” The man, who hadn’t gotten a good look at the culprit, returned, “He had on a blue suit.” Looking down at her angelic son as he figuratively polished his halo, Marguerite intoned, “This is my little boy…”

“No, he didn’t have on a white suit…I’m sure it was blue.”

David found himself flooded with an unsettling mixture of guilt and relief, as the perplexed man turned and left, and his mother returned to her sewing.

Sixty-five years later his own grandson, at a similar age, would commit a similar crime, throwing dirt clods through a neighbor’s trailer window. Freddy would not be as cunning in his own defense however and would suffer the consequences of an accurate aim, consequences that his grandfather had cleverly avoided.