Tag Archives: Frisbees

Daytona Beach

Daytona Beach: (n) city in NE Florida, a seashore resort

Oblivion can be very powerful if you know how to use it.

Acting stupid is not the same.

But legitimately being unaware or vacant of knowledge can occasionally win you favor in the Universe—and sympathy from those who are baffled by your misunderstanding.

There was a time I was young enough that I should not have been on my own, but old enough that I was allowed to be.

It is the true danger zone of the human journey.

Everything is legal but nothing is necessarily prudent.

I was traveling around at the time with two young ladies, who persisted in believing that we could make great music together—and someday others would confirm it.

We had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world around us. We had some sort of strange amnesia that caused us to think that the Earth was a desert island—and even though there were a multitude of creatures creeping along, we were quite unaware of their presence.

This is the condition we were in the first time we rolled into Daytona Beach, Florida. Unknown to us, we had arrived in town nine days before the Daytona 500 race.

I had a vague recollection that this was some sort of very large event.

With cars.

The young ladies, when told about the Daytona 500, questioned:

“500 what?”

We landed during a time that was far enough away from the race itself that there were still lots of motel rooms. But the people renting them were nervous that if we occupied a room, would we get out soon enough that they could triple the price for the racing crowd?

We didn’t care.

We promised we would only stay for two days, and we set out to learn everything we could about Daytona Beach.

The first day, the town was pretty vacant, and the beach was free of obstruction.

We discovered something that was so neat it still makes me grin: you could drive your car on the beach.

So we did—up and down—careful to avoid pedestrians and dogs chasing frisbees.

It was so much fun.

We pulled over, opened up our windows and doors and looked at the ocean until it felt like the huge splash was gazing back at us.

It was so much fun that we actually stayed one day too long. So by the time we left the region, people were everywhere. It looked like they were standing up, stacked together like cordwood.

But we had already enjoyed the town.

We had investigated the beach.

We had perused the ocean.

So we were ready to move on.

Unfortunately, because of the Daytona 500, we had to drive all the way to Fort Myers, Florida, before we were able to get a motel room that didn’t cost everything we had in our pockets and more.

But it was fun. You see, we were young. If we had arrived two days later, we’d have been jammed and unable to get in.

Sometimes God asks Mother Nature not to punish us for being ridiculous.

There’s an old passage that says, “God winks.”

Yes. Because He’s a Father, He sometimes has to understand that we’re just brats. Many of our antics are based on foolishness instead of evil.

Chimney

Chimney: (n) the part of a chimney that extends above the roof; a chimney stack.

I grew up living in a brick home.

Dead center in the middle of our roof was a huge chimney. It was probably about one-third the size of the house. I don’t know why they made such a large chimney–the fireplace was tiny.

But affixed to the chimney, on the front, was a large letter “S.” Now, this had nothing to do with our name, so as young children we speculated on what the “S” stood for. We never actually came up with anything that made sense, but it filled some time.

What also occupied our interest was using our sloped roof as the bouncing area for a ballgame, where we tried to get the ball to bounce as near to the chimney as
 possible without getting lodged behind it.

It was great fun–until the ball got lodged.

The chimney was so large that we couldn’t reach the ball with a long stick, and so, after three weeks there were six of our rubber balls stuck behind the chimney.

Every time I complained to my parents about the situation, they gave me a lecture on how foolish the game was in the first place and how if we didn’t throw the ball on the roof, it wouldn’t get lost behind the chimney. You see, to an adult mind, this logic made sense. But when you’re a kid, to eliminate fun just because it’s sensible is sheer torture.

So one day when my parents were away, we tok the youngest, smallest kid in our community. We called him “Toot.”

I’m not sure why. Maybe because it sounded small.

I stood on the bottom. Someone smaller than me climbed up on my shoulders, and finally, Toot scaled all the way up both of us, as we groaned in pain each time his foot stepped on our skin.

He got onto the shoulders of the fellow above me, and tried to jump over to the roof. He was able to get there–hanging by his fingertips.

We were scared to death.

We quickly tried to push him up on the roof as Toot struggled to pull himself up by grabbing shingles, which fell off the roof and onto the ground below.

Eventually, Toot, by some miracle, got his knee up on the roof, climbed up, raced over to the chimney, and threw down our six balls--and two frisbees which apparently had been thrown up there generations before.

We were so delighted that we forgot that Toot had no way to get down. He wouldn’t be able to get down the way he got up. So Toot sat on our roof waiting for my parents to return–because they had taken our ladder with them to do some work out on our farm.

When they arrived and saw Toot sitting on the roof like a little leprechaun, they were quite angry.

They quickly put up the ladder, retrieved Toot, and then began their lecture. They screamed, yelled, yammered and yakked for a good fifteen minutes. My friends wanted to leave, but my parents decided to be the disciplinarians for the neighborhood.

Afterwards, my mother turned to me and asked, “So what do you think about this?”

I thought for a long moment.

I probably should have thought a little longer–because without really being thoughtful enough, I replied, “Toot got our balls down.”

Needless to say, playing with balls was not permitted for me for several weeks.

 

 

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