I’ve got the world on a spring…sittin’ on a rainbow, got that spring around my finger…what a world, what a life… Holy Crap! It’s stuck in my nostril!
Yep. That’s about how I recalled it – vividly, looking at this spring in Tractor Supply one day. My kids stopped behind me, being their father’s children and possessing a strong herding instinct when it came to walking me through a store.
“Do we need one of those?” One of them asked as I fingered one of the larger springs. We were there to look at fencing material, but they must have thought it was plausible.
“Nah.” I told them. Seeing it, though, brought back a memory of getting one stuck in my nostril once when I was a kid- about their ages, and definitely old enough to know better. I told them the story. They were suitably impressed, or horrified, I couldn’t tell which, as they looked from me to the hook and back again, trying to puzzle out how that could possibly have happened.
I really couldn’t tell them. It had all happened so fast.
I remember coming home from school, seeing this big old spring on the kitchen table, and of course, messing around with it. I turned on the TV and sat there on the floor in front of it twirling this spring around and around on my finger, impressively I thought, when all of a sudden, THWACK! The end of that spring hooked my nostril.
I’ve since had time to ponder this whole event, and while I’d like to think I’m smarter than I was when I was a teenager…truth be told, I’m afraid I would react just the same today as I did back then…
And what I did was panic, and then madly yank at that spring, then ratchet up the panic level and the yanking when it wouldn’t come out. (As a side note, I have an aversion to fishing…I think it’s cruel. The nightmare fish must go through I was living!) Luckily, my mom came to see what all the ruckus was about and found me thrashing around the living room, frantically jerking at a spring that was attached to my nose. She stood there for a moment, aghast. “HOLD STILL AND STOP PULLING ON IT!” She finally commanded, shaking her head and muttering the all too familiar refrain, “How in the Sam Hell did you manage that?” as she unhooked the thing from my nose.
Now, whenever I hear Peggy Lee sing I’ve Got The World On A String, I automatically insert the word, spring instead of string and I can’t help but smile. It wasn’t, unfortunately, the first such incident in my life, nor would it be the last! I did a lot of silly, foolish and/or flat out dangerous things when I was a kid. I was what is known these days as a free range child. We all were back then, I think. But I knew I was lucky. I survived and I didn’t kill anyone. That’s possibly why I have tended to practice a more preemptive parenting style with my own kids. Over my dead body would they do a quarter of the things I did! There were a lot of hard “no’s” in our house, more nagging than rescuing, and more lectures than first aid…but to this day, I’m not sure that one way of parenting is necessarily better than another. You do the best you can. I just knew I didn’t like worrying myself sick or dealing with blood, so I tried to limit both. I’m not the least bit sorry about it, either.
I did worry a little sometimes that I was depriving my kids of their own good stories, but I needn’t have. Now that they’re grown and don’t have to worry about being grounded, they take great pleasure in regaling me with tales of all their silly, foolish and/or flat out dangerous escapades. To think, there I was busy beating out wildfires, while they were gleefully jumping off cliffs. Go figure!