The Time I Stole a Discus!

Growing up, our parents were always telling us what we should and should not do, and reinforced those admonitions with sayings that still rattle around in my head to this day.  Sayings like "Don't cross your eyes, Paul. They'll get stuck that way!" and "Don't swallow those watermelon seeds.  They'll grow in your stomach."    Not only did you get plenty of rules at home, you got a fair share of rules given to you at church. 

Charleston Heston was a Good Moses

And of course, while many of the ten commandments were a little above my "pay grade" when I was six or seven, there was at least one which made perfect sense to me "Thou Shalt Not Steal." (We were King James folks back in the day.) 

But like the comedian  (I think it was Flip Wilson) once said, "the Devil made me do it!," I broke that commandment on two occasions that I distinctly remember.  One of which has yet to result in any signficant consequences (although that may certainly change).  The other time, the consequences were delayed, impressive, and reminded me of the way Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heros would always say "Vee Haff Ways!" to remind you that old Number 8 means what it says and that paybacks were heck.

The Grays lived between downtown Camp Wood (where Northcutt's Dry Goods store was), and our house.  They had a big Live Oak tree near the highway, just north of their their house, which was a cool place to play on hot Summers, and always had various toys (mostly dishes and stuff - I don't remember that Karen or Jakelynn were big into trucks or toy soldiers), scattered around among the doodlebug holes in the dust at the base of the tree.

It was Flip's Fault!

One day as I was walking from the store to the house, Flip Wilson must have (figuratively) jumped out from behind that big Oak just as I was passing by and crammed a subliminal command in my brain right through my ear, because I looked down, saw a small, shiny object (likely a tin tea cup or saucer), and put it into my pocket without hardly slowing down, then furtively contined on home.

I'm not sure why I did that, but it sticks in my mind as clear as if it were yesterday, even after more than 50 years.  So Karen, or Jakelynn, if you have been wondering where that most favorite of all things went, that you KNEW you had left under the big Oak tree, now you know.  I'll try to make it up to you somehow.  Perhaps though, you can rest a little easier in the knowledge of what actually happened to it.   

The other object I stole was when I was in high school.  Coach Malacheck had taken us all the way out to the middle of nowhere in West Texas, (Iraan or Imperial or some such place) for a track meet.  I threw discus in high school, among other things.  That's one of the great things about a high school with less than 100 total students.  If you wanted to participate, especially in sports, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. 

Coach Malacheck was a great coach, and I was a poor discus thrower (to begin with.)  LA was watching me throw one afternoon, and after observing a few pitiful throws, said "Paul, you're doing it all wrong!"  The way I was trying to throw it caused the discus to be released with a counter-clockwise rotation from the back side of my hand.  LA said that when you release, you need to release with your fingers, giving it a clockwise rotation and a final push!  Well, it felt pretty wierd at first, but soon, I noticed that doing it the right way really improved my distance (which is pretty much all that sport is about - that and aiming.)  I'll get to aiming later.

Well, he was right, and I became a pretty good discus chunker after that.  So anyway, off the mighty Nueces Canyon Panther track team went to Iraan or Imperial or somewhere, to do some running, vaultin and chunkin. 

It was more beat up than this!

During the wait between one event an another, I was walking around the track field and found an old, beat up practice discus laying apparently forgotten in the outfield.  I say all those things because it helps me rationalize why I decided to take the thing.  So I did; I slipped it discretely into my gym bag and brought it home with me after the track meet.  Where it promptly was assigned to the barn in the back of our house, and soon forgotten.

Two or three years later, while I was home from college for the weekend, I was rummaging around in the barn and found the old, scratched-up, hard-rubber practice discus.  "I wonder," I mused, "if I can still throw this thing?" 

So I went over and stood behind the burn barrel and the old water well, gave myself plenty of room, warmed up a couple of times, remembering how LA had taught me to throw the thing, then went into my spin and launched the discus up, up, up into the beautiful, blue Texas sky.  I could tell as soon as it left my fingers that it was going to be a long toss. Lengh OK!  Aim --- NOT OK.  About one nanosecond after I decided it was going to be a long toss, I also determined it was going to be a disastrous toss because it was heading directly for the windshield of Mom and Dad's 1956 Chevrolet Impala which I had driven home from the Dry Goods store. 

Surprisingly, a practice discus doesn't even hesitate when it hits a windshield.  It simply passes through the windshield, with a great CLASHBANG!,  and lands smugly on the clear, plastic seat covers we had ordered from the Fingerhut catalogue, surrounded by hundreds of rectangular bits of safety glass from what once was the windshield.

What could you do?  You couldn't run, you couldn't hide, you couldn't blame it on your big brother.  You had to drive that car, looking out the impressive hole on the driver's side, back to the Dry Goods store to tell Mom.  Her initial reaction was "Oh Paul... you're kidding!"  Then her reaction got a little more animated.

So, the 8th commandment is there for a reason.  I knew it going in, but those two adventures reinforced it in me.  Now, I guess I'll just have to wait to see what Karen or Jakelynn do about that tin tea cup!