My Idiot Uncle (age 9). I spent some time living with my uncle near Orlando, FL. He had a place on one of four sand-bottom lakes in the area, which I believe was later preempted by Disney World. Only two homes on the lake had cleared land. Each day my uncle would shoot a couple of snakes that came up on our lawn to sun themselves. One day we were swimming in the lake. I was on my hands and knees at the bank digging up mussels when everyone started yelling, “Snake! Snake!” while leaping out of the water.
I looked around to see where the snake was, but everyone seemed to be pointing at me. I looked down and saw a big water moccasin about two feet away, blithely swimming along the shoreline. I froze and he swam right over my hands, which were resting on the bottom. Meanwhile, my uncle had gotten his rifle to save me. As soon as the snake’s head was about six inches past my hand, he shot it. What he overlooked was that the muzzle was about six inches from my ear. It was only a .22, but I was deaf in that ear for a couple of days and got powder burns on my ear and shoulder. This was the first step on a long road to tinnitus.
My uncle had played center for Villanova back in the leather helmet days and it showed. One day he decided to give me a lesson in nature. A big black snake was hanging out in a peach tree on the property. He was explaining that black snakes were good snakes because they got rid of rodents and they were harmless. To demonstrate this he reached out and touched the black snake’s tail. This black snake, which had apparently slept through that class, turned and slashed my uncle’s forearm to the tune of about a dozen stitches.
A Born Contrarian (age 9). In 1947 my father took a post with the Occupation in Japan. (He was an economist and one of the architects of Japan’s post-war banking system. By the ‘80s he was getting flak for doing that job too well.) My mother and I joined him after he got settled. We went by sea from New York via Panama, San Francisco, and an unscheduled stop in Hawaii. The total sea time was thirty-four sea days and I was seasick for thirty of them, at which point they considered feeding me intravenously.
The four days when I was not seasick occurred when the ship answered a distress call from another ship in trouble in a typhoon. While everyone was sick in their cabins, I would stand in the glassed-in observation deck just under the Captain’s bridge and look out at the storm. The ship would plunge down a monstrous wave and the bow would plow into the side of the next wave. The ship would shudder and I would watch the water flow over the deck and then rush up the superstructure until all I could see out of the windows was foaming green water. There was so much damage to the bow that the ship had to pit stop in Hawaii for repairs. If I had been a little older, I would have been petrified, but at that age I thought it was bloody marvelous!