The kid next door was trying to put together a tent. He had a couple of buddies with him. He was waving the instructions around and reciting the directions: "Insert part "Q" into part w etc." I was standing in my own backyard with my very old Labrador retriever "Roscoe" who was for his own part reading the instructions from the grass.
The kid with the assembly list suddenly said: "That’s why I was never a Boy Scout!"
"Thank you," I said, softly, smiling with a bouquet of rue in mind. "That’s why I was never a Boy Scout, indeed."
I was never a Boy Scout; and never destined to be a railroad engineer or a shortstop…
Still, back in 1962 I begged my mother to let me join the Cub Scouts.
My mother knew that owing to my blindness I was going to have an uphill struggle and accordingly she also joined the Cub Scouts as a "Den Mother". She probably figured that in this way she could foster activities that I might be able to do. She also knew that I had already been the target of bullies who had taken it upon themselves to hurl insults at me because I couldn’t see. I think she imagined she could control the drama if she was the designated mother of us all.
We made our own popsicles with Dixie cups and we dunked for apples. We made "wampum" belts with Indian beads. We sang songs about bears. We played harmonicas. We wore little blue uniforms and we went to assemblies where we received cloth badges that our mothers would sew onto our shirts.
In short: it was terrible.
Pretty soon we were begging my mother to just let us go out into the woods.
My mother had run out of activities that I could do and she was tired of us all. She gave us her blessing. And we were gone.
We ruined our uniforms by crawling through the trees and climbing rocks. We threw pine cones and pretended they were hand grenades and we were deep inside Nazi territory.
When the other mothers came to pick up their sons they saw one boy who was missing a shirt sleeve. Another had lost his epaulets. Several had torn pants. One kid was minus a shoe. We were covered in pine pitch and dirt. We were sweaty and we stank. We were ecstatic. We were still shooting each other with sticks.
Of course those were expensive uniforms and in those days you had to order them from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and it took several weeks to assemble the whole getup and we had managed to lose our kerchiefs and the little gold rings shaped like wolves that held the kerchiefs in place and one of us had thrown away his expensive belt by pretending it was a flame thrower and not one of us still had his little hat—we had collectively burned a huge assortment of our expensive military regalia.
That was the end of Cub scouts. My mother was summarily dismissed. But I was for one brief dazzling moment on the frontline of boyhood without bullies or tedious rules.
Thanks Mom!
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 