Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy, while visiting his Grandpa and Grandma Medvee in Quartz Hill, California, he snuck out into their garage which was full of all kinds of things he was not supposed to touch: big things, sharp things, and very oily, oily things. Everything was dark and strange and a little bit scary. But what Dougie liked best when he was four years old was climbing up on ladders or stepstools or anything not too heavy to drag across the concrete floor to get at one of Grandpa's big oily orange caps, and his gigantic stiff leather gloves that flared out past Dougie's elbows. Wearing these, and slipping into a pair of Grandpa's boots, Dougie became a brave knight in search and seek of danger and adventure.
He ventured out into the big backyard where Grandpa's big junk pile rose up like the ruins of castles. Step by plodding step, he plodded like a knight in full armor, heavy step by heavy step.Then he heard what he sought, the desperate call for help. He began to run in his floppy boots and he clenched his fists in his mighty gauntlets, and the massive greasy cap bounced over his face just the way a knight's visor must clamp down upon a knight's face. From far away came the sound of a damsel in distress crying for help, calling for the aid of a brave knight!And at a distance, the Knight Dougie caught sight of two roguish knaves torturing what must be a sheep! So it was not a girl, but a poor lamb, and soon, within hailing distance, he entreated the two knaves to cease and desist."Leave that sheep alone!" Papa as a little boy shouted.The two boys, each in the neighborhood of ten or eleven years of age, stared for a second at the ridiculous little boy in the greasy oily orange cap and the absurd workman's gloves, and the preposterous old construction boots, and then they laughed. And they laughed loud and slapped their knees. They closed their eyes and they bellowed laughter.The little boy, the Knight in Grandpa's cap, didn't think it was at all funny. Especially for the poor sheep, rolling about on the ground making pitiable noises that sounded like a dog in pain."You better leave that sheep alone," little Papa told them again, coming very close to them, holding up his little hands made big in his Grandpa's gloves."That's not a sheep, dummy!" one of the big boys said, not laughing any longer. He reached out and pushed the brave knight, and pushed him hard.Dougie stumbled backward, tripped over his preposterous boots, and sat down hard on the dirt. That is not what he had imagined would happen. When brave knights helped weak souls, they were triumphant. They were strong. Big, mean boys never knocked them down. At least that's the way it usually worked in fairytales.So he got up, losing the boots in the process and one of the gloves as well."He's our dog, stupid," the other boy said, "and we can do whatever we want with him.""Yeah," said the first big boy. "We're just playing. We're throwing him in a sticker patch.""Let him go!" Dougie told the boys. He wasn't afraid of them. He didn't care if they were bigger, or it there were two of them and one of him."Okay," said the first boy, the bigger boy of the two. "We'll let him go. But we're gonna play with YOU."And they grabbed him and wrestled with him, and even though Papa as a little boy was very strong for four years of age, boys that are nine and ten (even if they aren't strong boys for their size and age) are much, much stronger than even the strongest of four-year-old boys. And two big boys are almost always much stronger than one small boy.Soon one of the boys held the brave knight by his wrists, and the other boy held him by his ankles, and they swung him up, and they swung him down. The world blurred. The light seemed to fade. And first when they began to swing him, Dougie called for help, and then after the first swing up into the air he began to scream, but after they had swung him three times he could not breathe, not even to produce a scream.When they released him, he flew high into the air and came down tumbling into a lot of low-lying grasses in sandy dirt.At first he could not move because the breath was knocked out of him. As his lungs finally filled with breath so too did the knight's hearing return, and he heard the laughing big boys moving farther and farther away. Finally, he had to move, because the desert sand was very hot, but when he finally moved, he found it was almost impossible to move, because he soon discovered through experience the exact and literal definition of a sticker patch.Every time he moved, he got stickers in his hands. Or on his knees. Goathead thorns and burrs and twirly stickers and every manner of poking thing that ever grew on the ground. He sat and sobbed in the stickers, afraid to move, because every time he moved he got more and more stickers, they were in his hair, poking his face, sticking out of his pants and all over his arms. After a long time of lying in the hot desert sun, getting burned by the hot sand, he struggled up out of the sticker patch and hobbled up the hill toward his Grandma and Grandpa's house, weeping all the way.When his Grandpa saw him crying, he bellowed: "For crying out loud! Why are you crying!"When Dougie tried to tell him, through his tears, about the sheep and the mean boys and the sticker patch, Grandpa just yelled at him some more. You shouldn't be fighting with kids. You shouldn't mess with older boys, especially where there are more than one, and STOP CRYING! But the more Grandpa yelled, the more Dougie wept.It's not that Grandpa was unloving, or terribly mean. It's just that sometimes when you love someone you can't bear it when they get hurt, and you might thunder and lightning to chase away the pain. Finally, Grandpa helped remove all the stickers and thorns and burrs, and then he carried his grandson Dougie up to the house.Sadly, this would prove to be a pattern in Dougie's life, all through his life really, at every stage (except that big strong Grandpa wouldn't always be there to pick him up and pluck out the thorns). He didn't seem to be able to learn that you shouldn't go against the odds, or that when you tried to save someone from the sticker patch, that's where you often were tossed. It's not that he enjoys losing battles, or picking stickers out of his skin; it just seems to be the way he was made, as he grew up to be a knight in dented armor.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
