Throwing Rocks

I think we were about 6 years and 8 years old respectively.  Me and my older brother (uncle Phil) were out playing in the yard of our childhood home on a cool fall day.  There were not a lot of kids our age in the neighborhood so we played together a lot.

At some point we decided to get a softball sized rock from the yard and play catch with it.  Not sure why a rock was a better idea than the actual kickballs, softballs, and footballs that we had.  It will remain one of those mysteries of how the brain of a 6 year works.

We lobbed the rock underhanded to each other and we started to move further and further apart on a dare.  After a couple of minutes of uneventful catch, we decide to increase the degree of difficulty and make it a higher stakes game of catch.  In a bit of reasoning that is hard to explain (even today), we decided to move up on the concrete pad and play catch in in front of the sliding glass door.

I am not sure who threw it too hard first but we went from lobbing the rock to throwing it like a baseball in no time at all.  We were both getting mad at each other but we just could not stop.  Neither one of us wanted to be the first one to walk away from a really stupid game of catch.

When I saw my brother really start to wind up I decided to teach him a lesson and jumped out of the way.

I cannot explain the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw both my mom and dad looking at the hole and then looking at me and my brother.  We were standing perfectly still looking at the hole and then looking at them waiting for them to say something.

I had worked it all out in my head before I jumped out of the way,  If I did not throw the rock, I could not be punished for it.  I was clearly the victim here.  Both of my parents worked hard, did not occur to me in any way that in a family of 5, there was not a budget for replacing sliding glass doors.

When my mom sat me down across from her and Dad at the kitchen table and asked me what I was thinking, I could only hang my head.  It was hard to look at her I felt like a complete idiot.  More so because although I never did fess up to it, I was the one who jumped out of the way on purpose.  I was sent up to my room and I was relieved.  It was way easier to get punished that to try and explain myself.

So there are a couple of things for you here.

-Don't throw rocks for the hell of it.
-Rock catching contests are bad idea's in any forms,
-Walk away from a rock catching contest even if you were not the last one to throw it back as hard as it was thrown to you.
-Planning to be the victim or trying to make someone pay by being the victim is a very bad idea.
-Blind anger will always cloud your judgment.
-Never hide behind a punishment.
-Always try to make your mom proud
Love Dad.