MEMORIES PT27

Mom used to say about Dad that you could take the boy out of the country
but you can’t take the country out of the boy. This usually came after he’d
said or done something that would leave her shaking her head. But there
were two incidents that happened that more than proved she was right.

The first was right after we moved into Abington and our friendly neighborhood
teenagers tried the old “flaming cow patty” trick.(It may go by other names
elsewhere, but that’s the least offensive one I can come up with at the
moment. This trick is so old t I think Neanderthals played it on CroMagnon.
Man. Basically it involves putting the end product of bovine digestion into a
paper bag, placing the bag outside a door, setting it on fire and then ringing
the doorbell. The pranksters run and hide and watch to see if the victim tries
to put out the “fire” by stomping on it. The kids on this night probably thought
that because we’d moved to Abington from Boston that Dad wouldn’t know
any better. So they did the dirty deed and hid under a nearby tree to watch the
fun.

Dad came to the door, looked down, then went over to our fireplace in the living
room and got the small ash shovel beside the fireplace and used it to scoop up
the flaming bag. Then he flung the bag across the yard towards where he could
here those kids laughing.  They never tried that trick again,

The second incident happened a few years later. There were still some farms in
town in West Abington along Hancock St. One night Mom & Dad were coming
home from some function at the Knights of Columbus Hall when a horse came
out onto the road in front of them. Now this was in the age before cell phones.
They couldn’t call the police, so Dad somehow got a rope on the animal, got into
the car on the passenger side and had Mom drive slowly all the way across town
to the police station with the horse trotting alongside the car!

((358 Words))

Written for the Family History Writing Challenge.