MY SIDE OF SANITY

Grandpa and the dynamite.  I still laugh every time I think about this.  We were with Daddy in one of his peanut fields blowing up stumps.  You see, if the stumps were removed, more of the land could be used for farming.  Grandpa showed up and Daddy put him to work too.  My cousin and I had to stay on back of the truck.  Solomon, a black man who helped Daddy from time to time, would dig a hole under the stump.  Daddy would wrap and fuse the dynamite and place it in the hole.  Solomon would cover the hole, then get in the driver’s side of the truck.  Daddy would drive off in one truck and Solomon, my cousin and I would wait for Grandpa to light the fuse.  After lighting the fuse, Grandpa would run and sit on the tailgate of the truck and Solomon would take off to our yells of “GO GO GO”.  Sometimes there would be several fuses to light, depending on how many holes had been dug.  Now, I’m not sure if Solomon jumped the gun or if my cousin and I screamed too soon.  Grandpa lit about four fuses, ran to sit on the tailgate and Solomon took off.  Grandpa sat down in the middle of the field with those dynamite fuses blazing away.  Needless to say, even as old as Grandpa was, he didn’t waste any time sitting on the ground.  Quicker than a flash he was up and running.  Of course my cousin and I thought it was the funniest thing we had ever seen.  Grandpa certainly gave Solomon a piece of his mind and my cousin and I got a whipping.  Ever had a whipping in the middle of a peanut field with dynamite going off in the background?

Usually we had a bicycle or two around the farm.  Any bicycle would have probably been pieced together from several other bikes.  One of our favorite games was following the leader on bikes.  We would ride through, around, over or under anything we could find.  You see, the object was to go where no other could follow.  Steps, mud holes, cow manure, briars.  Nothing was off limits.  One day, while riding on the road between our house and our neighbor’s house, we were playing follow the leader.  And I was the leader.  And everyone involved knew I would go anywhere.  During our trip, I spotted a black snake crossing the road.  No one else had seen the snake yet.  This snake was about five or six feet long, but it was no match for me and my bike.  You also have to understand that our bikes usually did not have fenders as they were considered sissy and unnecessary.  So here I go.  Down in a ditch where I knew everyone would follow.  Also, I knew they were watching me and not the road.  When I came out of the ditch, I headed for the snake.  Just as a precaution, just before I hit the snake, I lifted my feet.  The front tire hit the snake.  When the back tire hit the snake, the snake got caught up in the spokes somehow and was flipped up on my back and neck.  Have you ever jumped off a bike going eighty miles an hour onto a red clay dirt road with a snake around you neck?  I did more damage to my body than you could ever imagine trying to get away from that snake.  But.  Oh yeah, there’s a but.  No one else followed me and I won.  And the others didn’t even seem to care about losing.