As children do, we naturally found different amusing ways of entertaining ourselves using the resources we had available to us at the time. One fine Oregon morning, okay it may have been afternoon or possibly evening but I’m 73.2% sure it wasn’t evening. Anyway, One fine Oregon morning in the great state of Oregon, the Fennimore boys, roughly ages 8,6,4, and 22, were trying to entertain ourselves and we discovered that jumping from the top bunk bed to the floor was a lot of fun. It generated an especially lurid sound when we landed so we decided to cushion the landing. We pulled a mattress off the top bunk and decided that we could easily jump on it now because we had a plush cushion. These mattresses weren’t exactly top notch quality. We could easily pinch them with our index finger and thumb and compress it down to about a half an inch thick. If you dropped a marble from shoulder height, shoulder height as in at our age back then shoulder height, and the marble would hit the floor through the mattress.
We’re jumping onto these things from a bunk maybe 4.5 feet high onto this lush cushion we have rigged up. Tony, Ken, Gabe and I are jumping with minimal pause at the top, basically enough time for the previous person to clear and that’s about it. Greg decides to join in the fun. He gets in line and when he gets to the top bunk, his mind begins to encase the event he is about to embark on.
He is on the top bunk and stands there as still as if he were the one who turned back to see Gomorrah (biblical thingy, the person turned to a statue of stone because she turned back to look at the town. No…nothing? It’s okay, it’s not that well known of a story, there are a few people that know it but it’s really hit and miss. Kinda like the story about David (not the Goliath David) and the Zombies. Even fewer people know that one, it’s a tragedy. Honestly, I don’t understand why people don’t know these stories or if they do you never hear about them when people are discussing the bible, it makes no sense to me. Anyway, David’s best friend accidently spills this beaker of toxic fumes that turns people into flesh eating cyborgs (oh ya they are ninja, cyborg zombies, awesomeness, I’m surprised you haven’t heard this story. It’s crazy what people have and haven’t heard) zombies that begin to terrorize Vietnam, then he gets angry and starts to fight them developing this new martial art he names, Muy Thai (which is Korean for Zombie Stopper), and he has this ninja, cyborg, zombie pinned down and…oh crap the original story! Long story short, David wins by freeing King Arthur.) and Greg won’t jump. We start to get impatient and start offering assistance. Being next in line, I offer him a little extra assistance and push him off the bed onto this lavish mattress.
He lands and lets out this blood curdling scream when he lands and we now are the salt statues. Here is our around 2 year old brother screaming after I push him off the bed. We all take off running outside to make it seem like we did nothing wrong. Our loving father is sitting at the dining room table doing taxes, or something grown uppy, and hears the crying after the dust settled from the rest of us leaving. He lets Greg cry for a while because let’s face it, kids cry for no reason. After a few minutes of Greg crying, he realizes that this cry is a little different than the normal ones. He calls up to Greg asking him to come down so he can see what happened and punish accordingly thinking this is a run of the mill tiny scratch that toddlers typically react this way to.
2 year old Greg, limps down the stairs quite slowly and makes it to the dining room. We are talking around 24 stairs. Our dad realizes that he is a little pale and that this is no ordinary scrape/bruise. Something is wrong with him. It turns out that after I pushed him, Greg wasn’t watching how we landed and landed the wrong way (HIS fault not mine) and broke his leg when he was 2 years old and was in a cast for some time.
We still argue to this day whether the push to clear our takeoff platform was justifiable or not. Since this is my story, COMPLETELY justifiable. He shouldn’t have looked before he leaped. Lesson learned.
-Paddy, on special request from Kuwait
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