Give Peace A Chance

I was the unwitting victim in a war that I wasn't even fighting today. I was blithely walking along, minding my own business, alone in my own little world, when !!!BLAM!!! Something hard hit me right in the top of the head. Oh Lord! I'm HIT! Medic!

Since I thought I was all sole alone in the 'hood, I couldn't imagine what it was. My first thought was falling birds but I didn't see anything around. Y'all know that I am rarely at a loss for words, but I'll admit, I stood there, stunned, for longer than I'd like to admit, trying to process this new information in my life. Then I heard it.... a small child's voice in the stillness;

"Oh Crap...I think I just hit an old lady with a snowball."

I look in that direction and see two boys cleverly concealed in snow forts. We don't have good snowball making snow so the forts were mostly made out of slushy ice chunks that the snowplow deposited at the end of their dooryard. As was their ammo... I though the dead bird felt awfully hard and cold.

There they stood, frozen in place, staring at me. My first inclination was to fall to the ground 'dead' to see what they'd do, but it was too cold and wet. The horrified looks on their faces at the prospect that they had just 'iced' a 'old lady' made me laugh and once I did, I lost any kind of advantage. They breathed a heavy sigh of relief but neither one of them apologized. They just laid down their arms and ran around the back side of the house as fast as their little legs could go. All this time, Ben is staring off into space, eyes glazed over, eating snow. He LOVES to eat snow, but I think it gave him brain freeze because he didn't even look at the kids and he do so loves him some little kids to smooch on.

For a small boy, he had a wicked arm on him, that one. I have a marble sized lump and tender spot up there tonight. The whole experience was probably a cosmic payback for the time when I was a sophomore in high school and overshot my own target and hit the principal in the head with a snowball. That one was lightly packed though and exploded into snowdust upon impact with the top of his bald dome. [He was a thin man and used to wear cream-colored turtlenecks all the time. He looked for all the world like a roll-on deodorant...] It was a thing of beauty to behold, even if I wasn't aiming for him, and worth the scolding I got for it.

So let this be a lesson to all. I do these experiments so you don't have to. Take from it what you will. War isn't the answer. What goes around comes around. Karma's a bitch. Give peace a chance.