A stick!
I read someone's Blog a while ago postulating (another $5 word floating around my brain and which I wonder if I've used in the correct context) that Twitter & Facebook have killed Blogging. After all, it's so much easier to just type up a sentence or two or some random thought and hit Publish, than it is to sit down and put pen to paper (figuratively if not literally) and generate a Blog post. And while I have been known to post Youtube videos I'd rather not devolve into doing that and nothing more, so this post is more than just a funny cartoon and a joke :)
Our daughter has been taking swimming lessons at a local Rec Center adjacent to a park with a large expanse of reasonably open grassland. We also found the boomerang we bought for my son when we were last in Australia, a couple of years ago now, which we'd never actually thrown. Boomerangs require a lot of room to throw, more than you might think. Like a good-sized Baseball diamond area, and of course no trees. This park had trees but also had a large enough grassy area that I thought we could get away with throwing the boomerang, assuming there were no people around. The park does have swings and a jungle gym but they're both set off to one side so the large grassy area is usually fairly free of bodies. And with the park being on a slight hill it's not conducive to soccer or other ball games, so we had our open, body-free area.
The boy couldn't get the hang of flicking the boomerang as he threw it so instead of spinning through the air it fluttered around a bit then fell to the ground about 20-30 feet away. Meanwhile, I was trying not to throw the boomerang too high or too hard, because there were several large trees surrounding the grassland and I didn't want the boomerang to end up in one of them. So the boy's throws landed 20-30 feet in front of us, while my throws left the boomerang with insufficient altitude to complete its arc and make the return trip, requiring us to walk to the other side of the park to resume our throwing. There I'd let the boy make several fluttering throws, then I'd launch the boomerang only to see it fall to earth and back to the other side we'd go.
After several throws and near misses with trees the inevitable inevitably happened.
No. Nobody got clocked by the boomerang. After one of my slightly more exuberant throws the boomerang flew into a tree...and didn't come down.
Being on the other side of the park meant that while we knew which tree the boomerang had entered, we weren't sure which set of branches was holding it prisoner, and so the wife found us staring up into the tree, walking back and forth, trying to spot a brown boomerang among brown branches. We did eventually find it but that was only half the battle; We still had to get it back down.
Fortunately there was a large, softball-sized rock near the base of the tree (a very out-of-place rock. I'm not even sure why it was there, but it was, and it served our purpose well) and I began making underarm lobs which initially didn't go high enough (it was a heavy rock, okay?) then didn't strike the right branches, then hit the right ones but still failed to dislodge the boomerang. A couple of kids playing nearby were watching with feigned disinterest, possibly hoping we'd give up and leave so they could try their luck. Finders keepers, right?
Had I been in Australia where a replacement boomerang was readily available I may have just done that and endured the tearful ride to the closest souvenir or toy shop (you can get cheap, plastic boomerangs in Aussie toy shops which are almost better than the real thing. NERF™ boomerangs. I'm just saying.) But we were in suburban Los Angeles and boomerangs are hard to come by here so the rock went up and the rock came down and then it went back up again. Until finally it came back down and the boomerang came down with it, and Dad got to be the hero in his son's eyes for one more afternoon.
He's 9 years old and waking up to the way the world really is, the magic is fading and Santa's sleigh bell doesn't ring for him anymore. As the years pass by and my strength fades those heroic acts will become fewer and further between, but for now, a rock thrown into a tree still does the trick. For now.
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5 comments:
One of my mother's oldest friends lives in Australia. She brought a boomerang to me from there when I was about 9ish, and we spent a couple of hours trying to get it to work. My mother threw out her shoulder in the effort, and it's never been the same.
It turns out that the dang thing is a hunting boomerang, meant only for accurate throwing, *not* for round trips.
So my dear mother hurt herself for no good reason, and has paid for it for decades.
Yes, I still remember that, and I still feel bad. But I know she loves me.
Yeah, the Hunting Boomerangs were designed to travel in a straight line, much like throwing a spear (which they also used), and were heavier than the returning kind. They needed to be, if you were to incapacitate (or kill) your target.
The cunning Aussie Aboriginals also invented what we white folks now refer to as a Woomera, being a short piece of wood with a hook on one end (to 'hook' into the notched end of the spear) which artificially extended the length of their arm and allowed the spear to be thrown with horrifying force over a much greater distance.
Nerf boomerang? NERF BOOMERANG??? Nerf Boomerang did NOT work. At least not for me. It may have been the single toy disppointment of my formative years.
Cool story, though I definitely someone was about to get clocked.
Considering I've spent many, many hours throwing boomerangs of different shapes, sizes & compositions (but no stainless steel boomerangs a la Mad Max ;) only once did I ever manage to get a boomerang to make a full circuit and return to me...didn't catch it though ;)
Then again we also lived on the edge of town so there were huge tracts of land over our back fence where I could practice everything from golf to archery to boomerang throwing :)
He's 9 years old and waking up to the way the world really is, the magic is fading and Santa's sleigh bell doesn't ring for him anymore.
That is my favorite line of this whole post.
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