Parents, Don’t Let Your Kids Read This!

Let me tell you a little story about my childhood deviousness.

I wasn’t just bad as a kid, I was cunningly bad. I’d figure out ways to get others to do the dirty work for me and I enjoyed the results vicariously while they’d get caught and punished.

Case in point: the picture window I (through my younger brother) broke twice when I was five years old.

We lived in a house with a huge picture window in the living room. The living room was home to a black-and-white hand-me-down TV set with a loose dial. It was a time before remote control TV sets, and even color TVs were rare then. My brother and I probably got more amusement from taking the dial off the set and putting it back on than from actually watching TV.

One day, I decided to push the amusement we got from the removable dial beyond our normal limits.

I talked my brother into throwing the dial through the picture window.

Lucky for me, but not so lucky for my parents, he obliged. The window shattered into what seemed a million shards and slivers of glass, all over the floor of the living room and our front porch.

Our parents came running to see what had happened. They found my brother and me laughing hysterically.

“What happened?” my father demanded.

“Tommy threw the TV dial through the window!” I said between peals of laughter.

Tommy was only three years old so my father didn’t really say anything. But I’m sure he suspected I had put my brother up to doing this; he shot me a dirty look that told me as much.

My father had a window shop come in to replace the window and clean up the broken glass. They were done quickly and Tommy and I went back to watching TV. My poor father, who worked two shifts at a steel mill, went back to sleep.

A half hour later or so, I was feeling mischievous again. I pulled the dial off the TV set and dared Tommy to throw it through the window again.

Again, he did it. Again, the window was shattered. Again, my father woke up, this time angry as all get out.

And again, I blamed Tommy who got out of trouble because he was too young.

Years later, my father told me the window shop folks had actually took pity on him and replaced the second window at no cost. And he said he knew all along that I had talked Tommy into doing it.

After all this time, I’ve never had the courage to ask him why I didn’t get into trouble if he knew I was behind it. I just hope he forgets all about it when he writes his will.