Cartoons, Hidden Decisions and Tooth Extractions

(Excerpted from The Logical Soul, publ. 2010 and available on Amazon)

My life has been the canvas on which a series of major turning points have been imprinted.  Here are a few more of the ones that led to my own hidden decisions:

Looney Tunes Strikes Again

I don’t know if it was because I had my “third eye” smacked open or what.  Until I was eleven years old, however, I believed that everyone – including myself – were all cartoon characters.

This was understandable, in part since my Saturday morning and after-school world largely consisted of Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Donald Duck, Peter Pan, Superman, and other characters who were invited into my life through TV and comic books.

The good news was that life was fiercely fun, and my grades didn’t seem to be affected except to draw complaints from my teachers who reported I “day-dreamed too much.”  I still made honor roll every year, however, and was usually popular with classmates.

The bad news was that I did things that freaked out my family and friends on a regular basis.  Because life was usually so non-threatening, things like heights, strangers, big dogs, and sharp objects rarely gave me pause to consider the consequences.  I considered my body as part of the playground I was given to play in, that’s all.

One day my friend David shot out my tooth with a BB gun. I picked up the dislodged canine and ran home yelling to my Mom something about getting rich that night from the Tooth Fairy!  Apparently she didn’t find this amusing since my Dad later had a long talk with me about the importance of NOT getting shot in the head with guns.

The other problem with living in a cartoon is that I believed that living things never die or even get hurt.  I learned the error of my thinking one day when David and I spent the afternoon playing with our new kittens – occasionally submerging them in a large bucket of water.  The resulting whipping I got from my Dad made me realize that animals have feelings too.

I respected animals from that day forward. The decision I made after the spanking made sure of that.  In fact, I could not kill any of them for any reason.  My Dad probably realized he created a monster when I started throwing freshly-caught fish back, became a vegetarian, avoided stepping on ants, and screamed to save roaches and rats from the exterminator.