Touching Memories of Rambo

Rehnquist dead. Two openings on the Supreme Court. Clean up likely to start in New Orleans. South Koreans inventing a silicon chip replacement (don't think Mott insulators are interesting - if they generate less heat and you work for or use services by a large company, you're affected). Rather than focus on nationally and globally altering issues, I'm going to discuss the fact that I had to dig through my old wooden chest in the bedroom yesterday looking for my wife's grandfather's WWII field notes. I didn't find the field notes, but the box contains every single piece of crap that anyone ever felt I should have that wasn't a Christmas- or birthday-type present: notes from old girlfriends, pictures, awards, writing, et al. Two of the things near the top made me laugh, so I'm posting pictures and explanations.

Item one: a broken baseball bat handle with the rest of the bat burnt off. This is the handle of my favorite bat as a kid, the one I always used when playing ball in my yard and perhaps the one that once impacted with my brother's face while he was standing behind me, resulting in a black eye so bad that it actually impacted vision in his other eye while the swelling was underway - an impact so loud my mother came running out of the house to see about the noise. It may have also been the bat I used to hit fly balls to my brother in the evening, resulting in his smashed nose when the ball hit him in the face instead of the glove. At one point, it developed a serious fracture along one side (as well as the chipped handle), the sort where a two foot+ long sliver of wood sort of cuts loose from the side, but you really only see the damage when you hit a ball hard enough, and then it snaps out and back and the bat vibrates like you're hitting cement with a metal bar. I loved the bat, so I continued to use it despite its wounds. My father, perhaps feeling that having a son with a large wooden sliver in his chest lying in the front ten wouldn't go down well with his wife or neighbors, relegated it to the burning pit in the back yard when I wasn't looking. I was distraught, but managed to claim a chunk of it to remind myself of our sweet times together.



I'm pretty sure this rubber Rambo figure is from Kyle - though it could be from my friend Ben - perhaps one of them remembers, they often had the same taste in stpuid gifts, as did I - just one of the things that binds friends together no doubt. He's wonderfully tacky. I do remember sticking a pencil end in one of the two pencil eraser-shaped holes in his back (though there's no obvious reason for them - they look like perhaps they're there so he can be stuck to other toys with plastic protrubances) and making him do little dances in class, like the potato scene in Benny and Joon, but not quite so lame, and much more irritating for my teachers.