The Limits of My Stupidity

We were at our son Andy’s after Thanksgiving.  A couple other sons were there.  Travis had brought in his four kids and JB his two so there were eight of our 12 grandkids in attendance.  Needless to say, there was plenty of excitement.

I looked over at the doorway between the dining room and mud room.  Andy had installed one of those child-proof gates to keep his one-year-old daughter, Hallie, from getting through to the dangerous steps.

Travis’s two-year-old daughter, Izzy, unaware that the gate was child-proof, was standing on the bottom rail of the gate, which she had unlatched, and was using the swinging gate like a playground ride, swinging it open and closed with a big smile on her face.

She reminded me of her uncles…and me.

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A couple years back one of our cabinet doors gave up the ghost.  The door was just as well constructed as all the others, but it had the misfortune to be underneath the sink, exactly in the right place for our six boys to use it for a stepping stool when they wanted a drink of water.

It was so much easier to run across the kitchen and leap into the air, gripping the top of the cabinet door with their toes just long enough to lean on the edge of the sink, than it would have been to move the stepping stool that I had made for just that purpose.

I guess I can’t really complain; they inherited that troublesome resourcefulness from me.

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When I was a youngster our white refrigerator stood against the west wall of our kitchen.  This was in the days when the freezer compartment was just barely big enough for three ice trays and a quart of ice cream.  Thus, it didn’t warrant its own separate door.

Instead, the fridge stood about five feet tall and three feet wide and around two feet deep, with one door the full height and breadth of the machine that had to be opened to lend access to the old glass orange juice bottle we kept full of chilled water.

I would open the door, remove the bottle, and place it on the nearby counter.  Then I’d retrieve a clean cup from the cabinet, fill it, and take a drink.  After that I’d put the cup in the sink, top off the bottle, and return it to the fridge.

I repeated this process every time I wanted a drink…if Mom was in the room…and watching.

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If my poor, long-suffering mother was out of sight, I engaged a totally different technique.  I’d approach the appliance and give its big handle the heave required to release the latch and magnetic seal to start the door opening.  Then I’d reach up and grab the top of the door with one or both hands, lift my feet, and swing outward with it.  It was a little bit of exhilaration in an otherwise dull life.

At least for a while.

Oh, and I didn’t refill the jug either.

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I don’t know if I gained too much weight or if something heavy was taken out of the fridge, or what, but one day disaster struck and took all the fun out of the activity.

That day, when I lifted my feet and the door swung open the refrigerator tipped forward.  I had visions of being found, crushed beneath the massive appliance.  As it turns out, that might have been better than what actually did happen.  Instead, the corner of the door jammed against the floor and propped the ice box up at a lean.  It may have prevented my death but it allowed food, bottles, and ice to slide outward and off the shelves. 

The crashing of all that food onto the floor got Mom’s attention.  She flew into the room and exploded.  The only other time I remember ever seeing her that angry was…well, I don’t think I ever saw her get quite that mad.

Luckily, I made it out the screen door to safety before Mom was able to land more than a couple blows and I was quick enough to evade her grasp, so I survived.

Another time I was even more lucky. 

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There was a cupboard next to the stove, which was on the south wall of the kitchen.  The sink was on the east wall with cabinets filling the rest of the wall.  That gave us lots of counter space and lots of cabinets.  Between the cabinets on the east wall and the ones on the south there was a gap of about two feet that allowed the doors on the east cabinet to open wide.  It also allowed an acrobatic preteen with serious Tarzan aspirations to grab the handles on upper cabinet doors while standing in the gap, then do a pull-up and sit his little hiney on the cabinet beside the stove.  Sitting there gave me unfettered access to the upper cabinet that housed the cereal bowls.

It worked pretty well…for a while.

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One morning I wanted Cap’n Crunch for breakfast.  I was doing my “chin-up on the corner cabinet trick” when the nails holding the cupboard safely attached to the wall finally lost their last tenuous fraction of an inch of grip and pulled loose from the wall.  To this day I don’t know how I was able to move quicker than gravity pulled the cabinet full of thick, heave crockery bowls down, but I dropped to the floor and into the gap.  For some reason the falling cabinet pivoted as it fell.  Whereas it should have smashed down onto my head, it turned mid-fall and bounced off the counter, flipping and throwing plastic bowls and shards of glass and porcelain all over the kitchen.  I still, to this day, feel the cabinet brushing my shoulder and arm as it fell, but I was miraculously unharmed.  No cuts, scratches, or bruises at all.

I was physically uninjured, but psychologically scared, as in scared…to…death!  I could hear Mom’s running footsteps and remembered the beating I narrowly avoided after the refrigerator fiasco?

Yeah.  There was no escape this time.  The cupboard had me blocked into the corner.

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Once again the crash of glass and porcelain smashing onto the floor brought Mom rushing into the room.  Only this time she wasn’t mad.

She leaped to grab me before I could even think about escaping to safety.  “Are you OK?  Did it hurt you?”

I might have been stupid enough to pull the cabinet down on me after nearly being crushed by a refrigerator I’d pulled over on myself, but I wasn’t so simple as to miss this opportunity.

I gasped as if holding back tears of fear and pain.  Rubbing my arm I said weakly, “I…I think I’m OK.”

You see, there’s a limit to even MY stupidity.

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Sorry Mom.  I guess your grandsons inherited their stupidity from me.

But wait, many, many years ago I remember Uncle Pat (Mom’s brother) telling a story about how he had torn the toenail off one of his big toes by swinging on the garden gate like a piece of playground equipment.

So, OK, if we didn’t exactly inherit that tendency directly from Mom, it definitely runs in the genes…your genes Mom.

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