A Short Story About Chance, Luck and Kharma-Part 2

The games boys will play.

As youngsters growing up in Hanover, we would play cowboys and indians or war an awful lot. The first stages were innocent and involved a great deal of pretending. That progressed into using tomatoes and other garden produce raided from neighborhood gardens, which by the way, makes a lot of angry neighbors. After someone got smacked a little hard it escalated to dirt clods and rock throwing.

Then one of the guys suggested we use our BB guns. That went fine until one day when Bill Whalen got his eye put out. We reasoned it was all Becky's fault. She was Pat Carter's little sister. Someone had forgotten to tell her not to shoot anyone above the belt line. That was one our main rules. We thought it was humorous to blast someone in the lower extrimaties. Anyway we transferred the blame to her. After all wasn't it always girls who were spoiling our fun.

In highschool someone got the bright idea that we graduated to more serious fun. We all met out at the old Jennings farmstead. It had a bunch of barns, sheds and an old farmhouse. This time we brought our shotguns and boxes of birdshot. At first we would just try to get close and not hit anyone. Next thing we know Dickie Collins is hit in the side of the face and neck with birshot. Dickie was bleeding pretty good and complaining about the pain. "Oh come on Dickie, it can't be that bad, It's just birdshot," said Butch. Any way we came up with a story about shooting skeet and said it was an accident. His parents bought the story and it became our dirty little secret.

It's amazing that none of us at that time could come to the realization that when you do stupid things, bad things will usually happen. Most of my life I have thought that the word "Kharma" was just something the Hippys pulled out of thier cosmos,but, more on this later.

Anyway, that episode at the Jennings farmstead, ended our boys games. We were now ready for adulthood and the games that they play.

Fiction ? By X.