LETTERS FROM HOME: STICKS AND STONES: THE KAMIKAZE GAMES BOYS PLAY

June 1, 2000

Dear Julie,

A recent rock throwing incident in the neighborhood was a reminder that children, no matter how well their parents think they know them, have secret lives.

I liked to throw rocks, too. In my neighborhood, it was how 5-year-old boys fought. Fortunately, we rarely hit what we were aiming at, but occasionally accidents happened. In one rock fight between groups of kids, I beaned a boy who lived on the corner on the back side of the block. His brothers and sisters shunned me afterward. All I remember about the aftermath is them passing around a box of Sugar Smacks one day and refusing to let me have any. The next thing I knew the family had moved to California.

A few years older and living in a new neighborhood, the fights graduated to spears. We pulled saplings out of the ground in a nearby wood and sharpened them with the pocket knife the Buckner-Ragsdale basement store gave out when you bought a pair of Tuf-Nut jeans. This was a male rite of passage, the year you were old enough to get your Tuf-Nut pocket knife.

Most of these were playful fights, more like dramatizations of scenes we'd seen in movies. One side would advance, filling the air with spears while the other side wisely fell back out of striking distance. Then the roles reversed.

How unbelievably fortunate that to my recollection no one was permanently injured in these jousts. Nor in the kamikaze games of mumbletypeg. Nor in the contests to see who could throw himself off a cliff the farthest.

I came close to getting seriously injured only once. My friend Danny Davidson had a dart gun with rubber tipped darts he'd inventively customized by adding straight pins, the better to stick in the target. I think he was hunting grasshoppers. But one day while we were sitting in his front yard the gun went off unexpectedly and I suddenly felt a prickly sensation in the middle of my forehead. The look of horrified mirth in Danny's eyes told me I'd been skewered. The wimp even made me pull it out.

Most if not all of this was and is a secret to my parents, of course. Moms worry enough as it is.

Such behavior amazes DC. She and her sisters never threw rocks or foolishly endangered herself or others as a little girl, although there was a Girl Scout day camp incident with a hatchet. And they did make her brother eat birdseed.

My guess is that since little girls were not allowed to sweat back then much less demonstrate aggression physically, they did it in more culturally acceptable ways: Psychological terrorism.

But nothing is inconsequential to a child. It isn't to adults either, though we pretend otherwise. The abuse, the sharp-edged words all register, just below our implacable surfaces.

As an adult I eventually made a realization: That as a child I'd concluded the family on the corner moved to California to get away from me. A 5-year-old doesn't know what a California is but I had made the connection that California was a place you went to get away. Naturally, I was living in California at the time this realization came.

I realized I still felt guilty about hitting that boy with a rock all those years ago. I still wonder how he felt. I saw how experiences that could seem unimportant to everyone else had helped form my personality.

If it seems violent boys have the country's schools under siege, I'm not sure the previous generation was any less aggressively explosive. But the heroes in our movies and on our television shows settled disputes with their fists instead of with laser cannons and Uzis. Technology has ratcheted up the body count.

For awhile, we believed we'd be safer if we developed weapons so destructive that nobody would be crazy enough to use them. But we weren't safe, just scared, like children afraid of the bogeyman.

Children don't understand the damage a gun or a rock can do, to others and to themselves. One of our jobs as adults who have survived childhood is to protect them, so I snitched on the rock thrower to his mother, breaking boyhood's cardinal rule. I hope he understands that manhood has rules, too.

I still like to throw rocks. Standing on the banks of the Castor River at DC's family cabin, I skim flat stones across the water. After a few skips, some disappear below the surface and some land on the other side.

Love, Sam