Youth is often a game of survival

You do dumb things when you’re a kid.
It’s part of the process of growing up, and if you are lucky, you grow up in spite of the dumb things you did.
Take the oak tree that used to stand across the street from our house. It’s gone now, but when I was a kid you could count it as a pretty substantial part of the landscape.
So when, about 10 years old, I thought it would be interesting to see what the world would be like if I were blind, it’s not really surprising that the oak tree became a part of the equation.
There I was on a summer day, walking home from what the neighborhood called “Bennett’s Field,” which was just a big backyard, with my eyes tightly closed and my arms stretched out at about a 45 degree angle on each side, the way you would if you were blind-folded and trying to find a playmate.
Trouble is, each arm went on either side of the tree and my face smacked into the oak’s bark.
As I said, you do dumb things when you’re a kid.
Take the time my buddy Don Starr and I decided to have a bicycle race. Don will always be one of my best friends. We started playing together before kindergarten and will get together this month for our 50th high school reunion.
But just because you are friends doesn’t mean everything always goes smoothly. About every other year, Don and I would get sick of one another and fists would start flying. And there was sometimes a measure of competitiveness between us.
That’s how the bike race came about.
I have no idea who suggested it, but I suspect it was more important to me than to Don. He showed more sense than I did.
We were on West North Street, in our neighborhood, and one of us suggested racing to the corner at Middle Street. Fair enough.
We set off. Pedals flying. Bike chains rattling.
But as we neared the intersection — and the stop sign for Middle Street — Don had an attack of good sense. And I did one of those dumb things you do when you are a kid.
Wanting to win so badly I could taste it, I decided to run the stop sign.
We were virtually elbow-to-elbow. If I’d hit the brakes — as Don did — I would have lost. So I didn’t.
I pedaled faster, ran the stop sign, saw Don stop out of the corner of my eye, zipped across Middle Street, then heard the brakes of a pick-up truck and a squeal of tires as a neighborhood driver heading home from work saved my life.
You do dumb things when you’re a kid.
But this one comes back to me now and then.
I imagine a different outcome. I imagine the pick-up truck not stopping. I imagine my crumpled bike. I imagine Don’s reaction when I went flying after the impact. I imagine the grief the pick-up truck driver would have carried to his grave.
Instead, I know from talking to the driver’s family that he made mention of the fact that he’d nearly killed me that day because of my childhood stupidity.
And every day I’m behind the wheel now, I keep in mind one inescapable fact: You do dumb things when you’re a kid.
I’m just glad I survived mine.