The Invention of Sabotage

The old Dutch door to our kitchen’s been shut in attempt to keep the living room warm with a space heater but it’s a real drag opening up the top half to reach inside and flip the lever to swing the bottom half open—the bathroom is through the kitchen. The door is extremely plain and very old; no wooden crossbars that resemble a barn (thank god), and the old varnish has crackled and separated into a rough beaded texture as has all the wood trim here, being built in 1897. So one evening Brigham says “Pull the fishing line” as I attempt to open the latch yet again. I stood back baffled and finally spotted a very thin invisible line looped from a straight pin that had been stuck in the wood near the top of the frame. I pulled it and the entire door swung open at once…YEAH! This is what I’m talkin ‘bout! Using the old noggin. Problem solving. Innovation. His friend Jesse came over later and spent quite some time finding the line and following it up to the pin, over the top to the other side, by another straight pin and down to the latch where it was tightly tied. Very cool, simple, and useful. Yes, the human race is lazy.

On TV, I saw a few instances of items made by felons—styrofoam cups melted/heated into hardened shivs, newspaper spears (the whole reason I don’t use flour and water for paper mache is that it dries rock hard and is nearly impossible to scrape off a table once its cemented itself on), and even a handmade gun from metal and JB Weld.

When Brig was a 5th grader, we’d been in field collecting monarch and other caterpillars and found a heavy metal serrated triangle to bring home with our jar of creatures. I heard him out later…ransacking scrap wood and hammering away…Viola! Fishing line, a wooden brace, and a falling triangle—all set to guillotine the head off a grasshopper. The contraption worked—it would also cut a banana and hard grapes (not that we ate them after insect murder), but it would not cut into the skin of your finger, thus making it marketable and safe for youth everywhere who felt the need for pest control or to provide mother with help in the kitchen(not). I believe the remains of this device reside in the basement, minus the blade since I always got a kick out of it…

Boys and their toys. Older brother was into technical and electrical aspects…as a grade schooler rigging the computer so that any pics that mom saved would disappear in 24 hours and having it play an annoying little song if I typed in certain words. Tiny lights on the desk nearby that would light up as keys were pressed; then the old broken Nintendos that were converted to a computer games with the use of a soldering iron and other things that I can’t recall…then using the soldering iron on the back of ID cards trying to use them in pop machines for a free one… ”That’s a felony to add money to a card illegally!” Luckily that trick never got above 3cents thank god, or him and the friends got tired of failure and went on to write more Doom levels, with a dry-erase board and stolen calc book. There were always language books all over and then little snippets of other games too (‘mom, can you draw the outline of an aircraft carrier here?’) or ‘Watch my character run and jump!’ The boys waited until ‘the day of’ to submit a labyrinth/mousetrap device which could light a match at the end…to the chagrin of their teacher—and it actually worked.

My brothers created all manners of funny little explosive devices and meddled with welding tricycles together into weird elements and played with fireworks in a safe manner, as far as I know. I’ve also come home to the smell of sulfur in the air and strange black grains in my pie pans—“Don’t light gunpowder in the house!” and when I saw it lit in the backyard that phrase changed to “at all!” I was afraid the cops would come from all the smoke...whoosh!
And since I am getting sidetracked, I’ve probably written this before…fishing line allover the entire backyard like a giant laser web to catch good old mom and the true Vietnam experience: a low invisible trip wire to send my coffee cup flying through the air…!