JANUARY: B.B.’s Boo Boo

by Stumblin' Jimmy Watermelon

ourse he had a “real name” but we all, family and friends and otherwise, tended to call him by his initials. B.B.’s daddy would tell that it all started when he was a toddler and just learning to walk. “As stumpy as those little legs were, he could scoot off like a pellet out of an air gun”, he used to say. By his Momma’s version, “That boy was born with a talent for mischief, imagination to match and not a drop of forethought to the consequences of their mixing.” More than once she swore that “B.B.” stood for ‘bad boy” and that, “If her roots an’ heart hadn’t been so strong, he’d have made her keel over with her hair fallin’ out.” The child would just look up at her and smile sheepishly where upon she would melt and hug him close. To us, his buddies, the name tied in just right with his stature. He was the shortest of all of us and in that, the moniker fit the bill. As for B.B., he didn’t seem to mind a bit. Truly, more often than not I think he reveled in it. He may have been short but he was doubly scrappy.

Now like most all children, B.B.’s flights of deeper mischief tended to follow a cycle as with the coastal tides to the moon. For him, the “highs” were those surreptitious stretches of innocence. The “lows”, they were something more like a monkey let loose on an unsuspecting neighborhood. And his “moon”, that my friends, as it may be for so many kids, was Christmas. The closer it came, the sweeter and more innocent he got. His crescendo being (and holding to not long after) December 25th.

Like a lot of boys down this way, living along the coast and woods, in a time more simple than now, from when he was five, B.B. wanted an air rifle, a bb-gun. Each year he would put out hints “to Santa” and his parents in hopes that he might find one laying under their Christmas tree. Each year he found much else that he asked for but that. Finally on the morning of his eighth Christmas, after the hardest year of a boy’s focus on goodness that surely had ever been attempted, a dream was realized. As B.B. held his new Red Rider air rifle in one hand and carton of copper bbs’ in the other, his heart soared. He scarcely heard his parents reading their list of rules to be followed. His imagination was a roar over it all. B.B. saw himself as Buffalo Bill Cody. Momma and Daddy saw a sweet boy with broad smile, nodding his head up and down. What they missed was the little monkey’s tail beginning to emerge out the back…..

“Buffalo Bill” blazed through the paper targets that came with the Red Rider. By January 5th, B.B. had bb’d every can, bottle, pine cone and knot hole he could find and run through the entire carton of shot.

A testament to misguided ingenuity, B.B. found what he believed might be a substitute. Who would have thought it, Daddy’s saccharine tablets. Poured in the barrel and primed to go, B.B. was just imagining shooting great bison from horseback when he spied Momma bent over sorting clothes to dry on the line. Here is where mischief, imagination and forethought pass each other like ships in the night.

Lessons come suddenly and often in clusters. B.B.’s aim of the tablets wasn’t as sure as his Momma’s with the hickory switch, a Red Rider air gun lost is not near as important as a soft pillow to sit on and that January saccharine turned out to be a mighty bitter pill. Oh yes, last but not least, B.B. learned without question, he had boo booed….