He Is Sparking, as they say.

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There is a time when a boy becomes a lad, and the lad becomes a man. The times between the lad and the man can be some memorable ones. I don't quite know how testosterone works, but when milk starts to stick to a young man's wispy mustache, change is in the making.

Raising three boys, I observed a few oddities and heard of a few more.

Friends in the neighborhood were also blessed with children, children the age of ours. However, they also had young maidens living under their roof.

One of my boys befriended my neighbor's young son, therefore he was able to maneuver toward a more personal range of his sister, who was his age. A pretty young girl, full of giggles and smiles. School bus quips and kidding around had not been enough. My son wanted to become her friend.

Now there are ways to draw closer to a young maiden. Those ways also had to be discovered by my young son. To scare the girl may work for some, and then again it may not work at all.

It may have been Halloween time, thirty years ago, when my son and his neighbor buddy decided to frighten his sister. With the help of the railing on the neighbor's back porch, the two boys climbed onto the roof of their house. Knowing that the sister had retired to her room, the boys snuck along the roof to directly over her bedroom window. They brought along pebbles and thin tree branches. The two started to flick little stone unto the window hoping to arouse the girl in the room. Intermittently they also rubbed the window with the soft tree branches making strange and eery sounds.

It did the trick. The girl became alarmed when the strange noises kept on and on. She must have gone to her daddy either scared or simply annoyed. Her father having seen the two boys earlier put two and two together and came up with a sure solution.

With the boys still on the roof, he quietly slid open the window from the inside, stuck his 12 gauge shotgun out, and let her blow. The boom and flash of fire had those boys a scootin'. Only their underwear knew they had been frightened.


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