Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Throwing Oranges at Cars

While growing up, my house was situated in an orange grove, with a large irrigation and drainage ditch separating it from a well traveled road.  When we were real young, elementary school age, my siblings and I would play down there in the ditch, on our island, surrounded by weeds and algae, if there hadn't been any strong rains.  But when I was a little older, probably middle school age, my brother and I and some of the similarly aged neighborhood boys would go along the ditch away from the house so that it wouldn't be associated with what we were doing, and then pick oranges off of trees and lob them at passing cars across the ditch.  Of course for us, timing was very important; our hope was for the orange to slam into the windshield of the car and to cause a strong reaction from the driver, preferably loudly screeching tires.  For which we would react by tearing back into the groves at max speed, starring at each other with huge eyeballs and full of laughter, and we were never spotted in all of our times doing this.

I don't recall totally how I felt about it then, but I started to feel remorseful and plain bad about doing this later on in life, although we never caused any real damage as far as I know.  It kinda came back around though.  One night, while in university, I'd left my house, the same house, to drive back to school after a weekend at home and while cruising down a grove lined rural road on my way to the interstate, an orange came out of nowhere and slammed into my windshield.  I did a quick search of the surrounding groves as best I could at night, but I never found the little punks.

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