Feeling Bad

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Sometimes things we did while we were growing up made us feel remorse. Here’s an incident that gave me that feeling.

 

 

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Feeling Bad

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When I was 10 years old, I was on a not so good Little League Baseball team. I was a pitcher part of the time and I had built up a pretty good throwing arm. On one occasion, my cousins Ricky and Scott and I had been over to our grandmother Aurora Bell”s house visiting one Saturday morning and we had decided to walk back to their house which was about four blocks away if you took the shortcut through area by the storage tank area. On the shortcut, there was a patch of weeds and deep grass on the way.

 

The speedy cottontail rabbit bursting out of the weeds at full speed heading for a rendezvous with the stone in my hand.on that day in 1953.

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We were just moseying along and I was picking up rocks and throwing them along the way. I had just picked up a rock when we reached that patch of grass and weeds and a cottontail rabbit took off running full speed off the one side. As a kind of natural instinct, I side armed the rock with a hard throw to the path the rabbit was running towards. As fate would have it, the throw was perfect and the stone struck the rabbit in the head and he rolled forward about three rolls and ended up laying there on his side. We all walked over to the.cottontail and his body was quivering with one of his back legs still kicking a little.

 

The lifeless cottontail rabbit following a collision with my stone still quivering and that leg still kicking a little..

 

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I then became the target of a verbal abuse attack from Ricky and Scott saying things like “Why did you have to kill that poor little cottontail bunny?”, and “That poor little soft bunny probably has baby bunnies that will die now.” We finally left the dead rabbit laying there on the ground and headed on to their house, but the verbal abuse continued all the way home. They had me feeling so bad that I was almost in tears when we got there so I sought refuse in the bathroom for a while to let my internal wounds heal for a while. When I came out, I guess the fun of riding me about the dead cottontail had worn off and it was not mentioned again that day.

Top; my cousins Kristi and Scott.   Bottom; my cousin Ricky and me.                                                                     Kristi was not active in this story, but she may recall the day I was feeling remorse for the cute bunny.

 

 

I can remember throwing a rock at and hitting a running cottontail one other time while growing up, and having the same feelings of remorse without the verbal abuse from my cousins. So I guess it’s just the thought that a stone thrown directly from my hand had ended the life a soft fuzzy cute little cottontail bunny that makes me feel bad, not the teasing. The teasing part is just something that I suspect all cousins do because they’re so close.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading Feeling Bad,
Bill