I found an old newspaper at Moms with a picture of a cute little 4-year-old boy who was pointing his toy-gun six shooter at the photographer. Behind him was his mother, dressed in black with her face hidden by a veil. She sat with other faceless women, mothers also I suppose.
The caption’s third sentence read: “Here, a 4-year old boy plays bang-bang in front of his mother in a suicide bomber training camp in the Middle East.” The photo went with an article written by Ron Wolfe about changing times and toys, and how the toy guns that you and I grew up with have at last gone the way of the Etch-A-Sketch and Easy Bake Oven (naturally I didn’t have the “Oven,” but I did have that other great cuisine game of the sixties known as “Incredible Edibles”).
It’s not that the toy guns of today are disappearing because kids are growing bored with them, quite the contrary, the killing of all your neighborhood friends before they kill you may be the only activity left that can pull the youth of today away from the electronic abyss that has so engulfed us all. But back to that disturbing photo – “A suicide bomber training-camp,” for 4-year olds no less! And who knows, that kid in the picture might be one of the upper-classmen.
Looking closely at the gun held by the little boy and future martyr, (as I said, it is pointed at the photographer,) at the end of the barrel there is a pretty good-sized hole. It definitely doesn’t look like a toy. But I suppose if you’re hanging around a suicide-bomber training camp somewhere in the Middle East, you probably need more than a cap gun, even if you are only four.
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Speaking of guns, my brother-in-law Bill Hooper lives over in West Memphis. He says that if you get pulled over by the Memphis police after crossing over the Mississippi River bridge into Tennessee, and they don’t find a gun in your car, that they give you one before letting you drive on.
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Speaking of Memphis, I spent a couple of hours in the airport there one morning while I waited for my connecting flight that would take me back to Little Rock. When it came time to board, the attractive blonde stewardess welcomed me aboard with what sounded like a German accent. “Gutentaag,” I thought to myself, remembering my daughter’s friend Julie, who had been taking a lot of German classes that year and had taught me the greeting.
Just as I turned toward the aisle to find my seat I heard something back towards the cockpit that I’d never heard before. It was some type of emergency recording device that I guess the crew was testing out before takeoff. The computerized voice sounded like the robot from “Lost in Space,” saying, “Wind sheer, wind sheer!” That was followed by, “Terrain, terrain, pull up, pull up!”
I looked down at the stewardess for comfort and reassurance. She smiled up at me and laughed a little before saying, “That always gets to the passengers.” Which wasn’t exactly the reassurance I was looking for. I turned around and was at my seat, No. 1-A. I don’t always fly first class, which always makes it a special treat when I’m able to. This being one of those times I sat back in my spacious and comfortable seat and looked out the window at the clear blue sky.
It looked to be shaping up into a beautiful day, hopefully void of any wind sheer and terrain. The stewardess asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I hadn’t planned on having any booze, but after hearing the plane’s warning system I ordered a Bloody Mary.
So there I sat in my large comfortable seat, sipping on my cocktail, not getting a lot of smiles from the coach-bound passengers as they moved past, when two young men who were traveling together sat next to me.
One of them turned and told me that after a night in Little Rock they were heading off to Japan, and it was his buddy’s first time in an airplane. “He’ll have lots of time to get used to it,” I said, while thinking I was glad the poor guy had missed out on the disaster warnings that had gotten my attention a few minutes earlier. Thirty minutes later we were landing, softly I might add, in Little Rock. No matter how safe air travel is said to be, for me it’s always a great feeling when it comes to an end. I said “Auf Wiedersehen” to the blonde and headed off to claim my luggage that probably wasn’t there.