FROM GREEN TO BLUE

Whenever, as a younger soul, the “green-eyed monster” reared it's ugly head in my direction, my dad always had a solution to drive it back to where it belonged – wherever the hell that was. It didn't matter what I was envious about, he would often use logic but sometimes he could even get the job done with a stick. “All the other kids have toy trucks, why can't I have a truck?” I would complain with the vengeance of a 5 or 6 year old, knowing I would, eventually, wear him down or annoy him to the point of caving in. Unfortunately, this was where his next move might be to pick up a stick and hand it to me with a glib “Here. Here's your truck. Have fun.” I wasn't sure if he was being a cheapskate or if he was trying to teach me a lesson in the evils of envy and greed. I have to admit, though, I usually did have fun with my skinny, little, wooden truck that was covered in bark. I may not have had a real truck but I had a real imagination, which, years later served me quite well. His sense of logic wasn't a lot better. “Well, Billy Hart's going trapping at the pond at 3am, why can't I go too,” I remember rationalizing as a cocky 12 year old who had no clue as to the world outside my block and the local playground. “If Billy Hart jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?” was his favorite (and, pretty much, only) comeback to such a request. Even if I wanted to to something that was, perhaps, inadvisable for whatever stage of life I happened to be in, with someone else, my dad might get a little confused and, once again, push Billy Hart off the Brooklyn Bridge to make his point. Sometimes it worked.......sometimes it didn't. I actually did sneak out the window, on that particular morning at 3 o'clock to meet Billy and head off to the pond to check the traps that he had set the day before. Neither of us had any idea what kind of traps they were or what we were hoping to catch but we were pretty determined preteen trappers who, most probably, got our inspiration from an episode of Davy Crockett on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” That was about as worldly as we were. As I was climbing out the window to meet Billy, who was standing on the side of my house, my dog started barking. Instead of taking the most logical step, which would have been to back away from the window and go back to bed, my 12 year old mind said jump and run, which is just what I did. Before I knew it, we were at the pond, which was covered in ice, and began looking for the traps, which were buried in snow. I knew we would have caught something because, my imagination told me so. That same imagination that I had been nurturing since my dad gave me my first toy truck. Thankfully, they were all empty. Soon our attention was averted by the sound of a car headed our way. As it got closer, I could see that it was my dad's 1956 two toned Mercury. Not wanting to be caught, Billy and I immediately dove for the river bank that ran along the side of the road. The bank was also a solid sheet of ice. We slid down the into the running water of the small river that bled into the pond, my dad watching and laughing, having spotted us as we made our boneheaded move. He packed the two little blue, shivering trappers into the car and turned up the heater, dropping Billy at home and then telling me that I was not to play with him any more. Billy and I stayed best friends until his untimely death in his late 50's. As I look back, I can never thank my dad enough for the gift of imagination that he gave me with that “stick-truck.” It became the basis of an extremely satisfying career. His lessons also filled me with integrity and gave me a foundation with which to raise my kids. My only regret is that poor Billy Hart must have gotten pretty water logged after all those inadvertent swims in the East River.