Children can be cruel and we were nothing if not children. It was a Tuesday morning and David and I were headed to our cousin Paula’s cottage to play some ping-pong, listen to some music on her porch, and maybe make a little noise. David had secretly scored some Black Cat firecrackers from a cousin who had visited during the weekend. So we walked along the road leading to the public beach detonating a few explosions on the way.
When we reached the shore, we were confronted with a resounding spectacle of frogs. There were hundreds of them, as if the wind-driven waves washing along the weedy section of the shoreline were turning into living creatures. They were hopping in a passionate celebration of existence. At first we looked in wonderment and felt their fervor in our blood. It was almost overpowering to the mind.
So it wasn’t long before the fact of frog and firecracker combined in our thoughts, emerging as some ghastly mutant creature. It wasn’t difficult at all to catch the first frog. And it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to gently clasp its little emerald body while forcing a firecracker into its tiny mouth. Lighting the fuse was just a simple spark of action, and then we let it loose to hop along the golden sands like a funny cartoon character smoking a small cigar—until its head exploded in a mush of green and yellow guts.
Oh how we laughed—we laughed our heads off and it felt so good! And then we did it again. And again. And over and over again until the killing grounds disgusted even us. We left them there to rot in the growing sun and continued our morning walk to Paula’s and listen to some top forty radio, munch on some cookies, and drink some orange soda. When the noontime news came on and started droning on about some B-52 bombings beginning in Viet Nam, we turned it off. It was time for ping-pong.
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