Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess |
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For those who might not know, punji sticks are something native tribes use to discourage the enemy - small wooden sticks honed to a point, boobytrapped to catapolt or stab a trespasser. The pointed ends are usually covered with fecses or poisen. You've probably seen Rambo or some other jungle movie that uses this weapon. With that in mind.... Yesterday's installment reminded me of an incident I experienced about ten years ago. In line with yesterday's thoughts - I am not real worried about little things - like for instance, the grass at the edge of the driveway - or under the mail box, or at the edge of the road. Or- grass in general. Many folks labor feverishly over their yard from edge to edge and get very upset at someone who drives on the grass, or cuts the driveway a bit short. My opinion is... it's just grass ... but then again, I don't spend any time working at it, so whatever comes up - comes up and whatever gets dug up from dogs, vehicles, kids, rain, etc - just doesn't matter to me. Most of our housing plans here all have neatly asphalted streets that are angled or bermed up along the edges to prevent the water from eroding away the soil at the edges of the yards. One morning, driving down a street in a housing plan, I noticed three one-inch by one-inch pieces of wood broken off and sticking out of the ground by about eight inches underneath a mailbox. I drove safely past it for weeks - until one sunday morning, while trying to fold the sunday paper in half, the paper got caught in the steering wheel, and if any of you have ever hit the edge of a bermed street, you know that it sucks you right off the road. OK - you can already see this coming, right? I had a really good picture of the punji stick pertruding from the sidewall of my tire, but like everything else - I can't find it. YOu would have laughed. Now, even better - at the time, I was still with my first husband, who absolutely LOVED receiving distress/rescue me calls in the middle of the night. Two days earlier, I had run over an area where someone's garbage had BEEN, and hit a bunch of glass, so the tire with the one-by-one sticking out WAS the spare. The only thing I had left was a set of winter tires in the garage, and David was going to have to bring one of those to me. He said later, that he could not understand why I was so upset - he thought I had run over someone's little decorative flower bed perimeter fencing .. some miniature wooden pickette fence - you've seen them. When he got to the house and saw what I was griping about - the remaining two sticks were laying over in the ground, but there was a good six inches that had been stuck INTO the ground - this guy meant BUSINESS. He meant harm to anyone that drove over his grass. Seriously - how much grass is between the mailbox post and the road? Ten inches, maybe twelve? David stood at the mailbox facing the house at 4:30 am and SCREAMED obscenities at the house. I held on to the guy's Sunday paper until I could present it to him personally. At that time, there were no digital cameras, and Poleroids were far enough out of style that film was extinct. When I knocked on the guy's door and asked if he'd like to have his paper, he said, "I wondered what happened to it". As he reached for it, I yanked it away and said, "You can have it when you explain to me your intention of the punji sticks under your mailbox - perhaps you'd like to see the one I have sticking out of the sidewall of my tire? I have it in the trunk".. I pointed at my car sitting on the road with the trunk open. I handed him his paper as he said, "Well, the News Record (the other paper in the area, which is now the Tribune Review) driver comes out of the side street across from my house and tries to cut the wheels to put his paper in the tube under my mailbox, and he keeps driving through my grass. I wanted him to stop. I complained, but he continued". I said, "Well, perhaps that tiny patch of grass is NOT so important that you need to resort to PUNJI STICKS. You might have considered a flat rock, or some bricks - something one can drive over,... something to REPLACE the grass that you can't stand to lose." I went on to explain that I had been sucked up over the edge of the angled berm, and that there is NO controlling a car for the first second or two when that happens, and challenged him to let go of the steering wheel for just a split second sometime that he gets close to the edge and see what happens. He appologized, did NOT offer me a new tire, but I noticed that a week or so later, he put two larger flat rocks under his mailbox. Mailbox vanity. And, while' were're on that subject, I have a current customer who constantly sends messages to the paper that I should quit driving on his grass. He lives in a culdesac; and of course, I am no where NEAR his yard. This has gone on for a year or more. Every so often, I get this complaint about me driving through his grass. I have NO idea what his problem is. Last week, he found somewhere a mini orange cone - like the ones from a construction site. Picture this: Most people, where their driveway meets the road, the corners are rounded or angled out so you can pull a car into the driveway and the back wheels don't drop off into the grass. So is his. This cone sits at one corner of his driveway - I moved it the other night, and there is a bare spot about the size of a cell phone where his driveway meets the road. Now COME ON!!! Really??? I'm not certain that I have EVER dropped off of his driveway and caused that bare spot, but if I did - I'm guessing it has been maybe a half dozen times in 18 months. I could NOT believe it. Apparently, this 4 inch by 2 inch patch of grass is what he's been complaing about. Well let me tell you friend - the orange cone is SO much more attractive than that four inch bare spot. Yah, go with that! |