Pretty Sure I'm Dead

Chapter 2 - Exhibit 1: THE DEADLY TURTLE

My first memory of dying was at the hands of my sister – well, sort of. Don't get me wrong. My sister was a good person - well, at least most of the time. It was just that I was her little brother and as big sisters are inclined to do, she frequently would find entertainment at my expense.

For as long as I can remember I have always wanted pets. Creatures I could love and that might love me in return. We didn't have much when I was a kid, but perhaps it was love I was really lacking and really craving the most.

Anyway, for my tenth birthday my family got me a small pet turtle. The kind that would easily fit in the palm of a young boy's hand or even his mouth. It came with a small plastic turtle aquarium. The aquarium was an oval flat-bottomed bowl about eight inches wide by twelve inches long and about three inches deep. There was an island in the middle just large enough to accommodate the small reptile. I filled the bowl around the island with fresh water and sprinkled in some lettuce scraps. I envied my pet's isolated self-contained kingdom. He had food to eat, an island to sleep on, and water to swim and poop in. What more could a turtle want? 

Well, maybe I should have changed the water more frequently. The limited living space combined with my total ignorance of turtle hygiene soon led to a condition that I could only imagine made my turtle yearn for the disease infected swamp from whence he must have come.

Enter my sister, who dared me to put the rather befouled turtle completely in my mouth. It was a dare; so, what choice did I have? I complied ever so briefly. Apparently, however, it was in my mouth long enough for me to contract a Salmonella infection that put me in the hospital. I generated a 107-degree fever and diarrhea experienced only by souls condemned to the deepest depths of hell. Such infections are rarely fatal but I was a rather sickly kid to begin with and the high fever alone had the doctors somewhat concerned. Such fevers can easily be fatal in young children.

Despite the fever, I doubt this was when I died. I don't remember an out-of-body experience. I do remember in my fever induced delirium hearing what I thought was Christmas music – in the middle of July. Maybe it was just a heavenly choir giving me a preview?

After that, it was a fairly normal childhood with the usual dangerous encounters - swimming with venomous water moccasins at boy scout camp and with barracuda in the Atlantic, fireworks wars ending with my pants on fire from a well-aimed Roman candle. At least I assume he was aiming at my butt. Jeans are somewhat fire resistant; so, the only real threat to my life from that incident was my mother finding out about it.

As I got older, the adventures continued, including being threatened by a farmer with a shotgun when we knocked on his door at one o'clock in the morning because we had run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Roger (the friend who was on the other end of the Roman candle incident) and I couldn't afford a full tank of gas or a cell phone and don't ask from where we borrowed the car. Anyway, believe it or not, while staring down the barrels of a twelve-gauge, Roger actually convinced the farmer not to shoot us and to give us a gallon of gas.

Oh yeah, and I'll never forget being threatened by MPs (Military Police) who made us lay face down on the ground while they interrogated us at gun point while holding snarling police dogs at bay. To this day I don't know if the MPs were serious or just having some fun terrorizing a couple of teenagers. We had been exploring around in a cotton field on the backside of the Air Force Base near my home town. It was a Strategic Air Command base and we had "accidentally" trespassed near where they stored the nuclear bombs for the B-52 long range bombers. It was during the cold war and although they never confirmed or denied the presence of nuclear weapons, we all knew those big-ass intercontinental planes were not parked in a remote area in the middle of the continental United States for joy rides. My friend and I were just curious; so, okay maybe it was not accidental. You know, normal kid stuff.