Colorful Shards of Glass

Back in the day, and about this time of the year, kids around the neighborhood would begin to hop around in their classroom seats in anticipation. We had noticed the dads on the street out climbing their ladders in the waning hour of daylight, maybe heard the call, the signal for some unseen someone in the house to flip the switch, and then watched as all those multi-colored lights brightened the night from one end of the street to the other. Yes, it was time for the annual Christmas light bulb swiping and popping ceremonies. I figure, by then, we had been following in the footsteps of, at least, a couple generations of bulb-swiping kids. 

There were always a few houses that were easy marks, maybe the people who lived in them were new to the neighborhood, maybe they had forgotten to keep their lights to the higher eaves, maybe they planned to catch those kids in the act, or maybe they just didn't care, thought they were safe from the predation.

Though there could be as many as five or six kids making the rounds, the number of bulbs swiped was limited by the number of accessible light strings and the size of kids' hands. Well one evening Doug decided he was going to ignore the limits by filling his pants pockets; keep in mind we are not talking those little twinkling bulbs of today, and certainly not strings of LED's, no these were the old-style glass bulbs, fragile things that didn't take much effort to break, hence the great popping sound they made when thrown.

Okay, you see where this going - those bulbs didn't remain intact, stuffed into the pockets of Doug's jeans, for long and when he reached his hands in they came back out embedded with colorful shards of glass.

I don't recall how he explained that when he got home, but I also don't recall the old gang (heresay, remember, and anyway statute of limitations passed long ago) ever swiping bulbs again. Call it a lesson learned. And so I shake my head every time I notice that familiar glow coming from the drivers' seat of some vehicle next to me during that stop and go rush hours traffic. I figure by now everyone has witnessed a distracted driving collision, know someone who has been in one, certainly heard untold numbers of reports of them, yet there they are still, people who have not learned their lesson. 

And now for something completely unrelated, some colors and sights of early winter in the Village: