The glass eye

When I was a kid I got a BB gun for Christmas.
With the BB gun came the usual warning about safety and such.
My mother didn’t use the phrase “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
No way man.
She had Reni Goss as her reference.
Reni Goss was a kid a couple of years older than us. He was playing with a BB gun in the basement of his house. A BB ricochet hit him in the eye. It put his eye out.
He had a glass eye but sometimes wore a big black eye patch. When he did that, every little kid would shrivel in fear as he approached. The very thought of Reni Goss’s big glass eye and empty eye socket sent shivers down my spine.
We always wondered why he was wearing the patch. I told my cousin one time that the glass eye was hurting him so he took it out and laid it on the table. It rolled off the table and the dog had eaten it. I told him that they were waiting on it to pass through the dog’s system so he could wash it off and put it back in. My cousin spent a week poking through every pile of dog poop in the neighborhood with a stick looking for the glass eye. But I think that if I put a white marble in some wet dog poo and showed it to him he would have gone screaming into the night and never been right again. It was a close call. I almost sent my cousin to 10 years of therapy.
It was kind of mean but that is what kids do. Kind of like convincing my little sister that she was adopted. Although, in retrospect it may have been a little much to tell her that she wasn’t getting any Christmas presents from our folks because her real family was coming to get her and take her back to work on their pig farm.

All of the above material is true and has not been embellished upon. To prove my point I say this:
To this very day if my cousin steps in dog poo he looks cautiously to make sure that he doesn’t have a glass eye stuck to his shoe. And every year I look at my little sister on Christmas Eve and ask her the same question. “Is your real family coming to get you this year?”

I did not tell my parents of these events until much later in life for fear that it would be put on my “permanent record”.

Ah, childhood. What a marvelous way to mess up the rest of your life.

This post has been edited. I originally posted that they guy's name was Scott and not Reni Goss. I got an email from a reader that reminded me that it was Reni Goss and not Scott. Scott was Reni's little brother. Thanks to my loyal readers. But that just goes to show you, I didn't make it up.