Boomerang

A budding young terrorist gave me a boomerang for Christmas one year. A few days later, I read the directions, picked a spot where it looked unlikely to end up in the road or through a window, and gave it a solid hurl.

It went spinning through the air, made a big sweeping turn, and started heading back toward me. Just as I was thinking, hey, this thing actually works, it decided to land in the branches of a pine.

So I fetched a stepladder and a broom and managed to reach up high enough to poke it out of the tree.

I changed my initial position a bit for my second attempt. This time it ended up on the roof. The stepladder and broom again proved useful.

For my third attempt, I made a rather more drastic change of location. I heaved. The boomerang spun, turned, and landed on top of the frozen pond.

I thought hard. There was no way I was going to trust my life to the thickness of that ice. On the other hand, if the young terrorist saw that I had abandoned her present to the mercy of the elements, her feelings were likely to be hurt. So I tied a rake to a rope and eventually managed to drag the boomerang over to the bank.

I never threw it again.

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