Donald Lee King - HS Freshman, gymnast, athlete, musician, nice guy. |
There were two Chinaberry trees in our yard. One by the house allowed us to climb up a limb and drop down on the roof. From there we would parachute behind German lines. Our "parachutes" consisted of one of Mom's old bedsheets. we'd tie two corners to the belt loops on the back of our pants and hold the other two corners over our heads and jump off the roof into a soft patch of thick grass that grew where the septic line ran out of the kitchen. It was sometimes squishy, especially if we'd been catching up on the dishes. Soft as the ground might be, that old house had a pretty high roof for an 80 plus year old one story house. My hips and knees are paying me back now for all of those parachute drops. Turns out, even if you only weigh 90 pounds sopping wet, hitting the ground from that height is going to be hard on your joints, even with the slowdown provided by a bedsheet parachute. It also turns out there's a reason the Army used other than bedsheet materials for parachutes.
"Should I open it or should we give her a second to calm down?" he asked.
"I don't know," I responded. "She sounds pretty mad."
Our house was almost as old as the town of Keene where we grew up. In the winter when the wind blew the linoleum floors would breathe up and down and sigh softly in the night. It was a bit creepy I can tell you. But we had a pretty good time of it. My brother and I roamed the local woods and creeks. Donny was more ambitious than me. He went along with friends who soaped the college fountain, climbed things they weren't supposed to climb and generally got into mischief. I was more the shy nerdy type, but still we had some adventures.
The last time I talked to him was the night before his death. We stayed up late Christmas Night talking about Christmases to come and how we would celebrate it with our families. He said he would make his kids wait till morning to open their presents. He was an old softy and I'm pretty sure he'd have given in and like me, let them open one on Christmas Eve. He told me he was going to get his grades up again and stay out of trouble. He wanted to go back to Chisholm Trail Academy again where his Adventist friends were. He'd gone back to public high school after his grades fell at CTA. He told me he wanted to get back to church again too. He used to play saxophone trios for church with his friend David and Mr. Schramm the band director. He missed it.
The guy who killed him later told me it was the worst day of his life. I rather believe that. He'd killed a friend doing something careless and stupid. The police wanted to rain down the wrath of the law on the boys, but my family believed the boys that were there and didn't want to compound one tragedy with another.
Still, hardly a day goes by I do not miss him. Jesus cannot come soon enough. I have two brothers and a son I need to spend some time with.
© 2021 by Tom King
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