by Shane Cook

Created on: November 28, 2008

In Response To A Question Posed By My Friends The Baha Men

The worst thing I think I ever did happened on the way to the bus stop in the seventh grade. It was one of those horrible winter days where it was fifteen degrees, the sky was crystal blue and the two feet of snow on the ground (that had fallen over a month ago) was a grey sheet of ice. Your shoes made that unpleasant squeaky crunch as you walked and your nostrils stuck together every time you took a breath.

I don't know too many boys who haven't thrown a rock at a bird a few times in his life. I don't know why we do it but we see a bird and we want to see if we can hit it. For me it was some sort of baseball fantasy I guess. If I could throw a rock thirty feet and hit a bird maybe I'd have a chance pitching for the Cincinnati Reds. It may even have had a little bit of a caveman thing to it. Something in our heads makes us want to catch and hunt things. Why else would we see a frog and think, "Hey I need to put that in a jar."

That morning when I was walking I saw a bird on a telephone line. I had a long icicle in my hand I had broken off the rafters as I had walked out the front door of my house. I snapped the icicle over my knee and flung the smaller part as hard as I could toward the bird. Now, I had been throwing rocks at birds on the way to the bus stop every morning for a couple months and never even gotten close. I'd be lucky if I was even within ten feet. But this morning everything horrible that could of lined up-lined up perfectly. The icicle hit the bird and it dropped to the ground.

I ran over to look at it and it was just sitting there staring at me. I couldn't believe it. It then hit me what I had done and I started freaking out. "Oh G*d, I'm sorry. I didn't think I'd actually hit it. You can't let it die. I' m sorry. I promise I will never throw anything at a bird again." I picked up the bird, brushed the snow off of him and wrapped him up in my stocking cap.

I thought if I got him to school my first period science teacher would know what to do. The bird didn't make it. It died before I even got to the bus stop. I dumped out my lunch and put him in my lunch box. I walked out in the middle of a field and buried him in the snow. It took forever to dig in the packed ice and I missed the bus. This was probably for the best because I felt sick the entire day and didn't come out of my room.

How I reacted to this shouldn't have surprised me. I've had a pretty long history of worrying and fretting

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