Dats (age 9) brought a nerf gun (from his nerf gun collection) to me because it was jammed.\u00a0 It’s one of those guns that spans\u00a0about two feet in length and fires multiple darts from a cartridge.\u00a0 I worked on that sucker for at least 45 minutes.\u00a0 I\u00a0removed about ten tiny screws but still got nowhere near the problem – the part that was jammed was\u00a0stuck in place over a key screw.\u00a0 \u00a0It’s hard for a dad to admit when he can’t fix something!\u00a0 But in defeat, there was this consolation:\u00a0 one more thing out of my house. After wasting so much time on that hunk of plastic, I took relish in breaking pieces off the barrel of the gun before I tossed all the pieces into the trash can.\u00a0 It brought back a childhood memory.\u00a0 It’s not a particularly pleasant memory, but it was a valuable lesson that stuck with me.\u00a0 I was maybe 7 or 8 at the time and my brothers and I had one unjammed dart gun between us.\u00a0 The darts were the pre-nerf type which were just orange plastic sticks with a suction cup at the lead end.\u00a0 I recall that we were in the kitchen having a heated disagreement over whose turn it was to use the gun.\u00a0 Now at 42 I can completely empathize and even admire my dad’s solution, but at the time it completely shocked us all silent\u00a0and struck a certain level of fear in us … but it did succeed in\u00a0preventing similar disagreements (at least within dad’s earshot) for months to come.\u00a0 Dad walked into the room after several minutes of our fight, asked for the gun, examined it briefly, and dropped it to the kitchen floor.\u00a0 He didn’t play detective or flip a coin; he dropped it to the floor.\u00a0 As his boys stood in a circle around him gawking, he taught us a lesson in problem-solving.\u00a0 He brought the heel of his foot down on top of that gun with the full force of his 6’5″ German-farmer-type\u00a0frame. leaving only quarter-sized fragments of orange plastic behind … which he told us to clean up.\u00a0\u00a0Then\u00a0he turned and walked away.\u00a0 Without lecturing us, dad taught us a lesson that I have tried to pass on to my kids.\u00a0 It is best summed up in a bumper sticker I once saw … maybe you’ve seen it too:\u00a0 “LOVE people – USE things”.\u00a0 I love that slogan because it’s a masterful use of language:\u00a0 in\u00a0four words it conveys a profound, positive life\u00a0lesson while also implying the negative – we tend to do the reverse.\u00a0 Why do I have to keep relearning this lesson throughout my life, even as I teach it to my kids??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dats (age 9) brought a nerf gun (from his nerf gun collection) to me because it was jammed.\u00a0 It’s one of those guns that spans\u00a0about two feet in length and fires multiple darts from a cartridge.\u00a0 I worked on that sucker for at least 45 minutes.\u00a0 I\u00a0removed about ten tiny screws but still got nowhere […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6244,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions\/6244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}