Thermos Bottle

Age 8

One summer day I didn’t have much to do, so I decided to do a little exploring. I went around the hill from the barn behind our house at Glen View and I walked up the hill onto Mrs. Polk’s property. I discovered a trash dump that I did not know was there. Most of the stuff in the pile was rusty tin cans or glass bottles that did not interest me. I spied a thermos bottle down in the pile. Keep in mind, this was before stainless steel thermos bottles were available. I expected the double-walled glass liner to be broken (the normal mode of failure), but it wasn’t. It still had the cork that kept the contents from leaking out. The paint on the outer metal cover had been faded by the sun. I don’t know why somebody discarded what seemed to be a perfectly good thermos bottle. I had seen thermos bottles at some friends’ houses, but we were too poor to have such a luxury. Mommy didn’t fix any coffee for Daddy to drink at work. She put ice water in the bottom of his dinner bucket.

When I took the thermos bottle home, Mommy was not impressed. She asked me to throw it away, as it surely had some defect that we hadn’t found yet. She relented when I begged her to let me wash it thoroughly with soap and bleach.

After I had scrubbed it, Mommy inspected it and passed it. I immediately put some ice and water in it and went to what was then my favorite place to be alone. A large white oak tree past the cellar had a horizontal limb that was straight and parallel to the ground that I could lie on. The level portion was about five feet long and two feet wide and it was about ten feet above the ground. It wasn’t easy to climb up to it, but I was pretty agile then. I climbed up to my limb and pretended to be a big shot, drinking a little ice water from time to time.

After about an hour, I decided to climb down and be a big-shot somewhere else. Without thinking, I dropped the thermos bottle to the ground so I could climb down easier. I realized what I had done about half a second too late. When I picked it up, it sounded like it had three or four broken light bulbs swishing around in the water. Believe it or not, I did learn a little bit from that experience. I learned to take care of my valuables a little better. That was the end of my time as a big shot that summer.