Punching Bag

I've noticed that people in our apartment complex often place things by the dumpster that seem to be perfectly good and I suppose they are just wanting someone to take it so they don't have to deal with it when they are moving out. Not long after moving here, I saw this punching bag and stopped and picked it up. It is in excellent condition and I checked online and it probably costs about $50 to $60 new. It has water in the base to weigh it down. Jacob loves it!

But it does give me an uncomfortable feeling to have a punching bag of this sort in my house. :-) Some of you know where I'm going with this. But I thought I would tell a story of a sweet little 5 or 6 year old girl and an unfortunate event involving a punching bag. This particular punching bag was similar to the one I picked up by the dumpster, but the pole was much more narrow- about the width of a pencil, I think. Somehow, the bag had been removed while the little girl and her baby brother and sister were playing. As the poor little girl was carrying her baby brother, she dropped him and he landed on the punching bag pole. With his head. It went straight up through his head, sort-of behind his ear, and out the top! She ran to get her mother, but her mother had already heard the screams and was on her way to the bedoom. She arrived to find her only son impaled on the punching bag pole. All she could think to do was run to him and pull him up off the pole.

As bad luck would have it, this horrific incident happened during a Michigan blizzard. While the mom held a towel to her son's head, which was gushing blood, the dad of the family went to shovel the car out of the garage so they could get to the hospital, and, in such a panic, as you can imagine, backed the car out of the garage.... twice... with the driver's side door open, damaging the door and the garage. (Okay, that's kind-of funny, right? Don't worry, this story has a happy ending).

The elderly couple across the street were called to come and get the sisters. The elderly lady asked the girls where their "stockings" were and they didn't know she just meant "socks".

As it turned out, according to the x-ray, the pole narrowly missed anything really important in the brother's head. And he got a stuffed elephant while he was in the hospital, which he named "Elly". But the guilt-ridden sister drew pictures of herself crying.

Yes, my dear readers, that little girl was me. And yes, I nearly killed my brother Matthew 35 years ago... on a punching bag. And it's funny to me that what I remember most clearly about all of this was Mrs Pichey asking me to get my "stockings" on.

So, even though the pole on this punching bag I got for Jacob is much, much thicker and doesn't really appear that it could cause anyone serious damage... the rule is that the bag stays on, or it goes back to the dumpster. No bagless punching bags in my house, even free ones.

:-)