Читать книгу Becoming a Counselor - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 24

On a car ride to Richmond, my sister taught me the words to the song “Once There Were Three Fishermen.” The song is playful with repeating words, such as “fisher, fisher, men, men, men.” In the song, the fishermen go to Amsterdam, and instead of repeating lyrics per se as a refrain the song deviates with the words “Amster, Amster, shh, shh, shh” instead of “Amster, Amster, dam, dam, dam.” I loved the song, for as a preteen I was forbidden to swear, and so instead of singing “shh, shh, shh” I sang “dam, dam, dam,” and my words were not considered profane.

Outside of the song, I was like many preteen boys and enjoyed building dams better than singing about them. One summer day, a group of us built a dam on Glen Creek, which ran through our neighborhood. During the middle of construction it started getting cloudy, and before we knew it a rather heavy rain started to fall. Inspired by the rain, we worked harder to build our dam and back up the water. We were successful and decided we should strategically break the dam when the water got to a certain level. The idea was we could ride the water to the city reservoir at the edge of town several miles away. We had enough inner tubes, so each boy had one. When we broke the dam, we were all swept away. However, we had not counted on the drainage pipes that went under the streets on our route. When navigating through them we were underwater and had to take a deep breath before entering and hope.

The Good Lord looks after fools and in our case young adolescent boys. All five of us made it to the reservoir and celebrated what we had accomplished. It had been thrilling as well as a little scary. Tired, but joyful, we walked the several miles back home carrying our inner tubes. In the back of our minds we were glad we had survived. We also wished we could do it again, but this time without going through the drainage pipes!