I remember I was hammering on a fence in the backyard when Dad approached. He was carrying a letter or something in his hand, and he looked worried. I continued to hammer as he came toward me. \u201cSon,\u201d he said, \u201cwhy are you hammering on that fence? It already has plenty of nails in it.\u201d \u201cOh, I\u2019m not using nails,\u201d I replied. \u201cI\u2019m just hammering.\u201d With that, I returned to my hammering. Dad asked me to stop hammering, as he had some news. I did stop hammering, but first I got a couple more hammers in, and this seemed to make Dad mad. \u201cI said, stop hammering!\u201d he yelled. I think he felt bad for yelling at me, especially since it looked like he had bad news. \u201cLook,\u201d he said, \u201cyou can hammer later, but first-\u201d Well, I didn\u2019t even wait to hear the rest. As soon as I heard \u201cYou can hammer,\u201d that\u2019s what I started doing. Hammering away, happy as an old hammerdog. Dad tried to physically stop me from hammering by inserting a small log of some sort between my hammer and the fence. But I just kept on hammering, \u2019cause that\u2019s the way I am when I get that hammer going. Then, he just grabbed my arm and made me stop. \u201cI\u2019m afraid I have some news for you,\u201d he said. I swear, what I did next was not hammering. I was just letting the hammer swing lazily at arm\u2019s length, and maybe it tapped the fence once or twice, but that\u2019s all. That apparently didn\u2019t make any difference whatsoever to Dad, because he just grabbed my hammer out of my hand and flung it across the field. And when I saw my hammer flying helplessly through the air like that, I just couldn\u2019t take it. I burst out crying, I admit it. And I ran to the house, as fast as my legs could take me. \u201cSon, come back!\u201d yelled Dad. \u201cWhat about your hammer?!\u201d But I could not have cared less about hammering at that point. I ran into the house and flung myself onto my bed, pounding the bed with my fists. I pounded and pounded, until finally, behind me, I heard a voice. \u201cAs long as you\u2019re pounding, why not use this?\u201d I turned, and it was Dad, holding a brand-new solid-gold hammer. I quickly wiped the tears from my eyes and ran to Dad\u2019s outstretched arms. But suddenly, he jumped out of the way, and I went sailing through the second-story window behind him. Whenever I hear about a kid getting in trouble with drugs, I like to tell him this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember I was hammering on a fence in the backyard when Dad approached. He was carrying a letter or something in his hand, and he looked worried. I continued to hammer as he came toward me. \u201cSon,\u201d he said, \u201cwhy are you hammering on that fence? It already has plenty of nails in it.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n