Raising a kid who can make his own cannons is a whole other level of parenting.
Middleborn is a “tinker,” I always say.
He gets his mechanical whims from my dad, who was a plane mechanic in the Navy and now does remarkable things to DeLoreans.
For Middleborn, it’s never enough to buy a device. He’s gotta build it. Break it. Build it again.
Like the catapult he built during COVID-19, in case of zombie apocalypse. (That was a weird time, OK?)
Like the mini torch he built from discarded appliances.
Discarded washing machines and toasters make his eyes swell. I find empty glass bottles, wiring of variable length and electrical tape in his room. My life is a constant fight over what I’m allowed to throw away and what I’m not.
Another conflict surrounds the level of commercial strong-arming I’ll weather in the name of mechanical engineering.
“Mom, I gotta go to the hardware store,” said Middleborn on a Tuesday while I was one hour from a news story deadline, three hours behind on making dinner and two cups of coffee short of a fully functioning brain.
“No you don’t, bud,” I countered.
“I do,” he insisted.
“Why?” I huffed. “What could be so important that we have to go to the hardware store during the news day and spend money when you’ve just opened Christmas presents?”
Middleborn straightened his back.
He’s my height; my weight. This fact doesn’t fit into my mind, which still wants me to scoop him into my arms and read him “Go Dogs Go!”
All four boys have told me not to do that to them.
“We. Have. To get. An igniter and PVC pipe so I can build a potato cannon,” said Middleborn in a grave deadpan.
I was about to say that that’s no reason to stall the rollicking pace of the digital news schedule, but then I remembered my own childhood of potato cannons. Of spraying the PVC cannon butt with AquaNet hairspray, screwing on the cap and firing the spud at our poor husk of a storage shed, where we kept the hog feed.
Again, it’s not like we have a shortage of guns or bows or other weapons around here. We’re booming with them, pun intended. That’s what happens when the parents of the household built their early-days courtship on a steady schedule of blowing up watermelons and old electronics by firing rifles at Tannerite, out in the hills.
“I’ll take him,” said The Husband.
But a couple days later, it was my turn.
“Hey Mom,” said Middleborn.
“Hey why didn’t you take out the garb–“
“Hey MOM,” Middleborn interrupted.
“WHAT.”
“We gotta go to Tractor Supply,” he announced.
I was cautious. “Why…?”
“For ether,” he said.
Flashes of Hunter Thompson’s drive to Vegas haunt my frontal lobe. Middleborn could sense he was losing me to a beat author fangirl tangent that had nothing to do with ether’s true, nature-intended purpose, and everything to do with the ways it could be misused.
“I mean, starter fluid. To fuel my potato cannon,” he said.
“What’s wrong with AquaNet?”
“What’s AquaNet?” Middleborn volleyed.
I gave my forehead a never-mind slap, but then recalled that Middleborn doesn’t have any older sister waiting to corner him, dress him up pretty and turn him into a hair-sprayed cross between Brian May and Dolly Parton.
“Fine. Let’s go,” I said.
For Fifth Amendment reasons, I won’t say which of us drove the car to Tractor Supply. The sweet, female cashier looked unsurprised at the kid’s haul of starter fluid and electrical tape.
Back home, the cannon didn’t work for one whole day.
Middleborn tried different spuds, different quantities of spray. He sent me out for hair spray (I didn’t see any AquaNet brand. I don’t know if it’s still out there.)
But that didn’t work either.
“Well bud, maybe this spud gun is just – “
BOOM!
Oh.
The spud launched straight for our wood pile and splattered in a mush asterisk. It was the satisfying kind of burst after which my dad (if he'd been there) would have something like, “Now that’s a good use for a vegetable.”
Middleborn grinned. The sun’s afternoon slant lit his long, curly, copper-colored hair.
The secret, he explained, is jamming a too-big spud into the cannon’s mouth with a broom handle so the combustion chamber doesn’t leak gas.
Potato crescents made my deck slats look like block-letter phrases, nestled in quote marks.
"Hope you like fried hash browns," he quipped, surveying the mess.
Maybe it’s a boy thing, maybe it’s a feral country-kid thing. But sometimes you just have to build your own cannons, to really appreciate the way they fire.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
