So I was playing in the backyard that is playing in the dirt. I don't know how old I was. I think I played in dirt longer than most. I found this piece of pipe; I dug around it and tried to pull it out of the ground.

 I couldn't get it all the way out. It was stuck in the ground at an angle that reminded my of the mortars used at army demonstration during the Fourth of July at the promenade. There were tanks, soldiers shooting and lots of running around, lots of smoke and lots of noise.

 Anyway, I dropped rocks in it and pretended I was setting off my mortar. I made sounds of the shell being sent off and the sound of explosions and could see the house next door being blown apart.

 But it wasn't enough. I wanted to drop something in the pipe and see it come out. I didn't want to blow anything up. But I wanted to see something come out of the pipe.

 I dug the pipe out. It was a piece of sewer pipe like I saw in the basement. I knew from talking to the soldiers that the shell has to fit pretty tight in the pipe to come out correctly. It has to be centered or there was no way to know here it would go. I also knew that an explosion is what made the shell come out of the mortar and that it was dangerous. Well, I didn't have any dynamite and didn't want any.

 How could I keep a rock in the center of the pipe and make it come out. I could use a spring to make it come out but how would I keep it in the center. A spring in the bottom of the pipe, something over the spring, but how to keep the rock in the middle of a metal pipe? And where would I get a spring, and how would I get it pushed down, and how would I keep it down, how would I let it go?

 What else could I find? There's a piece of wood. But how do I keep a piece of wood to stay in the middle of a metal pipe? And how do I get it out? The spring can get it out but with all of the same problems. And how do I keep a piece of wood in the middle of a metal pipe?

 Over there was a metal rod and here we go again. How do I keep a metal rod in the middle of a metal pipe? And how do I get it out?

 How do I keep a metal rod in the middle of metal pipe? There was something about this question. How to keep a metal rod in the middle of a metal pipe? This is an easy question and I knew that I knew the answer? Why is metal different from rock and wood. What is it I can do to metal that I can't do to a rock or a piece of wood? It is so easy. It is obvious.

 My father would know. He would know it in a second. He would know it before I finished asking. He probably already told me and I forgot. And, I'm not going to ask him now?

 I know how to do this: center and shoot a piece of metal from a piece of metal. This is not only the question. It is also the answer. What am I missing?

 I want to scream. I am about to cry. I lie down and look toward the sky. And there it is on a branch of the apple tree, a cocoon. And that is the answer.

 Wrap it up and change it into something else.

 As I run up to the attic to get the antenna from my big Philco radio, I know that my mortar will work. And more than that, I know that I can move even the heaviest of items smoothly and quickly as if by magic.

 I stop and get several extension cords and a damaged one missing one end from the basement.

 My plan is this I will wrap the metal pipe with my antenna, which is many feet of bare copper wire. I'll tie the ends to the damaged end of the extension cord. When I plug it in, it will turn the pipe into a big magnet. The magnet will attract the metal rod. Because the pipe is round, it will attract the iron rod and so pull it into the middle of the pipe. I will have the centering or aiming part done.

 Getting the centered rod out to come out of the pipe is something else. A magnet attracts metal. I need to use the repelling action of a magnet on a magnet to force the rod out of the pipe. But the rod is not magnetized.

 However, if I leave the rod in the pipe long enough, it will become magnetized, at least for a while. Then I will wrap the bottom of the pipe heavily with wire to make it a stronger magnet. When I drop the rod into pipe it will be centered and either be forced up or pulled down by the stronger magnetizes at the bottom. If it gets pulled down, I will do the whole thing over but make sure I put the other end of the rod into the pipe.

 It was a perfect plan. And I knew it would work. I wondered if other people were doing this. As I wrapped the pipe, I was thinking of how easy it could be used to move stuff around. You have a container with a magnet on the bottom, plug in a big magnet on the underneath and the thing on top would just rise of the ground. I would be able to move around a very heavy load by just pushing on it. It would be easier than pushing a heavy boat that is floating on water.

 I kept wrapping the copper wire around the pipe; I knew there would have to be a lot of it. The motor in the basement had a lot wire on it. But then I started to slow down.

 I had had other perfect plans that didn't work out the way I had thought they would.

I learned about mortars because the soldiers felt bad for having shot me. They didn't mean to shoot me. They were having their pretend war. I was told they weren't using real bullets. They were shooting blanks. No one could get hurt.

 I knew that blank means nothing. The teacher says take out a blank piece of paper. She means a piece of paper with nothing on it. So I just walked into the war. And they shot me. Shot me in the leg. Part of the war got called off early because they shot me. Blanks don't shoot nothing. They shoot pieces of paper. And if you walk right in front of a machine gun, and get shot, it hurts and makes you cry. And it makes soldiers and all kinds of people upset when they shot a kid.

 I didn't tell my mother or father about it because I knew they would be upset too. But I wouldn't get ice cream; I'd get a whipping.

 Once, I got this paratrooper guy for Christmas. You throw him in the air and he floats down on a little parachute. He basically floated straight down.

 The parachute was about the size of half a big orange

 I noticed that when birds floated down, they didn't come straight down. Rather they floated down and over. Their wings were not the shape of orange halves but more the shape of long watermelon halves. So it occurred to me that a parachute shaped like a half a watermelon would allow one to float down and over. If I jumped out of the second floor window with a watermelon chute, I could float over the fence and come down in the next-door neighbor's yard. I tested by perfect plan. It didn't work. So I tried a regular parachute, it didn't work. I came to believe two things: 1) Perfect plans don't always work; 2) When jumping from a second story window, it is better to land on grass than on concrete.

 I rethought my latest perfect plan. The perfect plan still seemed perfect. But was there something I should know, that I didn't know. I mean, it would have been nice to have known that blanks meant paper. And I still don't know why either of my parachutes didn't work. The down and over watermelon parachute still sounded like a good idea, but I didn't want to work on it anymore. Besides, I might get caught.

 I was finished wrapping my wire around the pipe, I connected the wire to the extension cord missing one end and plugged that extension cord into the other one and it was fired up and ready to go.

 As I walked back, I wondered one last time what could go wrong with my magnet mortar. I thought I might not have strong magnet to shoot the rod out. But then I thought what if it was so strong it shot it out fast and far. It might go right threw the building. It might kill somebody. I thought I better lower the angle on the mortar.

 But I wasn't going to shoot it now anyway. The first part of the test was to center and magnetize the rod. But what if it came out. I better lower the angle of the pipe.

 So, I knelt down and grabbed the pipe with both hands to lower it. I was immediately transformed in a person from summer revival who had received the blessing of the Holy Spirit. I began shake all over, like someone having an epileptic fit and spoke in unintelligible languages. The only words I understood were, "Oh Jesus." My hands were stuck to the pipe; my knees were glued to the ground. My teeth chattered like I was freezing to death. My butt kept going up and down, hitting my shoes and then being shot into the air. I could feel my eyes growing and my skin shrinking. Everything was hurting. The air smelled funny and my nose was moving. And there was nothing I could do about it but watch.

 My father and mother told me not to mess around with wires. They said I shouldn't be plugging things and unplugging them. Told me that when my sister put that key in the outlet and got a black spot on her hand she could have died. I knew I was in trouble. Can you imagine the whipping they would give me if I killed myself?

 O-Kay, I have got to shut this thing off. Another problem with the perfect plan: no on/off switch. O-Kay. The next time my butt goes up I will try to fall backwards. Oops my butt is up, its up again. I can't time this thing. I am going to die. Boy, will I get a lot of grief at school when they find out I killed myself.

 O-Kay, got to try now, "ugaa golla mokey da, Oh Jesus," I throw myself backwards, and it stops, sort of, I can't breathe, my chest hurts, I can't move.

 Slowly, things start to work or stop hurting. I am able to unplug the extension cord, unwrap the pipe and return everything as it was before my perfect plan. I even buried the pipe.

 But in my heart, I knew that the magnetic mortar and the magnetized mover were good ideas worthy of pursuing, but not by me. But just once it would be nice if I, by myself, could make a perfect plan work.

 Oh yea. I knocked the cocoon down and threw it into the yard next door.