How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (10 page)

Then slide the second piece down until it's in the center.

Take the cross-boomerang outside and throw it so that it spins, and so that it's heading up at an angle into the air. It'll whirl, and come back to you. You can round the corners, or paint it, or nail the two pieces together, if you like.

The next thing on my list is umbrella bows and arrows, but when my own kids saw the list, and I started telling them what it was, I found out something upsetting. An umbrella bow and arrow is something you make out of an old busted umbrella, and I haven't seen an old busted umbrella for a long time. I got to thinking about it, because when I was a kid, it was a fairly common thing. There was a kind of shopping we used to do when we were kids, which was just walking down our block and seeing what people had thrown away in the trash can, and taking out those things that looked useful. Quite often, in one of the trash cans was a busted umbrella, and whoever saw it first grabbed it. Come to think of it, it must have driven our mothers nuts. Let's say Mrs. Horn threw away a busted umbrella. Well, if I happened to see it before Charlie Horn, I hooked it, and carried it back to my house, and later on Charlie Horn came by, and I gave him part of the umbrella, and he took it home, and then later my mother put what I left of the umbrella in our trash can and Charlie Horn saw it, and he took what was left home, and then my mother threw away
her
busted umbrella and then Charlie Horn came along and hooked it, and—well, the way I figure it, nobody ever really got rid of any trash on our block. It just kind of got moved around from house to house.

I can think of a number of reasons why you don't see busted umbrellas any more. In the first place, in our town, we don't put trash cans on the street, so a busted umbrella might be harder to locate. But I don't think that's the main reason. In those days, the olden days, umbrellas were made of cotton, or, if you were rich, silk. And people used to walk a lot more then, because there weren't so many cars, and the umbrellas got used more, and cotton and silk, after a while, rot. Nowadays, umbrellas aren't used so much, and I imagine they're made out of nylon, and that doesn't rot.

But if, after all this, you do happen to run across a busted umbrella, the first thing to do is to get all that remains of the cloth off the ribs, and then pry the ribs loose from the center part. You can use brute strength, pliers, or intelligence. The thing is to get them loose. Now, right there you have made something: what you have left is a very useful cane.

If you tie a piece of thin strong cord, like fishline, to one end of one rib, pull the cord tight and tie it to the other end, you've got a bow. And if by this time, you're strong enough to bend down and pick up one of the other ribs, you've got an arrow. The arrows are pretty sharp, so one
more time I'll say anybody who shoots a gun, bow and arrow, dart, slingshot,
anything
, at another kid is a dope, and I'd just as lief he didn't read this book.

I just now mentioned a slingshot, and I don't suppose I have to tell you how to make one out of a forked branch, but just in case you don't know, all there is to it is to look around (in the fall is a good time, because you can see the branches clearly with the leaves gone) for a good strong forked twig. Cut the two ends even, and the handle to your hand size, so it looks like a capital Y.

Get a good strong rubber band, cut it so it's one long piece. Get a soft piece of leather, and cut it to this shape.

Thread the rubber band through the holes in the leather. Wrap each end of the rubber band once around each end of the Y and tie it with good strong cord.

Pebbles or nuts or beans are your ammunition.

If you live in the city and have trouble finding a forked twig, you can saw out a wood fork; we found out that this shape was maybe even better than the forked twig.

And if you don't have the wood and the saw, if your mother or father ever bring home a package with one of those wood-and-wire carrying handles, like this, get a pliers, straighten out the wire and pull it right through the hollow handle. Then twist it into a fork shape and push it back into the handle and make your slingshot. This kind, you can just tie the ends onto the wire.

For some reason, when I was a kid, I used to like to make things very small—perhaps you do, too—and I used to make a little tiny slingshot out of a hairpin. If your mother uses hairpins, you know what they're shaped like. Well, all you have to do is bend it like a slingshot, and using just a plain, everyday, little rubber band and a piece of cloth instead of the leather, and thread instead of the string, you've got a miniature slingshot. I made a lot of them, and took them to school with me, and I guess my teacher liked to shoot miniature slingshots, too, because she made a collection of mine.
⁴

There's still another kind of slingshot, sort of a cross between a slingshot and a bow and arrow, that you can make out of a spool. All you do is cut a wide rubber band at one end, and tie the two ends onto a spool. If the hole in the spool is big enough, you can use pencils for arrows, if it isn't, use lollipop sticks, or any straight stick that will fit
with a little room to spare into the hole in the spool. Grab the pencil or the stick between the sides of the rubber band, pull back and let go.

There's a kind of gun you can make, too, with rubber bands. The simplest way to make one is just to cut a piece of wood, somewhere between a quarter of an inch and half an inch thick, into a pistol shape. On the top, just jam the point of your knife in so that it makes a flat hole. Then cut a piece of cardboard into little half-inch squares. Put a rubber band on the gun, a rubber band big enough so that when you pull it back over the top of the handle, it's good and stretched. You can put a thumbtack through the rubber band where it comes over the front end of the pistol. Now jam one of the little cardboard squares into the flat hole, like this.