Do not be deceived: Bad company corrupts good morals.

We've all had best friends, but some of us have also had "best enemies". Mine just happened to be my best friend's big brother, Mike. I remember all too well his last name, but I will not use it here on the off chance that he has since repented and no longer needs to be held up to public ridicule. Also, if there are some other men who were formerly naughty little 11 year-olds named Mike, then it will do them good to call their past sins to mind in case they need to repent.

Mike taught me how to fight. Perhaps a more accurate statement was that he taught me how to get beat up, for he was older, bigger, and much meaner than was I. He once locked me in a wooden "fort" they had in their back yard and I got in trouble for being late for supper. He was the one that enticed me to eat that red hot chili pepper that I can still feel burning in my throat to this day. But the worst was yet to come!

I still have no idea why I was playing with him that fateful night. Perhaps he had hit his little brother (my best friend, Steven) over the head with a shovel. Maybe all of the rest of the population of Kirkland, Washington had leprosy. Whatever the reason, I ended up hanging around with him for a while. We found a heavy fishing weight in my dad's tackle box and had tied an old strip of cloth to it somehow. We would swing the weight around and around by holding onto the end of the cloth and then let her fly! The weight would carry the makeshift streamer far into the sky and we would watch it come down to the ground with the streamer now looking like a comet's tail.

It was pretty cool, when I think about it.

My dad loved cars, (can you see where this is going?) and had just bought a brand new 1968 Plymouth Fury III. If memory serves me right, it had a 318 engine. It was only a few weeks old, and she was a beauty! I say "was" because that fishing weight landed smack dab in the middle of the hood! I can still remember seeing it drop out of the sky and hoping against hope that it wouldn't hit that car that I had just then noticed parked in the driveway. Mike, whose turn it had been when the weight was thrown, ran away like the yellow-bellied coward that he was. I courageously hid behind a tree.

When dad found me (and he did find me) he was too mad to listen to reason. He would hear nothing of the fact that it was Mike who threw the weight. I might have even shared with him the notion that it was all Mike's idea. It was he who made us take the weight out of the tackle box. It was he that made us tie the streamer to it. It should have been an open and shut case, your honor, but dad wasn't buying it. He had this unreasonable notion that the accomplice in the crime should receive a penalty just as if he were the one who had pulled the trigger. And, since the trigger-man was not his son - was, in fact, no where to be found - I was the fall guy.

We kept that car from the time I was nine or ten until I went away to college. The dent was always there as a mocking reminder of the sins of my youth. It also reminded me of the truth contained in the Apostle Paul's inspired message above: Bad company corrupts good morals! I only wished that I had learned that lesson then, for it might have saved me an awful lot of "dents" later in life. How about you?