Circa 1966 - I'm not sure what came over me when I was in our backyard garden one morning and came across a rock that was about the size of my little four year-old hand and wondered what it would be like to throw it through the laundry room window, where my unsuspecting mother was folding clothes.
About a year later, my sister's bedroom window got an unprovoked attack from a flashlight battery that just seemed to fly out of my hand without warning.
A few months later, a potato rocketed nicely through the stained glass window of the church next door. A gentle but firm lecture from the pastor didn't help much. A second potato jumped right out of my hand a couple of weeks later, this time making a smashing impact on church services, and resulting in some forced Sunday School time for me, alongside an understandably angry congregation.
It's truly embarrassing to list the damage that followed. Other than a promising Little League pitching stint, most of my talent was spent on destruction.
There went a couple of heavily-glassed street lamps, mud balls splattered on a big kid's white pants (he deserved it - white pants? Come on!) and an unsettling incident involving a snowball and a fire chief's hat.
Circa 1999 - I sat in council at a modestly-attired village hall in a small-town in B.C. deliberating one of the many items on our agenda that evening.
This particular item was a proposal by the provincial government seeking our support-in-principle for government-sponsored daycare.
It would not cost our community anything, they argued. It was provincial money and just a motion of moral support for what was broadly viewed as a good cause.
Whenever anyone asked us for support on such a project, I would glance upward - not to the heavens, but to a strip of ugly shag carpet that adorned the beam straddling the ceiling above our council table.
The humble dcor (once referred to as "early '70s bachelor") actually inspired me. It was a reminder that we should live within our means in our little community of some 1,300 souls.
Since tax money is our money, I wondered how people would feel if we looked at the situation a little differently.
I asked the others to open their wallets and pay my family with cash right out of their hands to purchase government-sponsored daycare so my wife could go to work.
No takers. Why not? Because they could see the money leaving their hands.
Circa 2011 - I'm 49. My right shoulder is in constant pain. I throw like a girl, but smell like a man. (I'd trade with the girl, but she won't.) I'm a tax-averse curmudgeon.
Spending someone else's money is like throwing rocks at streetlamps. Somehow we have to make an effort to re-associate ourselves with the fact that it's our money, our streetlamp, our taxes.
Maybe if every time we had to pay for a new highway or bridge we had to go down to the bank, take out cash and then walk down to the construction contractor's office and pay him physically, then buy a little less at the grocery store on the way home, we would get it more readily.
It truly is our money. No, really -- it is. Let's don't throw it away.
