Many years ago, when I was but a callow youth, our well-traveled neighbor returned from a sightseeing trip to Australia wth a gift for me. It was a boomerang, obviously, and my inner snob, which was maturing much faster than the rest of me, was somewhat bored by its predictability. At least it's not a stuffed Koala bear, I concluded, or a Sydney Opera House snow-globe. What I really wanted, of course, was a huge Crocodile Dundee style 'bush' knife. Something that I could use to threaten the local kids. They would only laugh at the boomerang, knowing that if I tried to throw the damn thing it would neither find its target nor return to me when concluding its round-trip journey through the air.
And, indeed, that's exactly what happened. Although I never discovered if in fact the boomerang would have come spinning back to me, as it crashed through the window of our well-traveled neighbor's garden shed mid-flight. Fortunately, he was away at the time, visiting Istanbul for business reasons, so I was able to clandestinely retrieve the boomerang while denying any culpability for the incident. It might have been the local kids playing baseball, I volunteered, when asked if I knew anything about the damage.
After being so completely unhelpful, I recall standing there for several minutes, a brazenly innocent yet greedily expectant expression on my face, glancing at the well-traveled neighbor's luggage, wondering if he'd brought me back a souvenir from Istanbul. I had no idea what kind of weapons were wielded in the shadows of the Topkapi Palace, but was pretty sure they would be far more frightening and effective than a dumb boomerang. I was thinking possibly a curved blade, similar to a scimitar, or maybe even a double-headed axe. Both could usefully spark terror in the hearts of local kids in playgrounds everywhere.
Alas, my well-traveled neighbor merely produced a bag of tourist quality Turkish Delight from his suitcase. He seemed to believe I'd be excited by these unappetizing lumps of powdery confection, but the only people who needed to live in fear of them were my dentist and his hygienist. Let's be frank, Turkish Delight wouldn't even hurt if you threw it pointblank at your enemy's eye. Between this innocuous bag of candy and the unreliable boomerang, my well-traveled neighbor's gifts had left me defenseless, at the mercy of vindictive local kids, whose cap guns their neighbors had given them after day trips to the Alamo or Tombstone. Is Turkish Delight pellet proof? What if I glued together a suit of armor for myself from all those tiny cubes of starch and sugar? To be honest, I'd be better protected by a marzipan nose guard and a licorice jockstrap. I was screwed.
The white flag of surrender was not an option, but since my uncle had just returned from a guided tour of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the pipe of peace was. Although he hadn't actually presented me with such a pragmatic souvenir, my uncle did smoke Virginia leaf, so I was able to borrow one of his more elaborately designed regular tobacco pipes, claiming it was hand carved by a Lakota medicine man. I even drew a few buffalo around the bowl with an erasable marker pen just to reinforce the effect. The local kids would never fathom the depths of my deception. They were far too ignorant and easily impressed by Wild West nonsense, which was partly why I'd been at war with them in the first place. But sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, especially when inconsiderate adults won't help you assemble a lethal arsenal of your own.
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