Throwing Stones
I don’t know about how little girls think about
it. But I know a little about little
girls. I do have one daughter, but she
never showed much interest. But, if you
take a boy to the shore, any shore really, but ponds and lakes especially – and
even more especially if the surface of the water is smooth as glass, a boy will
immediately start searching for a stone to throw into the water.
There’s two main methods. If the boy decides to throw for distance,
most any stone will do. It should have
some weight to it so that it carries some, but not heavy enough that you risk a
sore arm. It should fit easily in the
palm of the hand; if it’s bigger than that it’s unlikely to travel very
far. Such a stone gets thrown more or
less like a baseball. The only difference is that the toss is
almost always preceded by a couple of steps to help get everything into motion.
If the boy decides to skip the stone, then the stone search
gets a bit more particular. The stone
should have at least one smooth side, and have an edge that you can wrap your
pointer finger along. If you can throw
sidearm, this is the time for it, because the smooth side of the stone has to
hit the water surface at an acute angle, so the stone, rather than penetrating
the water and sinking, skips off of the water.
If the throw is low enough and fast enough, there is a good possibility
that the stone will glance off of the water’s surface several additional times
before it finally loses momentum.
The challenge with skipping stones is to get the
impact angle low enough that the skip is also low. Otherwise, even if you manage to achieve one
skip, the stone arcs too high, so that it plunges into the surface. I know that little boys, and their dad’s can
spend a significant length of time trying to achieve the throw with the most
skips. With a well-chosen stone and a
hard, low throw, a young boy can at times manage more skips than his dad.
Distance throw challenges don’t last nearly as long
because the matter of who throws farther is resolved in a single throw, maybe
two at the most. It is harder for the
son to throw farther than his dad; hence there is usually less interest
generated in a distance toss match.
It may say something about you as a father, depending
whether you are more likely to challenge your son to a distance or a skipping
contest. It may say something about your
son whether he chooses to challenge you in distance or in number of skips. Or it just may be one of those things that
little boys do.
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash
Photo by Laura Cleffmann on Unsplash
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