The Slice Adult Supervision Left Plenty To Be Desired

It was Sunday afternoon.

We were sitting on a park bench by a tennis court, listening to the radio on earphones.

The door to a second-floor apartment opened across the street. A boy and a man emerged and stood on the walkway. The boy then wound up and sailed some shiny object out over the yard and into the street. Then the two went back inside.

We walked over to find out what had been hurled. There, in pieces on the pavement, was a shattered audio cassette. It was impossible to make out a band’s name or read any song titles.

We went away wondering what possible explanation there might be for that man thinking it was OK to just stand there and watch the kid chuck the tape out onto the street.

“Go ahead, Johnny, it’s not really littering if you’re tired of the songs.”

We finally decided it must have belonged to one of the boy’s mother’s previous boyfriends.

All in the family: Erma White’s great-granddaughter, who is not quite 3, was watching her dad head off to work. The little girl turned to her mother and said “I sure like your husband.”

Strangers to the rescue: Little things like this happen all the time. It’s just that we don’t always hear about such incidents.

A boy riding his bike on the North Side last week wiped out and fell on his face. He wound up with a chipped tooth and a bloody lip.

Larry Barringer saw the mishap. He pulled his compact car over and checked on the boy. Seeing that the kid was shaken up, he volunteered to give him a ride home.

Meantime, a couple of guys in a city van had stopped. Since they had more room than Barringer, they took over the task of transporting the boy’s bike to his home a few blocks away.

Sometimes strangers aren’t the enemy.

Training wheels: A colleague overheard a little boy in a Spokane Valley fast-food restaurant telling his mother that he wished he could win the expensive car depicted on a contest promotion displayed near where they sat. “I’d wash it all the time and keep it up until I was old enough to drive,” he said.

Good luck, kid. We had a similar dream, back around 1966. But our short-sighted parents refused to buy us a Corvette.

Today’s Slice question: People in what occupation are apt to hear the most unsolicited comments if they change their hairstyle?

, DataTimes MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. Spring break makes some parents nervous because they can still remember being 19.