Little Johnny and the bike crash…

—and black holes!

(A new Little Johnny story—to add to the stories I have told to June over the years when she wants to hear “Little Johnny” stories. Mostly they are true stories of things I remember from childhood, tho sometimes the gaps of memory are filled in with things to make it interesting to her. She often remembers stories that I’ve told her that I have forgotten I told her, and it’s sometimes challenging to remember what it was all about from her description, so they are an evolving form! The titles are mostly from what she calls them when she asks to hear them…)

When Little Johnny was in about the fourth grade, he got a big-boy bike for his birthday. He loved that bike, and he even learned how to work on bicycles with it, because it wasn’t exactly new and there was always something he had to be fixing.

One thing he had to fix was a front wheel that got a bit smashed up because Johnny crashed into a concrete post. Now, the story of how he happened to crash into that post is not one he’s very proud to talk about, because it was really a pretty dumb thing he did, as he usually will admit now that he’s not such a little boy anymore. But he did learn a big lesson from this crash!

That lesson was, don’t ride your bicycle with your eyes closed.

Yep, that’s how he crashed into that concrete post and broke his wheel and almost broke his head—he did fly over the handle bars and bang into that post with his head!—one of the many head injuries he got as a kid. Which maybe explains why he’s done so many not-so-smart things in his life!

Now why would Little Johnny be riding his bike with his eyes closed?! That’s a good question.

Well, the answer is also not such a smart thing that Johnny did. He had a girlfriend—well, he wanted her to be his girlfriend anyway—who lived just down the street from them in Adel, and he was not supposed to ride his bicycle down that way because he had to cross a big street to get to it. But he really wanted to ride his bicycle down to Marilyn’s house, so he hit on the idea of closing his eyes and telling his brothers, who were out in the yard watching, that he was gonna show them how he could ride with his eyes closed. Then if he got in trouble for going down Marilyn’s street, he could just saw he didn’t know because he had his eyes closed. Yeah, brilliant plan, huh!

So off he goes, riding down the street in front of their house with his eyes closed, crossing the big street. Somehow, he sorta veered off to the left as he was going, and when he got across the big street, he crashed right into the street sign, which was a square concrete post, bam!

It really hurt and he had to push his bike back home and explain to Mommy how he had banged his head and broken his bike wheel.

She wasn’t happy, but she decided he had probably learned his lesson from the crash, so he didn’t get into too much trouble for it.

But he did promise to never again ride his bicycle with his eyes closed!

…the black hole.

(After I told June this story last night, she started talking about the dangers of riding with eyes closed, and said that you really have to be careful because you could ride into a black hole and that would be really bad because black holes suck everything into them!

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying but then I realized after I asked her some questions that she actually was talking about Black Holes… the cosmic ones! She said she heard about them on YouTube, and we proceeded to have a long and very interesting conversation about Black Holes.

I tried to assure her that she wasn’t going to encounter any Black Holes in our back yard or on her bike rides, because there aren’t any here on the Earth, they are all way out in space, so that made her feel a little better. I also tried to explain, at a level appropriate for a five-year-old, what Black Holes are, and she was very interested.

At some point in the conversation, she asked me, “Where do things go that fall into a Black Hole?”

After I regained my composure—the question is pretty astonishing coming from a five-year-old!—I told her that a lot of scientists who have been studying Black Holes for a long time would like to have an answer to the question! And basically, I said that nobody knows where things go that fall into a Black Hole. I even told her a little about worm holes and some of the other theories related to the subject, so I probably got a little over her head, but she was very interested and very excited to be talking to me about this subject. Of course, she often gets excited about anything that will allow her to avoid being quiet and going to sleep!

But it was a most interesting bedtime conversation.