Unless you’re Flume, Macauley Culkin or Harry ‘the boy who lived’ Potter, there’s a fair chance you’ve come across a child superstar that makes you feel like a worthless human. I once pushed my brother out of a tree; he once smashed a mirror over my head; I once hit him with a rock; he once hit me with a rotten grapefruit.
Not once did we come close to saving one another’s lives.
So when someone like two-year-old Bowdy Shoff singlehandedly rescues his twin brother from under a fallen chest of drawers, my ego takes a bit of a shake. I do not cheer or applaud the heroics of this tiny person who is less than a twelfth my age. I walk to the bathroom, clutch the sink, look myself hard in the eye and ask: “What have you ever done with you time here on earth?”
To start with, Bowdy’s reaction time. One second he and brother Brock are clambering up the front of the precarious dresser, the next it’s crashed down over the top of them, pinning Brock to the floor by his skull. At this point I would deadest be having an anxiety attack, pacing back and forth helplessly– but not Bowdy. Bowdy picks himself up, dusts himself off and gets straight to sussing out the situation.
Secondly: his cool head under pressure. Bowdy knows that shitting your pantsuit and screaming until your kidneys bleed does nothing to alleviate a crisis. Bowdy doesn’t get caught up in the problem: he finds a solution. He even takes the time to calmly check that the wireless router is still in tact before moving on to the main event: namely, rescuing his twin brother from an all too early grave.
And this is where things really just get too much. Whereas I rupture a spleen from bringing in the groceries, Bowdy manages to push the heavy storage unit– which has got to be, like, five times his size– off the top of his brother like he’s been doing tricep curls his entire two-year-old life.
Even father Ricky Shoff, as though threatened by his own son’s unfathomable masculinity, tried to detract from the incredible achievement. “We know Bowdy was not alone in moving the dresser off of Brock,” he wrote on Facebook, apparently implying that some higher force must have had a hand in the rescue. And yet the footage clearly shows that Bowdy was absolutely alone, left to rely on his own quick thinking, cool head and superhuman strength to save his brother’s life.
Seriously, someone get this kid a Curly Wurly. I’ll be over here having an existential crisis.
Feature image: YouTube
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