Childhood Memories

My brother sent me an email today. That in itself is news worthy. We never were that close and we usually only talk on holidays and Mom's birthday. But he sent me this email. It's about life in black and white for those of us who are over 40 years old. Ok, I am way over 40. It's a long email with a bunch of pictures. Let me give you a few excerpts:

• My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning

• My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Note: Two things, I personally have never eaten raw hamburger. I don't care for steak tartar and you can't pay me to eat raw fish. My wife eats raw cookie dough and raw spaghetti which grosses me out. But I did get food poisoning once in the first grade from a sandwich with mayo. I switched to PB & J and didn't eat bologna again for years! The funny thing is that it was probably the mayo and not the bologna that made me sick.

• We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

• We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

This email brought back a bunch of old memories for me and I wanted to go back home again to see the places where I played as a child.

There was the sandy lot across the street where my best friend Ryland and I organized our toy soldiers into two massive armies to battle against the forces of evil. We also used war surplus ammo belts to make our Batman utility belts full of a arsenal of crime fighting devices to defeat the Penguin and Joker.

Just a short bike ride down a busy two-lane highway was the home of my classmates Chris and Scott. They were twin brothers who, in later years, would become local sports heros and big men on campus. But in our pre-teen years we were blood-brothers and great friends who built a tree house in the woods behind their house and had pine cone wars in the old rickety barn nearby.

Finally there was THE FORT. It evolved over time. It started out as a shallow depression in the ground in the woods behind my grandfather's shop. When I was a child this building was already a dark and mostly unused relic. My grandfather, who died before I was old enough to fully appreciate his genius, was a master mechanic and inventor. He didn't just built machines. He could and did forge the parts he needed in his designs. The forge was in the front of the building and I remember watching my father use it once. Most of the other machine tools had been moved to a new shop building across the road from the family peanut processing plant several miles away.

THE FORT grew as we added walls of salvaged wood and tin roofing that just 'happened' to be laying around. To make it livable in winter we added a fireplace of bricks and rocks with a flue that never did draft properly. One side of the complex was more open to "attack" by hordes of toy machine gun wielding invaders, so we wove a fence of thorns that was quite painful to stumble into in the dark.

It was a wondrous place where we used our imaginations and fought battles against commies, nazis, and aliens (the outer space kind). I wanted to see it again. I wanted to return to that magical place so I used Google Earth to go there. At least I tried. I found the shop, but the beautiful rural woods of my youth had been sub-divided into lots with roads and homes. Sigh... Tom Wolfe was right. You can't go home again.