The Magic Trees

The Old Man went to Bedford yesterday. I took some fellow church members to visit the National D-Day Memorial there. Much, much, more about that in a future post. We had a nice lunch and tooled around the big city for a bit. I pointed out many of the points of interest; where my home church once stood, the house where I lived from birth until I was 19, the school I attended, and the plant where my dad worked for all those years.

When we rode by my old "home place", I missed the mimosa trees. There were two. They were (at least to a small boy) gigantic. Giant redwoods had nothing on those mimosas. They fired a little boy's imagination until the magic was at it's peak. In one of the trees, there was a forked branch. I could nestle myself in that fork, lean back against the main trunk and read my comic books. When I tired of that, I became John Wayne in "Flying Leathernecks".....downing Japanese planes and making the world right again. I would sit for hours in summer, assuming the posture of a pilot in a Hellcat or a Corsair, making airplane noises, interspersed with machine gun noises. I'm sure people walking down the street wondered, "What's wrong with that boy? He just sits up in that tree and hums or goes ack,ack,ack,ack over and over." What did they know? Had they no appreciation for a real flying leatherneck? My friend, Bob, said that he used to take an old shipping carton, draw instruments on one of the flaps, and sit in it on the front porch for half a day making these airplane noises. He said his neighbors always whispered about "what's wrong with that little Tucker boy?" Adults.....phooey.
Sometimes, a "Jap" would get in a lucky shot and I'd have to bail out. Since this fork was about 8 feet off the ground, I could hang from the branches, mimicking a pilot drifting down from his crippled and doomed plane. I'd hang there for a bit and the subsequent drop to the ground was every bit as realistic to me as a true parachute landing. I suppose these same neighbors might have thought, "Oh Lordy, they've finally hung him."

One of my dad's work buddies gave him an old wooden propeller from a real Piper Cub. My buddy Kenny and I stuck it on the end of a broomstick. We would reach out, give it a spin, and for a few moments, the mimosa worked its spell and we were "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo".

The other mimosa lent itself particularly well to a long rope tied to its upper branches. I could stand in a lower branch and get a really good "swing out" and back. Some days, I was Superman. I would tie one of my dad's old shirts around my neck and presto....ready-made cape. Some days I was Captain Marvel....I'd actually yell "Shazam" and fly, fly, fly.

In the truly hot, dog days of summer, when all we wore was a pair of shorts, mimosa #2 became Tarzan's tree house. I had a rubber knife and could amuse myself for hours swinging on that rope and dropping to the ground to dispatch Simba the lion.

I got a little quiet for a moment yesterday. As warm as visiting familiarity can be, there is a bittersweetness to it as well. We realize that, like those mimosas, we are temporary and will one day be but a memory. The truly important thing, I believe, is to live our lives so that like those mimosas, we will be a link to the past and lovingly missed.