It's A Wonder

The Old Man is lucky to be here. It's a wonder I survived my youth. BB guns, sling shots, dirt clods, and arrows shot high into the air just to see where they would fall, could all entertain the Park Street Battalion for hours on end. Sometimes we would attempt the organized civility of sports, or the cerebral exercise of marathon Monopoly tournaments, but more often than not, we were engaged in some form of risky behavior.

Helmets were items worn by soldiers and football players.....never by a kid on a bike. Not only did we eschew helmets, we rode with no shoes and no shirts. While rocketing down Baltimore Avenue hill, we would let go of the handlebars and ride, steering "au naturale" by leaning a bit left or right.

We crawled through drainage pipes and culverts, climbed to 30-40 feet in trees on limbs that were never meant to support a squirrel, much less a kid, and roamed around town after dark with no thought of fear. We camped out in fields and in the woods.

Mom carved up chicken on the sideboard beside the sink, gave it a quick wipe and cut up the potatoes for salad. Meals were left on the table, covered with a cloth, after Sunday lunch and seldom re-heated for supper. We were never ill from any of this....perhaps we were lucky or I like to think that maybe it's been the passage of time that has created an evolution of bad stuff and disagreeable substances. Restaurant workers didn't wear hair nets or plastic gloves and the butchers used the same butcher block cutting surface for all their meat prep. There was sawdust on the floor of the butcher area to absorb spilled blood and prevent butcher "accidents".

We ate rabbit if Dad had a good day in the field, and during the summer we ate enough perch and bluegills from farm ponds and the County Park lake it seemed we would begin to grow scales.

If a huge flock of starlings became a bother when they decided to "park" themselves in one of our trees, Dad would simply take his shotgun and fire off a blast up into the tree. It wasn't illegal then. The starlings would scatter and peace and tranquility would return to Park St. I heard a quote on television recently that summed up most of the time on our street. "It was so quiet, you could hear a mouse peeing on cotton in China".

I recapture a little bit of that experience with my genuine Daisy Red Ryder BB gun these days when the squirrels launch an assault on my bird feeders.

I suppose a simpler time called for simpler solutions, but that delicious quiet visits me from time to time. It's rare, but when it comes, it's a treasure.

Oh, by the way......The Old Man is the second from the right.