I was looking forward to this. My friend's parents wee pretty cool, for parents. All the arrangements were made, and suddenly, I found myself at a cottage, not far from town, but far enough to feel like you were away.
At the time I had a thing for inflatable mattresses. I really enjoyed the concept of being able to float around on one of these things. I guess it stemmed from the fact that when we went swimming with the family, it was to go swimming, not floating. We didn't have anything that floated. So here I had the chance to really use one of these floating navigational devices, so much so that at one point the skin was coming off my back from overexposure to the sun's rays. The back of my legs got it too. That sort of took the fun out of using the air mattress.
While I was there, I was introduced to water skiing, and thought that was great fun, after having many gallons of river water run through my nasal passages. My arms also felt pretty sore from trying this new arm elongation technique.
Fishing was also part of the itinerary. I was a little more familiar with this, from many visits to my aunt's and uncle's cottage. I always liked fishing, as a kid, and really got a thrill out of catching anything. I never liked touching fish barehanded though, but I had no problems with impaling worms with hooks. You really have to wonder how much rationalization we humans go through. Do you remember these words of wisdom when you were a kid? "No, no, it doesn't hurt the worm when you do that". Or," No, no, fish don't feel the hook when you take it out". I can imagine a doctor telling you that the kidney stone you are about to attempt to pass will hardly be noticeable, and you won't need an anesthetic.
The week went by pretty quickly, and we had a fair amount of fun. I was always too polite as a guest, and should have learned to let loose as a kid. I would have had even more fun.
On the last evening there, my parents arrived to pick me up. They stayed for a while. My friend and I let the adults yak away as we built a campfire. We had made some stakes to barbecue some marshmallows, and we ate a ton of the puffy things. The whole thing turned rather ghastly at one point though, when by accident, my friend's "stake con flaming marshmallow" ended up in one of my eyes. Thank goodness for quick reactions, those self preservation movements that seem to be actuated by powers greater than ours. The thing really made a mess of my eyelid, but fortunately for me, the eye turned out to be okay.
I was rushed to the hospital to have this checked out. They bandaged me up, and sent me on my way. I had to wear this thing for what felt like forever, and I remember people asking me what had happened to my eye. When I would tell them, they would just about barf. The story probably turned a lot of people off of marshmallows. I should check the sales history of marshmallows in my part of the world for that year to see if there were any anomalies.
Anyway, I turned out no worse for the wear, and I occasionally still eat a barbecued marshmallow.
One Weekend at a Time
It was a ritual. It had gone on for as long as I could remember. The destination was the same every time. The day to go there rarely varied. I usually looked forward to going there, and quite frankly, I usually didn't have any choice in the matter.
We usually had to go to Sunday mass in the morning before anything else happened. Once that was out of the way, the mandatory preparations would be taken care of, including the recruitment of the kids who wanted to join in the day's activities. As the kids grew older, some would opt to stay at home.
So we'd pile into the car, recite a little prayer to St. Christopher, who lived on the dash, and off we'd go to the ancestral cottage that was for all intents and purposes, inherited by my mother's sister and her husband, who lived in the town that was near the cottage. It wasn't a long drive, just an hour from where we lived. The two lane highway that led to the cottage was fairly scenic, but also had become infamous for snatching the lives of many motorists, thus the prayer to St. Christopher upon departures.
We'd usually stop for gas on the way, and usually stop at the same place. Fortunately for those of us who were kids, someone in the village where we stopped for gas had opened up a go-kart track. We would usually be treated to a run on the go-kart track, and that kept us quiet for the duration of the trip. I really loved the go-kart track. I always got an adrenaline rush from driving those devilishly fast machines.
Upon arrival at the cottage, the usual formalities were taken care of:
“Have you eaten, are you hungry?”
“No, we ate before we left, thanks.”
“Are you sure, it's no trouble to make something.”
Then my aunt would turn to all the kids, one at a time. “Would you like something to eat? Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich. Would you like a Coke, a tomato juice...”
“Okay.”
Then everybody would get into it, and the formalities were over, one more time. It was rather comical to observe all of this as a child. Once the dining was taken care of, the choice of activities would vary. As a kid, you could sit there and listen to what the adults were yakking about, or you could go for a swim, or go fishing, or play with the neighbor's dog.
One day, a bicycle appeared from who knows where. It was an old crate, nothing fancy, a ladies full-size bike. I wasn't very tall at the time, but I was not intimidated by the size of the bike. Besides, I didn't have to straddle the bar. Anyway, I figured that this would keep me occupied for a while. So I rode around the place. There was only one lane that led up a hill, so I'd amble up and down the lane. As I was riding back down the hill towards the cottage, I felt that I was going a little too fast, so I casually applied pressure to the pedals in a reverse fashion, to engage the brake. It worked fine, but as I did that, my foot slipped, and all of a sudden, I was riding this rather huge bike from a new seating position. My feet were now dragging behind me, my arms were stretched out to the sky, holding on to the handlebars, and my scrotum was serving as a seat on the crossbar near the pedals. Needless to say, I discovered the nasty pain that my yet to be instrument of manhood could inflict upon me. The pain was just too much. It felt like some diabolical fiend was putting my parts into a meat grinder. Tears flooded my face as the bicycle conveniently fell at my mother's feet. She was sitting chatting with two of my aunts at the time, and saw that something was gravely wrong. I explained the delicate situation that part of my anatomy was in, through the sobs and stuttering. She looked at me and said that one of my aunts was a nurse, and could she look at the problem? I didn't have to think twice. This was a man's problem, and I wasn't about to share it with a woman, not even my aunt, the nurse.
The pain eventually subsided, and I went on with the day's activities. Later on we drove home as the summer sun began to disappear from view. Upon reflection that evening, as we drove home, I made a wish that that sort of incident would, if possible, not occur too often in one's lifetime.
The Discovery
We were about ten or eleven at the time. Life was simple. We lived in our own little world. We went to school, we played. Play was interrupted by eating, and the whole process was interrupted by sleep.
One day, in late winter, on our way back from school, all of that changed. We were talking and walking. Home was nearly a mile away, so we had a lot of time to talk about things. That day, we would talk about something completely different, something that would change our lives. My friend looked at me and said: “You won't believe what I'm going to tell you. It's incredible!”
“How incredible can it be?”
“Super incredible!”
“Oh yeaa?”
“Yeaa!”
“So what is it?”
“Well you know how babies are made?”
“Yea, well sort of.”
+And so he went on to explain the process of making babies, and the instruments used to do so. As he was speaking, I would nod in disbelief, sort of saying yes on the outside, but shaking my head on the inside. Where the hell was he getting all of this stuff? He was quite a joker, and at one point I figured he was just puling my leg.
It all sounded so absurd. What a strange way to make babies, and it just didn't seem like an efficient method of doing things. It also didn't seem to be very sanitary.
Well, I got the whole story from him, and he said he’d gotten the whole story from his parents. So I sort of looked at him, and thought he had taken the joke too far, and that he was full of shit, so to speak.
The next day, I happened to be walking to school, or back from school, I can't remember because we often walked home for lunch, if you can believe it, and I started telling a mutual friend what the first friend had said. He, in his incredulity, had approached his parents the night before to find out if our friend's information was accurate. Sure enough, it had been confirmed. My reaction was very profound at the time. I looked into my very soul and said to myself that this was a piece of information that I could have very well lived without. Someone had taken away the very innocence of my childhood and arbitrarily decided, by proxy no less, to discard it without my consent. I felt as if part of my integrity as a person had been unnecessarily moved and that the process for making babies lacked imagination. Truly, some of the magic of living had been taken away.
I had no choice but to accept the truth. One of my best friends had learned it and passed it on, the other best friend had confirmed it. Life would never be the same, but we all got over it.
Getting Good
Every decade sees its share of trends, and the sixties were no exception. As a matter of fact, the sixties probably saw more trends than just about any other decade in the twentieth century. Why, you ask? Probably because there were so damn many kids who were more than willing to adopt whatever might help them define and differentiate themselves from adults. Plus, there were tons of money to be made by trend-setters.
One of the trendiest things to come out of California in those days was the skateboard. I was probably eleven or twelve when the first homemade ones appeared in our city. The store-bought ones were virtually non-existent. The construction was very simple. All you had to do was find a pair of roller skates, the ones that attached to shoes, and dismantle them so that the front assembly could be attached to a piece of plywood, and then the rear assembly attached to the other end of the four-by-twelve inch platform. At that time, we weren't clued-in to making the platform wider, or longer.
The very first time I hopped onto a skateboard, I immediately fell on my butt, and knocked the wind out of myself. There I was, writhing silently in pain, not knowing if my butt was going to fall off, or if I was going to die by auto-suffocation. I still remember the exact spot where all of this happened. It was in front of my friend's place. Their house lay in the middle of a hill, and his dad was a doctor. Where the hell was his dad when I was suffocating? Once I got my breath back, I hopped back on the skateboard. This time, I had slightly better luck, and managed to go down the hill. The experience was quite thrilling, and as we discovered, would thrill an entire generation.
There were some pitfalls to these contraptions. For one thing, the first ones were very very susceptible to tiny pebbles on the road. You could be leisurely cruising down a hill, and all of a sudden, the skateboard would stop dead in its tracks, held back by the smallest of earthly objects, a minuscule pebble. The other skateboard stopper was lawn, any stretch of lawn.
When the store-bought boards came out, they too went through an evolution, a rather quick one at that, to a point where the wheels had grown in width, the board itself was much wider and longer, and the thing actually had a suspension. These improvements made all the difference in the world, and millions of boards were bought by young people. The craze coincided with the advent of Squirrels and Yohawks. Now you're going to ask me what Squirrels and Yohawks were. Suffice it to say that a portion of the youthful population dressed like and behaved one way, and the remainder of the population dressed and behaved another way. I don't even think that Hippies had been invented yet.
Anyway, we were too young to be either Squirrels or Yohawks, but we loved skateboarding on a very popular circular downhill piece of pavement called Yohawk Haven. There were hundreds of skateboarders there, and that's where you could learn all the latest tricks. You'd also get to see some of the most incredible falls. Had skateboards been invented by clothing companies? Did the ensuing trend to wear jeans with holes in the knees ultimately come from skateboarding?
Thank goodness the act of skateboarding was never legislated into having to wear helmets. Sure some people cracked their heads open, but they were the exception. The thrill of taking a chance on a skateboard was very therapeutic. It gave you a chance to take partial control of your destiny, to risk, and to enjoy the rewards of taking that risk, or to pay for your folly. Isn't that what life is all about?
It's sort of neat to see people still enjoying them today. It's truly amazing to see what they do with them, compared to what we used to do with them.
What on Earth was I Thinking?
I was a pretty mild mannered kid in class, not a real bother or anything, just one of the kids, so to speak. There were however, a few kids, and then again, could you really call them kids, who were, shall we say, more bothersome. I'm talking about the ones who already had jobs in grade eight! These guys were old enough to have kids of their own, for Pete's sake. They had evidently not done too well in school, and were repeating the same year until they could legally get out of school. Now I didn't mind these guys, but I made it a point to keep my distance. I was eleven years old in grade eight, and these guys were sixteen.
The teacher, in a teacher's infinite wisdom felt that I would make a great buffer zone between two of these guys, because they were uncontrollable if left sitting adjacent to each other. Good thinking, Teach! Well I didn't get off on this idea at all, but being more complacent, I endured for a while.
Late one afternoon, in the middle of February, things came to a boil. I had one guy sitting in front of me, and one guy sitting behind me in class. They were farting around as usual, and I was in the middle of it. The games were the usual ones. Hide the pencil, tear the notebook, throw this here, and that there. I was an orderly person, and I was also someone who needed quiet to concentrate. None of this was happening. So I blew up. I took my freshly sharpened pencil, and jabbed it into the back of the guy sitting in front of me. Big mistake! It felt good, and got rid of some tension, but now I was in trouble.
“We're going to get you after class! You're going to get it!
I knew what these guys were capable of, and I couldn't rely on them cooling down and forgetting about it before the end of the day. It was already twenty to four and we were out of there at four. Panic. Well I worked out the best contingency plan that I could think up in twenty minutes. I figured that nothing would happen in the school because these guys spent more time at the principal's office than they did in class. So I had to use the crowd as cover to get away. I knew that the house next door to the school had a driveway that led to the backyard, and there I would find a space between the church and the garage that would allow me to escape to the other side of the block. Then I could take the long way around, and avoid these guys.
The plan worked to a point. I was able to get out of the school quickly. I did not have far to run. Although I knew of it, I had never tried to pass through the opening between the church and the garage. I ran to the opening. The opening was tighter than I anticipated, and there were some boards piled up in there. I was standing in the driveway, looking out onto the street, when all of a sudden the side door of the house opened and the lady who owned the house started screaming at me and telling me that I had no business in her driveway. I used more body language than anything else. What I really wanted to do was tell her to shut up and go inside, and that I'd be out of there in a minute or so. Well I still remember the absurdity of it all, me standing in the driveway, the old woman screaming at me, and the guys who were out to get me running past the driveway, not looking anywhere but straight ahead. I felt like I had been enveloped in a cloak, and I felt so lucky and thankful th
at in their fury the guys went straight by me. I thanked my lucky stars that day, in the driveway.
The next morning rolled around, and I knew I had to go back to school, that I had to sit between these two guys again, and I wasn't looking forward to any of it.
Well I went to school, and I timed it so that I wouldn't have to hang around in the school yard, and I went to my desk, and I sat down, and I pretended that nothing had happened. Thank goodness for short fuses, because it was as if the previous day's events had never taken place. I never tried to explain it. I just accepted what had happened and forgot about it. Shortly after, I asked to be moved to another part of the class.
Walk, it’s Good for You!
I'd hate to count the number of miles that I walked as a kid. Not that it did me any harm. Quite the contrary, it did me a heck of a lot of good. I can't help but think that kids these days get a little spoiled by their parents. The kids get bused everywhere by the school boards. When do they walk?
I remember when I was a kid, the first school I went to was about five blocks away. Even in kindergarten, I used to walk to the school. When the new school opened, I had to walk somewhat farther, about eight blocks. That's okay though, I was now going into grade one. Sometime after grade one, we moved, and guess what, I got a break. I only had to walk about four blocks. Then, going into grade five, I had to switch schools. So now I was walking about ten blocks to get to school, but that's okay, I was getting older. But here's the clincher. I would walk to school in the morning, walk home for lunch, walk back to school, and then walk home after school. It had to be really cold to not go home for lunch. So if you do some quick figuring, I was walking about forty blocks a day, just for school. I never saw the inside of a school bus unless we were going on a field trip. In the winter, I would sometimes walk back to within one block of the school to go skating. I'd slap my skates on at home, and walk nine blocks to the skating rink, spend some time there, and then walk back home. The sidewalks usually had snow on them, so you could sort of skate-walk.