Continuation, hiatus

Today my Mac shall share time, about a week, with packing peanuts, my router prepares to be routed to Dallas and my Internet connection, via Comcast, will terminate later in the day. I can post from my ipad or iphone, but don't expect piles of paragraphs until I reach Dallas, by then stricken with withdrawal pains, desperate for my narcotic injection of "run off at the mouth". For now and for a last meal before my posting fast, I offer up a snack of my history, replete with boring kid stuff.

I left off somewhere in or near the summer between fourth and fifth grade, having digested Psycho Cybernetics, likely a meal far too sophisticated for my palate, met a cool musician and listened to a blind guitarist, survived an earthquake and, for the first time, enjoyed fondue. All ten year old kids should be so lucky.

Nowadays, ten year old boys live different lives than when I was a kid. Parents are, maybe rightly so, more protective, more involved in the daily activities of their children where- as opposed to 44 years ago,- structure rules the day. While I am in favor of safety first, I feel there is a price to pay regarding the development of independence and creativity when a child has eyes upon his back every waking moment. I use the word "child", but in the '60's, I was  a kid plain and simple. I was never a child- a term I find to be curiously condescending. From daybreak until the streetlights lit, I was out exploring the world, taking risks, sometimes getting in trouble, sometimes getting banged up and always looking for something new. This behavior for a young kid was not allowed because parents were being irresponsible. ALL kids got out to play, to invent and to explore. Today's kids are stifled in their unstructured development. I believe the phenomena is part of the reason educational issues exist in America.

So my mom got S&H green stamps every time she bought groceries, giving them to me, whereby I licked page after page and affixed them to page after page of my little redemption books, soon acquiring enough to claim a prize at the stamp store that would change my life forever. In short, a stopwatch. For some kid reason, it was fascinating to measure increments of time. If I had been a child, my mom would have helped me claim a more practical prize like a scarf or a shoe polish kit; heck, if I were a child my mom would have showed me how to wet those stamps with a moist sponge and lectured me about the health hazards of licking adhesive. As were the times, my mom was raising me as  a kid and I thank her every day for that. Thanks, mom.

My first best friend in California was a kid, Rodney, a black kid who didn't go to my school but showed up in the neighborhood one day, striking up a kid conversation with me, a relative newcomer, and initializing a friendship that lasted until we moved away. The two of us bummed around all summer. When I got the stopwatch we clocked everything- cars, people walking, us sprinting, even timing how long we could pee. To this day I have a small bladder- Rodney could always pee longer than me. Eventually, we found a competition where neither of us had a clear advantage, and it consumed our summer. We started timing handstands. At first, our times rarely exceeded one second. Up, down. We found our times slightly better if we over balanced and fell on our backs, so we focused on that. If we were lucky enough to stall between under and over balancing, we found we could hang for two seconds or more. The stalls developed into balancing  acts and our times got better. Throughout the summer we stayed neck n neck and it was a blast. Once we started moving forward, our times skyrocketed. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, more! By the end of the summer, we were crossing courtyards on our hands. The summer ended, but we still practiced, though the stopwatch found itself a home in mom's junk drawer as we now marked  distance rather than time. In the spring of 1969, at school- 5th grade, I  clocked my best 50 yard dash time of the year- 6.9 seconds, and soon thereafter set my never bettered record by walking the same 50 yards on my hands.

The summer I spent with Rodney was chock full of cool stuff, so expect me to linger there for a few posts, where I will detail such happenings as: sneaking into a gated pool area, getting pushed into the deep end, nearly drowning and learning to swim on the spot, Apple Beer soda, sneaking into an orange grove, eating shitty oranges and discovering a strange, edible, sour weed likely saturated with DDT, hitting a parked car on a friends bike and recollecting a groin injury inflicted by a football back in Chicago, learning that rollerskating in a carport under construction is a bad idea...................