I live close enough to my parent’s house in North Carolina that I can jump in the truck or on the bike and be there in a little less than four hours, which is a really good deal after spending 8 years in New Jersey where a trip home meant an eleven hour drive one-way. (My wife is now going through that, and I pity her.) All of the time alone in the truck and especially on the bike – no radio on either bike – gives me ample time to lose myself in thought, which is where I sometimes come up with ideas for my blog.
Kinda like this one.
So last week on my way back from my parent’s house, I’m cruising along in the truck with the cruise control set to a comfortable 75 MPH in a 70 zone, listening to Jimmy Buffett and letting my mind wander. (And before you ask, my wife wasn’t with me because we have two dogs, one of which is on eye medication so he won’t go blind in his remaining good eye. My parents have cats – LOTS of ‘em – so taking the dogs with us isn’t the smartest thing we could ever do, so we don’t. Hence, one of us stays home when the other travels to see family.) On this occasion, my mind wanders back to my childhood and some of the more pleasant things I remember from growing up in an age where things were simpler, life was easier (for me, anyway), and the world wasn’t quite such a dangerous place. These memories parading through my mind made me feel good, so I thought I’d share them here instead of posting something in which I’m complaining about something else. (Besides, there’s always tomorrow for that, and NObama isn’t going anywhere for the next three and a half years.)
So let’s step into Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback Machine” and travel way back to 1963 and work our way up from there, shall we?
What, you never watched “Rocky and Bullwinkle” as a kid?
Oh. Anyhow….
First stop is 1963 in a Richmond, Virginia suburb called Central Gardens. The big thing that I remember about living in the Gardens was flying kites. These were the paper, wood and string kind that I don’t think you can find anymore, and they came in two colors – red with white letters or blue with white letters. My personal favorite was red. I remember getting them from the drug store on the Mechanicsville Turnpike where my father would take me for haircuts at Woody’s Barber Shop – when you got them the paper kite was wrapped around the wooden sticks, and one of the tricks was getting it unwound and laid out without ripping the paper. After getting the paper on the wooden frame – slipping that string around the edge of the kite into the slots on the ends of the wooden sticks could be tricky - you had to tie a piece of string on the back side of the cross member and draw it tight to create a “bow,” because the kite wouldn’t fly if you didn’t. Then you found an old t-shirt or a rag and ripped it up into strips to make a tail. Finally, you tied one end of a 100 foot roll of string onto it, took it outside, and went flying!
I remember at one time there were about six kids in our front yard, all flying kites. To this day I can remember the feeling of the string tugging in my fingers as the wind kicked against the kite, the string played all the way out to the stop so that all 100 feet of it was out, the kite so far up in the sky that it was nothing but a little dot.
I also remember the feeling of utter helplessness when the string would break and the kite would go flying off on its own, landing God knows where. How far away it landed depended on how high it was when the string broke, and if all of your string was played out the kite would come down somewhere in Maryland for all you knew.
In 1965 my family was living in Highland Springs, a small town 9 miles southeast of Richmond. At the intersection of Nine Mile Road and Holly Street was The Center Drug Store. This drug store had one of the few remaining honest-to-goodness soda fountains in it, and I remember going into the cool of the store during a hot July day during summer vacation and ordering a real Cherry Coke – the kind where the old guy behind the counter mixed carbonated water, Coke syrup, and cherry syrup into a glass and gave it to you. If it wasn’t cherry Cokes it was lemonade – hand squeezed, honest to goodness lemonade made right there in front of you.
In the back of the room was a circular, white wire display rack that spun around, and on this rack was the store’s selection of balsa wood gliders. There were basically three kinds – a single wing hand-tossed glider, a biplane hand-tossed glider, and a rubber band powered one with actual wheels. The single wing was 15 cents, the biplane was 20 cents, and you’d pay a whopping $1.25 for the rubber band one.
I didn’t care, I loved all three of ‘em! The single wing was great because depending upon how you set the wing in the slot and on how hard you threw it, that thing would either fly in loop after loop after loop, or it would go in a straight line from my yard clear across the street into Mark Wright’s front yard! The biplane glider called for a lot more finesse, because if you threw it too hard the upper wing would split, and any kid who was ever a balsa wood glider pilot knew that a split in the wing meant the trash can for the glider. You couldn’t tape it because the tape would throw the balance way off; glue would do the same thing, so once the wing split that was it for the glider.
The glider with the rubber band was simply amazing to me and every other kid who was 8 years old. I mean, this thing actually had wheels and would take off from the sidewalk! Sure, the wheels were nothing more than a piece of wire bent double with a red plastic wheel on each end, but the point was that you could wind the rubber band up, set the glider down on the sidewalk, and when you let it go the little craft would actually take off and fly!
Okay, so it only flew for about ten feet or so, having expending 90% of the rubber band’s energy in the takeoff run, but hey, it still flew! To an eight year old kid, this was great!
Oh, to be eight years old again…
These memories made me smile last weekend on the drive home, and they’re making me smile now as I transform thoughts into words for you to read. And hopefully, my words have brought back some pleasant childhood memories of your own, and have made you smile as well.
IHC
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