Paul's house had a big front yard

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We all played at Paul's house because it had a big front yard.

All the boys lived on Paul's block; my block only had girls, four of them. That meant I had to travel to Paul's block. Girls were OK, but I mean, what do you do, at four, with four of them? I tried playing dolls with them once, where they bent little paper cloths that had paper shoulder tabs on them around the cardboard bodies. Then you were supposed to jig them up and down while moving them forward. I asked them what to do, and they said, grabbing the Father doll, jigging him up and down and walking him onto the towel that represented the house floor then saying "Hi, I'm home", then picking up a woman doll, jigging her up and down while marching her towards the father doll, saying "hi" and then making kissing-smacking noises.

This was stupid. I couldn't see any point in this, I mean it was me jiggy marching things around and me saying things I knew I was going to say, so what was the point in this? This was s-t-u-p-i-d.

So I had to travel to Paul's block to play with boys, where we could pretend to be robots and stick our arms out straight and march towards each other while the others ran away, all while making clicking noises. This wasn't stupid - this was thrilling!

Paul had an older brother Frank. Frank was in the first grade while we were too young to be in school yet.

Frank beat me up when he got home from school. He beat me up by making fists and punching me in the stomach as hard as he could. I didn't know what to do with this. So I would go home before he got out of school.

We lived close enough to school to hear the school bells.

My grandmother would tell me to quit going over there because he was going to beat me up, but the only other choice was to not play with the boys, and be sentenced to playing with girls all the time. So I went to Paul's.

Paul lived in my old home. It was sold to Paul's parents after my parents divorced and I moved in with my grandmother while my mother moved to Florida and my father went somewhere - I didn't know where.

I had a hard time understanding why my places in my old home were now Paul's.

I liked to crawl under the house when it was mine - it was cool, dark and the dogs would follow me in and lay around with me, now I couldn't. You could lay under there and listen to the grownups call for you. You had to wait until they were gone before coming out, otherwise they would know where you were and you knew, somehow, they wouldn't let you go back under there, so best to keep it secret.

The dogs always seemed anxious to go under there with me. Probably the heat.