Paul's house had a big front yard

This story under development...

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.

I never met a kid with a bottle opener

I never met a kid with a bottle opener.

That thought came to me this morning as I was laying in bed preparing to get up. You prepare to get up if you have vertigo. No point getting up just to do a face plant!

Anyway, I was thinking about a crack the dentist found in one of my molars. It's from an old filling that has acted like a wedge and is being driven down into the tooth, causing it to split.

So I'm going to have to get a crown on May 12 2011.

This will be my 2nd crown, caused by the same problem, but on a different tooth.

The noise from grinding the tooth for the crown is the worst part. Last time, I mentioned it to the dentist while he was grinding. He disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with his iPod, selected some blues for me and handed it to me. I cranked up the volume, allowing it to mask most of the grinding. It made for a much better experience.

Anyway, thinking about my tooth cracking led me back to my childhood and visions of us kids walking up to the corner gas station to get a soft drink - either Pepsi or Mountain Dew, another Pepsi product. We preferred these over Coke because Pepsi gave you twice as much for a nickel, the cost of a drink in the 50s.

These were the old style bottles with crimped metal bottle caps on them.

We were four, five and six years old, plenty old enough to walk to the gas station by ourselves.

Buying the drinks was an experience. We had learned, if you were barefoot on the cool moist concrete floor of the service station, you would get a little jolt of electricity when you reached into the old top-loading drink cooler. It would make you dance, and everyone would giggle - us and the grownups. We giggled because we knew there was a secret. The grownups, not being barefoot, didn't know the secret. They thought we danced because we were happy.

So being barefoot was the preferred method of obtaining your drink.

Reach in, grab your drink, squeal, dance a little, giggle. All for a nickel.

We all left with our drinks. We didn't open them on the side opener. Instead, we all marched out holding our drinks. The grownups thought we were carrying them home to drink.

But we didn't wait to get home to drink them. We were going to drink them on the way home, after pouring a pack of salted peanuts into them.

Pouring salted peanuts into a drink makes the drink fizz. You have to drink the liquid down enough so there's room to accommodate the peanuts and the fizz. It's a delicate balance; drink too much and the drink is too salty; too little and it will fizz over when you pour the peanuts in.

But to add the peanuts, we had to open the drinks. We didn't open them in the store because we were going to all open our drinks by using our teeth to carefully lift an edge of the bottle cap. Lifting three or four of these edges would allow us to pop our cap off our drink.

This was the preferred method for opening a bottle cap. We didn't need no stinking can openers, we carried our own can openers! We could open a bottle any time we wanted one.

It gave us a little swagger. Four kids, heads held high, a swagger, and barefoot.

When you lift a bottle cap in this way, an instant of fizz gushes into your mouth, and a smile breaks out. Everybody laughs and giggles.

One kid said his momma said not to do that. He wasn't sure why. We thought about it and realized it was stupid. Stupid being telling his mother. We knew telling a grownup anything only resulted in one thing - being told "don't do that".

I still remember the day my best friend Paul told me his mother said for him not to eat his buggers, so he wasn't going to eat his buggers anymore. I asked him why we weren't supposed to eat buggers. He said she said they were dirty.

We thought about it. We decided the little hard buggers were, in fact, probably dirty. However, the clear runny kind that hadn't hardened yet were obviously clean, you could see through this, so we could continue to sop those up. We felt good, we had solved the issue - we were obeying Paul's mother, and not eating dirty buggers. Of course, it wasn't a problem for me anyway because my mother, who knew everything, hadn't told me to stop eating my buggers, so I knew Paul's mother was wrong. But I didn't mention this to Paul, I didn't want Paul to know his mother was stupid.

Paul and I had a favorite game. It consisted of going to a field behind his grandmother's house. If the field had just been turned over by a plow, and then allowed to sun dry for a day, the earth would have baked hard, which made for perfect dirt clods that could be thrown at each other.

I liked this game a lot because my aim was better and I could throw harder, and thus stand back out of Paul's throwing area. I could hit Paul, but he couldn't reach me, and if he threw harder, it went wild.

I remember hitting Paul in the chest with a clod. His surprised look when it hit him tickled me so much I fell down on my back laughing. When I opened my eyes, there was Paul, standing over me, backlit from the sun, holding a dirt ball over his head that was so huge, it took both hands to hold it. He raised it up over his head, and at that instant I foretold the next. It came crashing down on me. Paul ran into his grandmother's house.

This wasn't fair, and I was going to get Paul.

I couldn't just go into his grandmother's house, I had to knock. His grandmother told me Paul was in the bathroom. I waited a while then knocked again. He was still in the bathroom. Soon, she quit coming to answer the door.

I realized he was never going to come out to get his reward.

I left.

The Women in My Life

I realize this is a somewhat provocative title, but it's the most appropriate.

All of the men in my life, my father, my uncle, my step-father, they all disappeared out of my life, leaving me to my find my own way. The women, however, stayed and took care of me, giving me the direction in my life.

My parents separated when I was three, and divorced at four. I had no siblings - two brothers died at birth. We all carried the same name; I'm the III for this reason.

My mother was relatively old when I was born, certainly older than the average for a child during this era. She was 33, while my father was 38. Because of this, my mother never made friends with any of the moms of my friends - by the time I went to 1st grade, they were in their mid-20s, and my mom was in her 40s.

Prior to 1st grade, I spent all of my days with my grandmother. Later, after the divorce, my mom also moved away for a couple of years, so during this time I was raised by my grandmother.

With the divorce, my father moved away, and I only saw him infrequently from this point on; I never got to know any of his family, so my family consisted of my mother's family.

My maternal grandmother was very important to me. She was devoted to me and showered me with love and attention. When I was with her, she took care of me; when I was with my mother, I took care of myself.

So my grandmother was the first woman that was very important to me. She continued to be so until her death, two months after I was married at age 22.


I had two maternal aunts. One, a twin to my mother (J) and the other a few years older (K). J was less interested in children than even my mother; my Aunt K however, was a warm loving person. She was the 2nd important woman in my life.

Aunt K had a daughter, S. She is 13 years older than me, and has also been an important influence in my life. Both K and S, along with J and my mother, were women that took charge of their environment; they were a generation or two ahead of their contemporaries. For example, both K and S drove boats for skiing when we would go to our local lake. They were the only women I ever met at in the 60s that would, or could, drive a boat. My wife drives our boat now, but I still see few women driving boats, 50 years later.

These women, my grandmother, my Aunt K and S, all stepped into a void in my life and taught me so much. I obtained the central Christian beliefs from them, along with other moral values. With them, I always felt I had a family. With my mother, it was always a lonely, isolated, hateful environment. After my mother remarried when I was 10, she and her husband C seemed bent on finding out how much they could argue in restaurants, how much of an aggravation they could be to other people, how much they could embarrass me in public with their mean, hateful dispositions.

My mother, meanwhile, mocked Christianity as "an old, backward religion". I suffered from her religious views, her constant switching from one belief system to another, until she died when I was 34. I referred to her religious beliefs as "the religion of the month club". I don't miss her.

My Aunt J has similar beliefs, or non-beliefs, depending on your view. I don't seek to spend any time with her either.

Both my mother and my Aunt J felt they were little princesses. They both came up the daughters of a wealthy man (for that area). Because of this, they spent considerable time pretending to have money, pretending to be important. But in reality they were mean, cheap, stingy women. My Aunt J used to drive her travel coach van across country, stop and spend the night in a WalMart parking lot to avoid paying for an RV or motel room, meanwhile wearing furs and driving Cadillacs.

They both learned that they could coerce my Aunt K and get their way by getting into a public place, then create a scene. My Aunt K, embarrassed by their course behavior and public scene, would agree to almost anything to avoid the embarrassment.

My Aunt J, at my daughter's wedding, seized this opportunity to force her way over something which, because of the wedding, was not convenient or appropriate to the rest of us. However, I had observed this stunt too many times, and I refused to be manipulated by this. When she couldn't get her way, finding herself publicly humiliated, she stomped out of our house and has never returned. I don't miss her either.

So my mother, and her twin sister J, have been influences to avoid in my life - to reject anything they use to coerce people to get their way. They have also been important in my life - how not to conduct your life. I'm glad their negative influence has been removed from my life. I'm glad my daughters and wife have not had to spend any time around them.

At age 21, I truly met my wife. I say truly, because while I had known her slightly since I was 14, I only got to really know her at 21, when I started to date her. We got married at age 22.

My grandmother loved my wife. She got to know my wife during the last year of her life, and said she felt good leaving me to P, that I would have someone to take care of me. It was like a release, and I think she felt OK to move on.

My wife has been both the most wonderful woman in my life, as well as the most important person in my life. She has been with me now for 36 years of marriage. She has been a solid foundation for me to draw from. My goal, everyday, is to make my wife feel appreciated and loved. I think it is easier to make someone feel loved then it is to make them feel appreciated.

My life has been wonderful and fulfilled since I met and married my wife.

My two daughters, H and S, as adults, have shown me a lot of attention and have made me feel special. They are both strong women in their own right, and making their way in the world. They are topics of a later blog, as they are too big in my life to be limited to the topic of this blog.

And finally, my wife's sister V, has always been a good, kind woman to me. She has suffered more than I would have liked to have seen, but goes through her life with a positive outlook, and makes a positive contribution to everyone around her. We are so happy she has found more happiness in her life in recent years, and has a husband that appreciates her.

And that's the women in my life!

Southern Sounds and Sights of Summer

There's something about an ice cream truck, driving through the neighborhood, playing its first song of summer, that gets children excited while making adults reminisce about childhood.

Children came out the door as if ejected by the house; tilted forward, legs and feet churning, trying to catch up to the rest of the child.

When I was a child, it seemed the ice cream truck always came during the evening. I wonder why that was? Maybe parents used it for good behavior, an end of day reward, proving they had successfully negotiated another day?

I never had much money growing up, so I typically didn't buy an ice cream, instead preferring to save my money for comic books - besides, I knew I had ice cream in the refrigerator. But I did like to go near the window and observe the anticipation excitement on the kids faces after they had placed their order. Now it seems as though the younger kids were licking the entire rim of their mouths while they waited!

Some of the vendors appeared to enjoy the job and the children, while others appeared to not be happy in the job at all - in a hurry to get to the next site they wouldn't find any enjoyment in either.

I never saw a woman selling ice cream from a truck. I wonder why that was too.

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Cicadas and crickets come out at this time too, playing their songs of summer, along with lightening bugs to intermittently light the way. I have some crickets singing and lightening bugs blinking in my yard as I write this from my back porch.

I used to chase after lightening bugs, placing them when caught, into a mason jar with holes punch in the lid with a fork, in order to have 'air to breath'. Also some carefully placed grass and a small stick to climb - lightening bugs like to climb, you know. I'm not sure what the purpose of the grass was, but it seemed like a good thing to add to make them feel more at home.

Sometimes little fingers would catch an unfortunate lightening bug in the grips of the lid, and separate the bug's tail from his main body, resulting in a continuous emission of light from the tail. I would watch as the glow, which seemed to pulse slightly, gradually faded away. I didn't like it when this would happen, as even young children understood they had killed the lightening bug. But I was on a mission, and lightening bugs had to be caught, so I would endeavor to be more careful next time.

I have read, but can't ascertain the truthfulness, that only the males light up in an attempt to 'call' a female in to mate. I also read a wonderful story (I think it was in 'Guide Post') that there was a valley in North Carolina, where all of the lightening bugs in the entire field, hundreds, if not thousands of them, would 'strobe' on and off at exactly same time.

I hope this made the females feel they were important and desired!

After pondering about it, I don't believe sticking a light bulb in my rear will result in any females coming my way.....