The Far Meadow

This is the Ferris wheel's top, this the high-flying midpoint of summer, from which we can glimpse the whole landscape of our lives.Just look there, in that far meadow: there is the toylike stage-set of your childhood, the stoops and sidewalks that made up your world. It was there you learned how to ride a bike and how to tie your shoes; how to give a noogie and how to recieve one without too much wincing.The more we look the sooner the first person singular give way for we were kids in the company of other kids, And when I pull out my old diaries they carry me right straight to that place:

• At Ballroom Dance class in Fifth Grade, my flailing hand catches Robbie Wilson square in the face and his nosebleed makes a Jackson Pollock canvas of his dress shirt.
• In school during Sixth Grade the big magazine drive has me hard-selling kinfolk across three counties and 12 weeks later my "prize" comes in the mail: a cheap ballpoint pen.
• My best friend Tina and I find a baby mouse separated from its mother. We bring it home, squeeze milk into its impossibly small mouth and pray it will last the night. The next day we hold a funeral, tissue-lined cigar box and all.
• That Christmas, I get three great presents. The dog, I lovingly note, gets four.
• Later that year, the dog gets a chest cold for which our veterinarian, with perfectly straight face, prescribes not just pills but an ounce of booze to be given nightly. (Afterward, my mother will never tire of telling of what she said to the druggist: "I need a pint of the cheapest whiskey you have," then, on seeing his expression, blurting, "IT'S FOR MY DOG!") 

Ah but how my sister and I love that pup, the first most grateful object of our young affection. We are all three kinsmen, we sense; we follow orders and come when the grownups call us. And more time passes and the diaries show our antics growing bolder:

• Our next-door neighbor Dicky lights a fire of oak leaves and rolls in it to be funny.
• He and his brother Bobby get trapped in a too-high tree and Nan and I wing buckets of hard little apples at them.
• Spring comes and we pick sides for the big season opener of Softball out behind the Talbots' house. Everyone is there: Tina and all four Talbot kids, Robbie Wilson and his younger brother Alex, Nan and I - everyone but Dick and Bob, held captive in their long Catholic-school workday.

We're four innings in when suddenly comes a deep male shout. It's Mr. Wilson on a child's bike, roaring across the Talbots' grass and heading straight for their big crimson maple.He reaches up as he passes under it, grabs a low-hanging limb with both hands and swings, letting let the bike rocket on without him. Then he jumps back to earth, limps to home plate, for one of his legs is polio-shortened, picks up the bat and hits one out of the park to bring everyone home.I can see it now. And I can remember now, too, that he did this in a thousand ways, as did all our grownups. All through our childhood they brought us home safe, then leaned in, sheltering, sheltering, sheltering us in that golden far-distant meadow (but not all the time and not all that close as these pictures of Robbie and Dick testify.)

And on the Menu Tonight... Vomiting!

So people don’t like peas that much. This I gather from reaction to my question here yesterday about the most hated childhood dishes. They also dislike brussel sprouts, and really anything in the cabbage family. (Do you know you can’t eat  cabbage and broccoli and such  if you're breast-feeding? If you do your baby will draw up its legs and howl with stomach pain. You can’t have a whole lot of chocolate either or the child will be flying around the room like this baby in Gary Larson's famous Bellybutton Slipknot cartoon. (See left. We miss  you, Mr. Far Side! )Myself I try not to focus on things I dislike. Still, I'll never forget the first time and only time our mother gave us lobster.  It was  even more expensive then than it is now and for sure it was WAY beyond the range of what our little family usually ate. And here our mom had gone out and bought it for the 'young hooligans' as she sometimes called us. Bought it, boiled the big pot of water, committed the horrific act of murder-by-scalding, then cracked the lone lobster open and set out the melted butter.This is how Nan looked around the time of this experiment.This is how I looked.Mom might  have guessed we could never measure up to the high gastronomical bar she was setting for us.      Nan took her first bite and went "Ewww!! Ack!"  I took a bite and turned a kind of purple plaid.“Terry’s going to faint again!” Nan cried. (I was a tireless fainter: in church at the doctor’s office, during flag-raising ceremonies in school. And i really did turn a kind of mottled color just before I went sheet-white and keeled over backwards. But I didn’t faint. I ran from the room, hightailing it after Nan who had scooped up the fanciest wastebasket in the house, made from a kind of elegant rigid ricecloth, and spit the half-masticated lobster bite into it.  I watched it slither down inside the wastebasket and turned more of a Madras this time.  Then I threw up all over my  little sneakers, a pair of red P.F Fliers if memory serves. The next night we were back to nursery food, an ectoplasm of soft-boiled egg, a little toast, and a side order of canned spinach. And for the rest of my childhood every time I looked at that wastebasket I thought guiltily of Mom’s gallant effort to introduce us to a higher kind of living.Maybe fine food is like a Thomas Hardy novel: you have to get to a certain age before you can enjoy it.  

End of Year Lookback Part Two

After the launching years I spoke of yesterday came the developing years when you were just starting to become who you would be, maybe as part of a team or a troop. Me, I was part of a camp, a little kid in falling-down socks and an odd sort of woolly green bathing suit that bagged at the seat and stood away from my little-kid thighs.These were the years for teams and troops and summer programs at the  playground where you did what you did without parental interference. Moms and dads mostly didn’t go to their kids’ games back then and you did the Scouting thing alone too much of the time, sometimes even walking to your troop meetings. And as for camp, well, the whole point of summer camp was to get you away from your house and teach you how to win and lose with an equal grace.I went to camp for ten years and the kids I was there with became two things on account of the experience, (1) competent athletes and (2) people who could sing. We sang morning noon and night: funny songs, schmaltzy songs, rousing songs, songs written by Steven Foster, George M. Cohan, Carl Perkins -  everything from 'Swanee' to 'Over There' to  ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ in other words. In the camp dining hall other kids would call on you to sing and you got up and did it, simple as that. Talent didn't matter as much as heart.I guess that's what those late-childhood years on teams and in troops and at camp are all for: the growing of heart. Think now: what did YOU do back then to go about growing yours?

(pretty sure I'm the little dumpy kid with the dark hair at the end of the table)