"Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood." Pablo Neruda

When I was a kid, I grew up in a nice suburb in between Dallas/Fort Worth. The house was huge by what some standards are today. The kitchen was one of those annoyingly skinny ones with a built-in mod "bar" for casual seating. We frequently ate dinner there. My most traumatic childhood memories are at the dinner table, well, that and when I'd get caught playing in the street. I was a finicky eater, and my father was the guy who wanted me to eat everything on my plate. I was predisposed to some kind of conflict occurring whenever we sat around the bar to eat. I'll never know if it was on purpose, but my dad used to stare into space, his cold, icy-blue eyes always seemed to be watching not me, not mom, not brother or sister, but my plate. I didn't get it at the time, but I guess because I was ten and twelve years younger than his other children, and because I inherited a smattering of his impatience, I can see how going through the fun of kids being picky eaters could get old. It's too bad that's a kind of fond memory of him now.

The entire neighborhood was wooded-- almost every yard had an old stand of trees in front and back.  Our house, built in 1967, was a two-story, four bedroom, two bath, living room, dining room, two-car garage, and it sat on an acre lot, originally about three acres, and there was a tiny creek running through the middle of the property, and many trees, huge, ancient oaks, cedars, elms. The three two-story houses in a row, almost exactly the same with some differences in the stair wells, each had large property dimensions. When I was really small, my sister had a horse named Bandy, all I really remember is he fit in our yard, was white and he would try to eat my hair.

Between my father, when he was around doing cool things, and my wonderful surrogate family next door, those few acres were a paradise . As kids ranging in age of about 6 years, all of our first names begin with "K," and one of the boys was born 16 days before me-- our moms were pregnant neighbors together-- we all went to the same school our whole lives, living next door... and, most of the neighborhood kids hung out with us, and they played while they were still innocent.

In my backyard there was a swing-set with two swings, a big slide and a monkey bar, like parallel bars in gymnastics, and a tiny slide. Over by a huge elm tree there was another set of monkey-bars my dad scored from some park that was being demolished. It was like a huge space-ship and a labyrinth and a dungeon and a jail for all of our imaginary role-playing games. My father built  a wooden airplane swing for me that hung from a high branch in a very very old and large oak tree. It had pulleys on each wing and one at the tail, a bicycle seat, a control stick and a propeller that really turned 'round when you got going fast on it. To the best of my dad's abilities it looked like a British fighter plane, a "Hurricane" I believe, like the one above.

My dad raced cars, loved old motorcycles and was a mechanic, although he was employed as a cash register technician, and our house also had the treasure trove of fun tools, BMW motorcycles, helmets for playing racers, Star Wars, martians, not to forget the old BMW Isetta that dad had bought and it sat for a while in the garage. A little pod-shaped thing, shaped much like today's Smart car, had entry in the front, a big hinged angled door like an industrial freezer--the steering column was hinged and pulled out when you opened the door-- one bench seat, a snap-on vinyl sun-roof. This car was the perfect space ship & time travel device and I remember one rainy day we hung Xmas lights in the darkness of the closed garage and argued over who would be captain, etc. But my surrogate father next door was an engineer, and since he had so many kids I guess, aside from just being a really loving, cool guy, he built a basketball court, where we also held performances of summer plays; a play-house with cherries painted on its lovely pop-out windows, especially good for pioneers at war-- the "pioneers" would be attacked from above with huge black PVC bazookas by the "Indians" who had a stealth position in the tree-house/fort up in a cedar tree to the south of the playhouse along the what by this time had become a large city ditch, former creek. He also built a bridge to get us all across the ditch to where we had a nicely foot-worn baseball diamond, and north of there was a magical,glorious thicket.

When I was a kid I liked the word "thicket" because I'd read it in Bambi, and this was the first "real" thicket I had discovered when I started riding my bike through the trails back there. Of course everyone in the neighborhood likely knew it was there. For me it was otherworldly and perfect; it seemed precisely round and the 15' or higher trees had all bent over the circle and were bound downward creating an enveloping darkness amongst the limbs of the trees, the overgrown shrubs and especially vines.  In the spring and summer, everything from poison ivy to mustang grapes were entangled within the dense brambles; and the flowers, whose names  I learned as primroses, Texas wine-cups, bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, Indian blankets, dandelions and buttercups blossomed below the outside rim of trees. In almost the precise center of the thicket was a jagged, worn and shorn stump that still clung to life with fresh green sprouting branches that seemed strategically placed beneath the tiny skylight above. I would carry a lunch there sometimes by myself and imagine that before I arrived there were fairies and elves dancing and frolicking around the spot of sunlight and the green stump. I would feel a surge of energy walking into the circle, and day dream and eat my peanut butter and jelly or plain American processed pasteurized cheese product sandwiches on white Mrs. Baird's bread. I would often look from my brother's upstairs window toward the thicket in the darkness to see if I could see the fairies glowing.

The ditch wasn't so bad either. You could collect rocks and fossils, most frequently the same old fossils but you were still a paleontologist, which was another game we played, along with wildlife biology-- collecting horned toads, and toads and bullfrogs, gathering strands of eggs laid in the still somewhat natural flow of creek water into mason jars and waiting for them to hatch into tadpoles and then grow legs--catching as many fireflies as you could and putting them in a mason jar and staring at the glow all night before you fell asleep. I should feel guilty for all of the slugs we killed with salt just because it was so "neat" to watch. But perhaps we made up for it with the many times we tried to rear a baby bird that had fallen from its nest, or by the fact that our parents actually let us run in the mosquito fogger-truck emanations.

To be continued...maybe... if I have food-deprivation insomnia and am not writing more important stuff. :)