Summer Memories
The summers of my childhood were endless. I woke up, had breakfast and immediately was sent outside until the noon whistle blew. When I was growing up, every small town had a whistle that sounded every day at noon sharp; that’s how we knew to go home (or back to grandmas) for lunch. After a lunch hastily eaten, we quickly headed back out before we could be corralled into doing dishes.
We spend our days running wild, rain or shine. We had the run of the main street sidewalk for playing games, like hopscotch or roller skating. It was the 60s, the end of the baby boom, and kids to play with were plentiful. The grown-ups were there to keep an eye on us and corral us for the occasional errand.
Other children’s parents/grandparents never hesitated to help or hinder us with the occasional warning. We had the run of two playgrounds, the public and the elementary school ones, and there was a paddling pool to splash in. We loved to hide in the lumber yard, but being it was off limits, only got to explore it on Sundays and holidays. The lumber yard was a forbidden danger full of nails, the fear of tetanus shots because of a rusty nail stepped on and splinters.
In reality, the lumber yard consisted of hundreds of open shelves, long enough for two or three kids to lie down in them toe to head. I don’t really remember the appeal except it was cool & dark and smelt of saw dust, and was, of course, forbidden!
Our summer games were different from the schoolyard games we played from September to June. There were fewer rules, nobody to tell us what to do and boys & girls roamed together as one large pack, a gaggle of kids, a mob.
What is a large group of children called?
The biggest difference was that in the summer we were allowed out after supper. Summer evenings are long, for a few short weeks, the sun stays up until ten and we pack of children were not called in early to bed. In the back alley, we played tag or hide-n-seek in the waning twilight.
I don’t remember many rainy childhood days. The rain did not stop my fun; I would pull on my serviceable rubber boots and follow the streams the rain made. I would imagine tiny people boating and building and playing along these streams. It was very British, in my imagination; there were green forests and rolling hills and fairies. My first book was Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book and these are the illustrations that haunt my childhood memories.
If I was not outside, I was at the library (after all it was right next door) or I was hiding and reading. I don’t know why I hid with my books? I hid under the bed, in the back of my mother’s closet or upstairs in the back of eldest sister’s closet. I still like creating caves and I still like reading; you could say that on bright summer days, the curtains closed as they are now, my apartment is one big, solitary cave.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a small town, 5 blocks x 5 blocks in size, with a bustling main street. Main Street had two grocery stores, a drugstore, a hardware store, the library, a meat market, a bank, a cafe, the seldom used train station at one end, the elementary school at the other end, and a horseshoe pitch. It had every thing we could ever need.
Of course, part of the summer was spent with grandparents. My mother’s parents lived in a smaller town than we did after they sold their farm and my father’s parents were, on a farm, just a few miles out of town. We had swimming lessons in the lake my mother’s parents’ town was named for. When we were in our early teens, my younger brother and I walked across this lake one winter and the news reached my grandparents before we were even across this frozen vast-land (yes, we got in trouble).
On my father’s parents farm we morphed into farm kids, free to roam the countryside, staying within yelling distance, of course. We weeded the garden, we climbed the rock pile we helped to create, we picked cattails at the slough, we conversed with the cows and were chased by the vicious geese. When he was twelve, my younger brother got a BB gun for Christmas. I was so jealous! When he finally let me use it, I accidentally on purpose shot him in the back of the leg. I wanted to see if it would hurt and was not about to shoot myself. I didn’t get in trouble for this because he never tattled on me (which was very unlike my younger brother).
There were cousins galore on my father’s side and none on my mother’s, though there were a handful of second & third cousins much older than us. On my father’s side we cousins ranged from babies to teenagers and there was always some one to run wild with. I miss that aspect of summer. My summers now are too bereft of companionship.
From the ages of 7 – 13, I was a wild child, a tomboy, a member of Peter Pan’s tribe or Robin Hoods. There was endless freedom and no responsibility except to be home in time for meals and to be respectful and kind. Like any normal pack of children there were fights, disagreements, bumps, bruises and tears. We learned to negotiate our way; we learned how to survive and who would compromise.
Childhood is not necessarily safe but we all survive it somehow.
In spite of the bumps, scrapes, bruises and hurt feelings.
My summer childhoods felt perfect and I miss that bliss of perfection.
I wonder what I have lost, growing up, becoming fearful, and losing that fearlessness to try everything.
What would you answer if I asked you to come out and play?
(Playing Hide-n-seek in the dark is fun for grown-ups too.)
11/22/63
November 20, 2011 at 12:31 pm (Book Commentary, Travel) (1960s, assassinations, conspiracy, Doctor Who, JFK, Kennedy, past present future, politics, Science Fiction, Stephen King, time travel)
I just finished Stephen King’s latest novel. It was intriguing. I found it hard to put down. I read it over three nights which was barely doable – Uncle Stevie writes long and this book clocks in at over 840 pages.
I’ve been reading Stephen King since his first novel, Carrie, came out. I read Carrie, oddly enough, the year it came out. I’ve read everything since (the Bachman books, the Dark Tower series, both versions of The Stand, the Entertainment Weekly columns, the short story collections – every obscure item, both fiction & non-fiction that I could find). Though I’m sure I’ve missed some since it’s only been lately that everything is available to anyone (via the web, for instance).
I don’t read Uncle Stevie’s books because they make me think. I read his books for the nostalgic pop culture, the inevitable links between stories and the interesting “what if” streams of consciousness they provoke. His world is my world; he’s only ten years older than my older sister and we grew up in the same sociological conditions.
I don’t find his books scary. What I usually skip over is his all too real gory descriptions. I’ve never slept with the lights on after reading a Stephen King book, not like I did after Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle; I don’t read a King book just before bed because of the gore.
11/22/63.
It is assumed that all of us know what this date signifies. I tested out this theory yesterday, at my Toastmasters meeting, and only one person guessed close – he said the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But than again, we are Canadian and not American.
11/22/63.
Am I giving too much away by telling you that this is the day JFK died in Dallas, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (presumably).
11/22/63 is a science fiction, time travel novel.
It asks – what if JFK did not die in Dallas? What if we could go back in time and change the past? What happens to our present/future then?
Jake Epping, an English teacher in a Maine High School is moved by an essay written by one of his GED students, Harry Dunning, the High School janitor and this action leads to the finding of a place that links to a certain summer’s day in 1958 and an old friend who is determined to stop the JFK assassination but can not continue.
This past has a reset button. This past can be altered without, it is at first assumed, irrevocably altering the present reality.
Read the book to learn what watershed moments involve Jake and the janitor’s father; watch Jake learn how to live in the past; uncover who Sadie and the general are; see what happens on 11/22/63 and learn the importance of the Green Card Man.
I have always been intrigued by time travel. My favourite Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes are the ones in which our main characters travel back into history. This novel felt very Whovian.
I’m not a big fan of politics. I could count the number of political novels I’ve read using just my fingers. However, 11/22/63 was a perfect mixture of political, sociological, and pop culture history. Reading this book made me want to read more about Oswald and JFK.
Plus, I found King’s version of an alternative political history in which Maine becomes a province of Canada, to be plausible. I loved reading the afterword which put the historical facts in context for me. You know but can’t necessarily tell, reading the book, how much work went into researching this novel.
Now, for the fun bits.
Look closely for references to It and the small town of Derry Maine. I knew right away what was going on here and that made me feel very smart. I love it when Uncle Stevie references one book/story inside another.
I was the first to read my library’s copy of 11/22/63. It was a crisp, new hardcover and seeing as the majority of books I read are library copies, I seldom get to crack the spine of a new book. It makes me feel rich. Heaven knows I could never afford to buy all the books I read and so I daily Thank the Stars for libraries.
Finally, 11/22/63 is dedicated to Zelda, King’s granddaughter, but was supposed to be dedicated to my favourite time travel author, Jack Finney. Kudos to both of them and Uncle Stevie – enjoy being a grandpa. I think you’ll like it.
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