Oh, goddess. Sometimes shit just happens. I am on the precipice of my 61st birthday. I'm not quite sure were I am with that yet. The right side of my brain is panicked and saying "Dude, you're older than mold". Yeah, pretty. But the left side of my brain (which btw, I love dearly) is telling me to cut loose and cause some trouble. I like the sound of that. Now you know why I like the left side of my brain...
So, I'm sitting at the computer this morning and an earthquake of memories came back to me. The summer of 1959. I was about to turn 6 years old. I was spending the summer with my grandparents in Kinmundy, Illinois. It's a town about the size of a postage stamp. Ahh, yes, the South. They lived right next to the rail road tracks. And right across the street from a huge vacant lot full of peonies. Their back yard was full of hollyhocks and the occasional snake or two. They had a burning barrel. And a "glider" on the front porch that I was constantly rocking in as I enjoyed the strawberries that I had raided out of the garden. And occasionally their next door neighbors garden as well. I was a notorious produce thief. Hey, I was a precocious little shit. Surprised???
That was the summer I decided to go into business for myself. An entrepreneur, if you will. Yeah, I opened a drink stand out by the side walk. Two gallon jars, a card table, one of grandpa's "ceegar" boxes with a couple of nickles in it so I could make change and a horridly self made sign that said "Lenomade and Gape Dink". Only 5 cents a cup. I'm not sure if I looked like an abandoned child or an indentured slave out there. But my first day I made damned near 2 dollars. Hell, I felt like a Rockefeller!!! So, of course, after dinner I go charging down the hill, past the peonies to Jesse George's General Store to spend my nickles.I was in heaven!!! I snagged 4 different flavors of Fizzy's, some cherry licorice, a balsa wood airplane and a Spud Gun. (If none of that makes any sense to you then you need to use Google). The Spud Gun thing would eventually become an issue of enormous proportion and my aunt Margaret and I would never talk again. To this day I still harbor some issues of that incident.
Yeah, all this came flooding back to me this morning. I started laughing so damned hard I actually slipped out of the chair and ended up on the floor in tears. Then I stared giggling. Once again, not pretty. I loved it!!! To be transported back a little more than half of a century and reacquaint myself with the little melon headed, garden raiding and happy thing that I was... It was delicious. I can still smell the burning barrel and the hollyhocks.
Hmmm, maybe 61 doesn't sound all that bad when I think about it again...
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