Elementary

I read people's stories, of their childhood. Their stories involve their families. My childhood stories don't...at least not on the surface. It bothers me at times, this lack of family memories.

Maybe I just have a shoddy memory. Sparse.

I was my own person, even as a child. I rarely, at least to my recollection, asked permission to do things. I just did them.

When I was around 6 years old, I made myself a chore chart and posted it on the outside of the painted off-white bathroom door on the back porch. The "back porch" was the den, not a porch. It was a porch before the porch got torn down and my parents had a real room built in place of the porch. I remember when the old screened-in porch got demolished, there was a door that went from the kitchen to where the porch used to be. If someone would have walked out the door then, before the new real room was built, they'd fall from the second story and hit the ground. I wonder if there was some sort of caution tape put up to keep us from walking, by habit, through that door?

But I don't recall any tape; I just recall how cool it was that I could open the door and have the air as a floor.

I wanted to have responsibility like my friends had. That's why I designed the chore chart. My friends had chore charts, with checks and stars and stickers, all given for completed chores. I don't remember what chores I listed on my chart. I tried to give myself checks when I completed a chore. Probably didn't last but a couple weeks.

Looking back, maybe I just wanted to be noticed. To think that I was somebody. That I was here.

I used to have temper tantrums too. Once I demolished my red plastic gum machine that distirbuted the little square Chiclet gum that came in a two-pack.

I spent lots of time with horses, up until I was 12. They were some of my best friends, horses were.

I then traded horses for boys.

There were lots of kids in our neighborhood...lots of kids. At that time in middle-class American culture, neighbors used to play together. We spent a lot of time outside.

There weren't all the time-consuming organized sports and activities like we have now.

There were sand lot games..rolly bat, football, tag, Sardines, Werewolf, Hide and Seek, Croquette. There were horses, bicycles, minibikes. And sleds in the winter. There was the miniature putt-putt course that some of the guys built in the woods across the street where houses are now.

I broke my arm when I was around 10 years old in some of the woods that were across the street, below the putt-putt course. I was breaking in Mary Jane, a horse. She was the size of a Welsh pony, multicolored white with black and brown spots. She got spooked that day, I think by a mini-bike, and she took off in a wild uncontrolled panicked gallop. I started screaming, instead of staying calm. Mary Jane didn't like my screams; she ran faster and harder through the woods.

I woke up on the ground at the base of a tree. My face scratched and bleeding from briers. My right arm numb.

I began to scream, "My arm's dead! My arm's dead!"

Mr. Yount, our neighbor who I had a crush on, who used to give me rides on his motorcycle, came to my aid. I don't know who took me to the hospital. It seems like they first let Dr. Lafferty, our neighbor who was a family doctor, examine me. Or maybe I'm thinking of the time I got bit by Georgia Girl, another horse. Seems she was a quarter horse of some sort.

I don't think Dr. Lafferty charged the neighbors to check out the neighborhood kid injuries. He was a kind man, something out of a Normal Rockwell painting.

We were neighbors.