If those of you who have heard some of my stories would quit laughing so loud and choking; and stop the sarcastic comments while you’re at it; I can continue sharing with the newbies in the group.
You know how it is. You see the world from your own perspective. And my perspective on what a typical childhood was like was certainly shaded (some might say twisted) by my personal experiences. I had my observations of my life’s experiences, and I augmented my observations with the experiences of the closest other boys I knew growing up, and came to the understandable conclusion that an active childhood was normal.
Hindsight has brought me to understand that “Active” was a massive understatement.
Sure, the other close boys were my two older brothers, and those few lads around our home town that could semi keep up with us.
Now, it may be critical information to know that my eldest brother is only 35 months older than I, and that here was an additional “middle brother” as well; who was just about 16 months younger than the eldest, and 19 months older than I.
Yep, three boys in 35 months; kinda makes you question the over-all level of sanity that’s embedded in my family gene pool, doesn’t it? Add to that the fact that the first was born about 14 month’s after my parents married, and that I, the last, was born before our mother reached legal drinking age.
So, while my brothers and I were not exactly of the same den’ing, we were unquestionably a single pack.
Barry felt put out being the oldest, feeling that he had to fight harder for each step forward than did either Jeff or I. And I for one am willing to give him that; as long as he is willing to admit that some of his more spectacular failures delayed Jeff and I receiving some of those same freedoms. So all in all, Barry had to fight harder for selected freedoms, but Jeff, and much more to the point I, had to wait regardless of our arguments for the calendar pages to fall before we were granted equal rights.
But if truth be told, the three of us were not particularly adept at waiting and tended to just reach out and do; with or without approval; knowing all the while that there would likely be a price to be paid when our actions came to light.
Now my son one time famously told his mother that “it wasn’t fair” that he “didn’t get to do the kind of things Dad did while growing up”. His mother looked at him like he was prone to riding short buses and said; “do you really think that Dad and his brothers asked permission to do all that stuff?”
But I digress. Growing up Barry, Jeff, and I pulled many of the stunts that I’ve since written about and many more that I haven’t even attempted to transfer from recollection to paper.
Now as most youth, I grew through my active days and moved on to a short stint or two grappling with higher education, invested in building a career and started a family. All life events that tend to take the spontaneous “hey, let’s go and…” out of life’s pattern; well, except for those people who start every adventure with “hold my beer a sec…”..
Yep, years passed between my own childhood and the firmly established childhood of first my son and then my daughter. And as those childhoods blossomed and I, as a supposed “adult” was drawn into Boy Scouts, 4-H and other youth programs, and I found myself sitting around campfires with various groups of other people and their children.
Now, there is something special about a campfire; a special communion of those present with each other, and with themselves. Maybe it’s that wood magically turns into light, heat, glowing colors, and popping sounds. Perhaps it is the curtain of darkness around the circle warmed and lit by the fire, or it might be the feeling of anonymity created by the obscuring legions of smoke that march first this way and then that around the circle and into the darkness beyond.
Whatever it is, it has been for tens of thousands of years; and it has always been around just such smoky, warm, dark enchanted circles that the art of storytelling first crawled forth from some hunter, who if we’re being honest was likely shading the truth a bit in hopes of attracting a better blanket mate; and then spread like a rampant disease throughout the tribe and virally leapt to the next circle of nighttime fire watchers. Ultimately, it has been around the blistering red coals of night that the storytelling art has been perfected.
And so, as first my son and then my daughter began to sit around evening campfires with friends and parents, I began to draw up recollections of things that Barry, Jeff, and I did as boys. In an effort to encourage the kids around the campfire to stretch their imaginations and participate in the communing, I began to offer up those recollections of my youthful activities. Little did I expect either of the reactions that were drawn forth from the gathered crowds.
Universally the youth found points to laugh about. Now in truth, my sense of humor can be a little bit dry and I have been known to exaggerate a point or two, but the kids readily enjoyed these stories of growing up a generation earlier, often asking for some particular story to be repeated for both their enjoyment and for whatever new child was along that had yet to hear the tale.
Equally universally, the adults’ eyes sprang open like large white plates. Eyes wide, often slightly out of focus as if they had been popped hard, on the nose, the adults sat still, listening with slowly shaking heads and gaping mouths. With my sense of humor, I found the grinding incredulity of the adults to be incentive enough to dredge up additional stories. You could hear the internal circuits click, pop, and ultimately short out when each adult ultimately came to the same realization; They had foolishly entrusted the lives and mental stability of their own retirement plan to a lame-brained antisocial troublemaker.
It was that second reaction that got me to revisiting my own childhood and reconsidering the type of child I had been.
It was that second “life review” that brought me slowly to understand; my brothers and I had been full on wild hellions as kids. Not kind of, not once in a while, but day in, day out, hell raisers who, though without a single malicious thought, had left indelible tracks in the history of our small town.
I realized that I owed my parents an apology, most especially my mother.
And I owed neighbors (now long dead) apologies as well.
And I can’t even begin to define what I owed the baby sitter we tied up and threatened to burn at the stake.
I was stunned. Or as stunned as I have ever been by anything other than a chromed-steel bumper up side the head.
Next time I saw my oldest brother I just had to share with him the epiphany that I had had. And yet, once again in life, he proved the relationship between wisdom and experience. For when I said to him “You know, I just recently realized we were real hellions as kids”.
His response was; “I remember when I first came to that conclusion, but I don’t think of it as that any more, now days I just say; “we found more ways to ‘experience life’ than any of the other kids did”.
© Copyright 2019, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved
