“Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.”
- Chili Davis
Talking about Billy Bob Thornton and our similar upbringings in small town America in yesterday's blog reminded me of how blessed I was to have grown up in an era of unsupervised childhood freedoms. It didn't matter if we were town kids or country kids, our worlds were wide open with possibilities, limited only by our imaginations. Almost every kid from that time heard some version of, “Get out of the house and go find something to do. Come home by suppertime.” And you went out and explored your tiny universe. Man, I wish every child could have a taste of that, but I know few ever will in this age.
I was thinking about those freedoms a while back and jotted down some remembrances.
Timber
Robert Propst
We never called it the “woods”
or the “forest.”
Any dense population of trees to us
was the “timber.”
It was always just the timber.
Our farmland was divided by a
two-lane blacktop.
I crossed it as a child.
“Look both ways.” Mother would say
as I went out the back door.
A small creek ran east and west
through our timber.
A boys dream.
Tadpoles and frogs, snakes and minnows -
my own private biology class.
A bluff rose up to the south -
Sioux and Blackfoot warriors
often watched me on their ponies from above,
war drums off in the distance.
And the timber was usually full of Krauts
that I had to engage
and mow down with my Tommy gun
like Sgt. Saunders on Combat!
On occasion I was wounded in the shoulder,
but I pulled through.
When the ammo ran out
it was time to head on back -
back to Headquarters for some rations
around noon,
hardened from battle
and glad for my bologna sandwich
and if I was lucky,
grape Kool-Aid,
my favorite.