AncienTrails

Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

As summer tries to take root, bringing heat to this winterspringsummerfall season we’ve
been having, Memorial Day arrives.  In my school days Memorial Day meant school was over until Labor Day.  The grandkids in Colorado go into June and start up again mid-August.

I recall those long summer breaks perhaps better than the school years they punctuated, especially at the elementary ages, grades 1-5.  They were hours upon end of baseball, bike riding, playing kick the can, hanging out at the field, a special place that could become a fort, a trench, a hideout, a bunker, an overnight camping spot.  This was kid world, immersed in the boiling mass of kids my age or so that lived on Monroe Street between 1952 and 1958-9.

To a young boy in Indiana this was the 50’s, the Atomic Age now lionized in Mad Men and  shops filled with retro furniture, plastic chairs with metal legs, formica tables, aluminum tumblrs, boomerang shaped end tables, blond furniture, poodle skirts and fancy aprons for high-heel clad cooks.

This was not our 50’s.  Our 50’s had sandlots, trips to the forbidden pit, the subtle ranking inevitable among groups of children, the magical evenings as dusk fell, bats swooped and we each found a hiding place behind an arbor vitae, an enclosed porch, a dark shadow beside a garage, waiting for the tag that would make us out or finding a chance for momentary glory when we could streak out, run like the wind and kick the tin can clattery clat clanging down the street.

Yes, we had homes and parents and bedrooms and breakfast but those were way stations, filling stations and kiddie hotels, holding us only until we could go out.  “I’m going out,” was a phrase common on our lips.

We knew the limits to our wandering which meant we could have, from time to time, the  experience of venturing beyond them, back to the old gravel pit now filled with water where instant drowning awaited–we imagined our sad funerals and weeping parents, or off into a far neighborhood, perhaps as far as downtown if we had pop bottles we had collected from the trash.

That all lay before us as Memorial Day came, with the legionnaire color squad straining and sweating in those uniforms that fit so well back in their service days, the band playing patriotic music and a few floats with a queen or two doing the wave.  Dogs barked.  Clouds rode high in the blue sky and war was in the past, something to remember.