How would you describe a perfect day when you were young?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Snow day – no school.
Agree to this–when I was a kid in Dayton.
Oh yeah. Huge fun on the local hill tobogganing with my buddies until we were half frozen and completely exhausted, then returning to Mom’s warm kitchen for hot chocolate.
Or we could play touch football in the snow for hours. In jeans. Until our legs were lobster red from the snow and cold. I was so much tougher that way when I was young and dumb.
Snow day – third Wednesday in a row. Third time a dreaded test was canceled because the teacher just moved it to the next week. Plus the snow in South Carolina in 1960 was just deep enough to used waxed 1 x 12 boards to sled on. And enough for snowball fights.
The winter of 1996-1997, followed by The Great Flood, was insane. It got to the point where every. single. thursday and friday school was cancelled because of weather. 6 solid weeks. Then my school was destroyed by flood waters and we went block schedule at a local college to finish out the year and everyone’s grades went way way up.
Awesome all around.
As kids, my sister and I would spend two weeks at my grandparent’s house in West Virginia. Grampa kept ponies and let them loose in their yard. We kids would drape ourselves across their backs for hours, riding, walking them around, just being there.
We played outdoors every day, and we were much more free than under my mom’s watchful eye. If she knew all the things we did while we were there, jumping on rocks in the creek, shimmying up trees, and racing the ponies around, she probably wouldn’t have let us stay there.
Every day was perfect.
A nice warm day. Nobody fighting. Ice Cream.
Almost any day at my grandparent’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. Free run of woods, cornfields, torturing (psychologically) the cows, hunting for tadpoles and crayfish in the muddy little pond, driving the old truck, getting a nickel for every pop bottle full of potato bugs and spending the loot at the gumball machines when we went to the local grain mill.
A perfect day now is being able to remember when I was young. This is not a perfect day. It’s not bad though since Obamacare is saving me about 10 grand a year.
In the summertime I was amphibious. What I remember is my mother coming out and telling us it was time to get out of the pool and go to bed. So you’d dry off, sleep soundly, then wake up in the morning and go jump in the pool again.
Memories of racing home after school then out to find my dear old horse, swing up and then ride bareback out to one of the orange groves that CA used to have. There I could let my horse graze under the trees, grab a hot fresh orange off a tree, turn around and use his rump as a pillow while I polished off the orange.
Simple pleasures.
Walking the fields and the woods behind our house with our Beagle (named Snoopy, of course), with a couple of fishing poles in one hand and my tackle box in the other. My destination was an absolutely beautiful pond that was owned by a one-armed farmer named Beckett. When I got to the pond, I would plop down in the grass at the deeper end of the pond and commence to catching beautiful crappie, bluegill or sunfish on one line, while the other line sat on the pond’s bottom, waiting for a yellow belly catfish or channel cat to come cruising by and gulp down the wadded nightcrawler. Occasionally, I would work a Rapala along the moss line in the hopes of coaxing out one of the Largemouth Bass you would occasionally see as dark shadows, hanging just out at the edge of your vision, just off the sloping bottom.
While my afternoon was consumed with fishing, Snoopy would be running somewhere off in the distance, piercing the sound of the gentle summer wind with his hoarse beagle howl, as he was obviously in hot pursuit of a rabbit he had flushed out of the undergrowth and briars. He would eventually return to the pond, exhausted, and with his fur matted with burrs. He would collapse in the cool grass and quickly fall asleep.
Eventually, the fishing would slow and the sun would be creeping toward the western horizon, hanging in the sky just off to the side of Mr. Beckett’s white, 19th century farmhouse. I knew that mom was probably fixing dinner. I would gather up my fishing poles, clean off the remnants of bait left on the hooks, hook them on the rod eyelets and tighten up the line so the hooks wouldn’t come loose on the walk back. With rods in hand, I would grab the tackle box and head around the perimeter of the pond. Snoopy would jump and follow, knowing that the day was coming to an end. During the mile or so walk back to the house, Snoopy would zig-zag the field, shoving his nose in every divot in the dirt, occasionally stopping to dig a little in pursuit of some field mouse that had scurried into a hole or a tuft of grass in a effort to avoid detection. By the time we neared the old wire fence at the back of our yard, Snoopy’s black nose would be caked with brown dirt from all his pokes and prods looking for those elusive vermin. I would toss the fishing gear over the fence, put my foot in the middle of the fence and throw my other leg over; making sure I cleared the single run of rusty barb wire that ran along the top. Snoopy would head down the fence-line to a familiar hole a few yards down and squeeze through, emerging into our back yard.
And this is how a typical perfect day ended for me in the summer of 1970.
*************
Sadly, my mind now jumps forward, settling back in 2013, the here and now. Farmer Beckett has been dead for at least 30 years. Those woods are also long gone, felled by a developer’s bulldozer so they could lay a web of asphalt and line it with upscale homes sitting on streets with names like Chestnut Lane, Oak Drive and Creekside Avenue. The creek of course, is also long gone. Another victim of the bulldozers indiscriminate meandering. And probably worst of all, the pond; that beautiful pond that served to fill the imaginations and afternoons of many a neighborhood kid with hour upon hour of simple, cherished and memorable fun, was erased from the face of the land in the span of little more than an hour once its dam was torn apart by the swipes of a monstrous backhoe; its contents spilling out through the breach, spreading out across a couple hundred yards of field and soaking silently into the ground.
Suddenly, I find myself mourning for what is lost at the undiscriminating hand of man.
That was beautiful!
Wonderful.
Beautifully written.
That’s about all I can say.
How about this kid’s day:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/15/batkid-san-francisco/3588173/
San Francisco values in action
Good for San Francisco, what a great day all round!
A bag of fruit and a cheese sandwich, a thermos of milk, a comfortable tree branch in the woods and a 2 good books.
Wake up. Big breakfast.
Head down to the dock. Swim in the lake all day and snack on crackers, cheese, fruit, and cold cuts. A few boat rides and some water skiiing.
Head back up to the cabin. Clean up. BLT’s and fresh corn on the cob for dinner (this was in Iowa so it was straight from the field to our table and to this day I am super picky that corn on the cob needs to be freshly picked).
Some board games
Hanging out by the fire later making smores.
I can remember being stretched out on my back on rich, green grass in my backyard. Watching clouds. Summer. This was in the Jersey Shore area, very early sixties. There was a patch of wild strawberries in the field next to our yard, You could lay there, watching the tall clouds tumble slowly across the sky. If it was the in the afternoon the ground would have warmed enough so that the wild strawberries’ aroma would waft through the air. Birds in the trees chirping. And the smell of rich, green grass.
We had a honeysuckle bush that ran down along our driveway. Another perfume in the air. You take the flower, pinch the bottom, pull the pistol, and a tiny drop of nectar would be there for the taking.
At dusk, after supper, the stars would be making their appearances one by one and the air would be thick with mosquitoes and lightning bugs. We’d run around until we were called home.
Block wide kick the can and hiding in a window well with Leslie Crebbin.
Definitely, a Sunday.
No church visit.
My dad’s scrambled eggs for breakfast – with bacon, of course. English muffins, too.
Then, reading the NY newspaper’s sports sections – with the NY Times “Week in Review,” a must-read.
An afternoon softball game in the spring or summer, or a tackle football game in the fall or winter.
Dinner with my parents and my younger sister.
“60 Minutes” – back when it was still “60 Minutes,” with the great reporters and the usual suspects
Alternative – a Saturday.
See the above, and followed by an evening in a local bar, with my best bud’s, drinking pitchers of cheap beer, and laughing our asses off.
And everyone getting home safely.
Late May, on a sunny day, getting on the bus after school and sneaking out of the mountains down to Santa Cruz with my friends. We’d wander through the Boardwalk eating the candy our natural-foods-oriented families despised, riding the rides, and looking at cute boys on the beach.
My childhood sucked. A good day (perfect would be too much to expect) would be one where my parents weren’t angry and taking it out on us 5 kids. (emotionally and physically) Probably me out riding my bike for a while.