Most week day mornings we headed up the street to the babysitters,and there we would spend the day. But not everyday.If our father was not working we got to stay at home.It would have allowed my parents to save a bit of money on childcare,and of course,we always complained about having to go to the sitters.I would never have really been able to voice my concerns back then,but I think we really did not like the sitters that much.It was a loud place with a lot of kids and,a lot of conflict.Stating at home was much better.
Early in the morning,just after nine O'clock,if the weather was nice I would get onto my tricycle and head on down the road to Kenny's house.My parents never seemed to have the least concern about this at all.I was well out of sight of our front yard,but my father would just say"Be home at eleven thirty." So I would ask Kenny's mother or father to let me know when it was time to head on home,and there was never any problem.Sometimes we would get into the car and drive off to pick up my mother for lunch,so my father would drive by Kenny's place,pick me up,and I'd leave the tricycle behind until I returned in the afternoon.We's go off and get my mother,then come home and eat,and I'd be off again.
In the mornings we'd usually hang around at Kenny's place,racing bikes,or playing trucks.I had a yellow dump truck that I would tow along using a piece of string so that I didn't have to carry it.On the way down the street I'd count the cracks in the sidewalk.Well,actually,I'd count ten of them,but more than once because ten was as high as I'd learned to count.So,I knew exactly how many cracks there were along the way.I just would never have been able to communicate that knowledge to most adults in a way that made much sense.Sometimes,at mid morning,we'd stop and have a plate of cookies and some lunch.
One morning we were out at play when an ambulance came up the street.It's lights were flashing,but it wasn't sounding the siren.It stopped right across the street from Kenny's house,maybe one or two house up the block.Two men got out with a stretcher and went into the house.They were in there for a long time,then they came out.There was an old woman living in that house,and she was on the stretcher.Kenny was trying to see if he could see the woman's face because,he said,if the blanket was pulled all the way to the top,it meant that the person was dead.But I wasn't able to tell.The ambulance left slowly,so I thought the person inside really couldn't have been that sick.But Kenny said that they wouldn't be going fast if she were dead either.There would be no point.I never really found out one way or the other,but I think she must have been alright.?We likely would have heard if she'd died,even though we didn't know her.Sometime while we were playing at Kenny's house,the mailman would come around.Actually,there were a number of different mailmen.Some were grumpy old guys who wouldn't say a thing to us,and we didn't bother with them at all.But there was this one mailman,whose name was Reggie,and he liked kids.He would shoot elastic bands at us and joke around all the time,and all of the kids liked him.He delivered mail for a number of years and always got along well with the kids.
While we stayed around Kenny's place in the mornings,in the afternoons we'd usually head off for the woods.Kenny never came to our place to play,so we were either at his place or in the woods.To get to the woods,it would have been easy to just cut across the field and enter from the back side.But that's never what we did.We would ride,or walk all the way back up to Willet Street,almost all the way back home,then go over the one block to Crandall Street,and proceed down to the first fire hydrant,almost directly across from the end of Second Avenue.Right there the woods opened up into a little path,and we could hide our bikes and explore.The woods were not big at all,you couldn't really get lost in them,but you could hide from anyone passing on the street.Anyone passing would maybe have a vague awareness that there were people in the woods.And if we were in there playing,we would not have much more than a vague idea that there was anything going on out on the street.Right in the center of the woods,there was this tree that had fallen most of the way to the ground before getting wedged into the crotch of another tree.So,we could climb along it's trunk,and there was never much danger of falling because it didn't really go up very high.We referred to this tree as a fort,and that is where we would spend most of our time,every nice day until summer had passed.
Kenny sometimes brought along a string of caps.We didn't have cap guns then,so we would find a rock and stretch the red paper roll of caps out on the sidewalk,and hit them with the rock until they blew up.Kenny would sometimes fold the paper over so there was more than one cap,sometimes even four or five together before he'd hit it,and it would make a really loud bang.We would catch insects too,and put them into bottles and take them home.Usually the only insects we could find were these long furry caterpillars that would crawl right along the curb.They were big and dumb and easy to catch,and one day Kenny decided it might be a good idea to blow up one of them using the caps.But,he never had any matches.He talked about having matches,and lighting up whole boxes of caps at one time,just to see what kind of a noise,and how much fire it would make.But he never had matches.So,he was never able to figure out how to blow up a caterpillar because it would involve putting them into a g;lass jar,with some caps,then hitting it with a rock.But we never did that because we didn't want to break glass.
We would find treasures of various kinds in the woods.We found a box of cigars once,hidden under this pile of sticks,and Kenny took them home.I would find mushrooms there too,and once I gathered up a whole bunch and took them home,thinking my father could use them to put in his eggs like he liked to do.But he explained to me that there were no mushrooms in the woods that were good to eat,and that I must never eat them,because I might end up getting sick enough to go to the hospital.All the time,we would find empty shotgun shells in the woods.But I'd never heard anyone shooting in the woods.But still,there were spent shells.Kenny said there were bears living in the woods too,but I never believed him.The woods were just not big enough.A bear was so big that I would have been able to see it from anywhere in the woods,and I'd never seen one.Besides,this woods was right in the city,and everyone knew there were no bears in the city.
Early in the morning,just after nine O'clock,if the weather was nice I would get onto my tricycle and head on down the road to Kenny's house.My parents never seemed to have the least concern about this at all.I was well out of sight of our front yard,but my father would just say"Be home at eleven thirty." So I would ask Kenny's mother or father to let me know when it was time to head on home,and there was never any problem.Sometimes we would get into the car and drive off to pick up my mother for lunch,so my father would drive by Kenny's place,pick me up,and I'd leave the tricycle behind until I returned in the afternoon.We's go off and get my mother,then come home and eat,and I'd be off again.
In the mornings we'd usually hang around at Kenny's place,racing bikes,or playing trucks.I had a yellow dump truck that I would tow along using a piece of string so that I didn't have to carry it.On the way down the street I'd count the cracks in the sidewalk.Well,actually,I'd count ten of them,but more than once because ten was as high as I'd learned to count.So,I knew exactly how many cracks there were along the way.I just would never have been able to communicate that knowledge to most adults in a way that made much sense.Sometimes,at mid morning,we'd stop and have a plate of cookies and some lunch.
One morning we were out at play when an ambulance came up the street.It's lights were flashing,but it wasn't sounding the siren.It stopped right across the street from Kenny's house,maybe one or two house up the block.Two men got out with a stretcher and went into the house.They were in there for a long time,then they came out.There was an old woman living in that house,and she was on the stretcher.Kenny was trying to see if he could see the woman's face because,he said,if the blanket was pulled all the way to the top,it meant that the person was dead.But I wasn't able to tell.The ambulance left slowly,so I thought the person inside really couldn't have been that sick.But Kenny said that they wouldn't be going fast if she were dead either.There would be no point.I never really found out one way or the other,but I think she must have been alright.?We likely would have heard if she'd died,even though we didn't know her.Sometime while we were playing at Kenny's house,the mailman would come around.Actually,there were a number of different mailmen.Some were grumpy old guys who wouldn't say a thing to us,and we didn't bother with them at all.But there was this one mailman,whose name was Reggie,and he liked kids.He would shoot elastic bands at us and joke around all the time,and all of the kids liked him.He delivered mail for a number of years and always got along well with the kids.
While we stayed around Kenny's place in the mornings,in the afternoons we'd usually head off for the woods.Kenny never came to our place to play,so we were either at his place or in the woods.To get to the woods,it would have been easy to just cut across the field and enter from the back side.But that's never what we did.We would ride,or walk all the way back up to Willet Street,almost all the way back home,then go over the one block to Crandall Street,and proceed down to the first fire hydrant,almost directly across from the end of Second Avenue.Right there the woods opened up into a little path,and we could hide our bikes and explore.The woods were not big at all,you couldn't really get lost in them,but you could hide from anyone passing on the street.Anyone passing would maybe have a vague awareness that there were people in the woods.And if we were in there playing,we would not have much more than a vague idea that there was anything going on out on the street.Right in the center of the woods,there was this tree that had fallen most of the way to the ground before getting wedged into the crotch of another tree.So,we could climb along it's trunk,and there was never much danger of falling because it didn't really go up very high.We referred to this tree as a fort,and that is where we would spend most of our time,every nice day until summer had passed.
Kenny sometimes brought along a string of caps.We didn't have cap guns then,so we would find a rock and stretch the red paper roll of caps out on the sidewalk,and hit them with the rock until they blew up.Kenny would sometimes fold the paper over so there was more than one cap,sometimes even four or five together before he'd hit it,and it would make a really loud bang.We would catch insects too,and put them into bottles and take them home.Usually the only insects we could find were these long furry caterpillars that would crawl right along the curb.They were big and dumb and easy to catch,and one day Kenny decided it might be a good idea to blow up one of them using the caps.But,he never had any matches.He talked about having matches,and lighting up whole boxes of caps at one time,just to see what kind of a noise,and how much fire it would make.But he never had matches.So,he was never able to figure out how to blow up a caterpillar because it would involve putting them into a g;lass jar,with some caps,then hitting it with a rock.But we never did that because we didn't want to break glass.
We would find treasures of various kinds in the woods.We found a box of cigars once,hidden under this pile of sticks,and Kenny took them home.I would find mushrooms there too,and once I gathered up a whole bunch and took them home,thinking my father could use them to put in his eggs like he liked to do.But he explained to me that there were no mushrooms in the woods that were good to eat,and that I must never eat them,because I might end up getting sick enough to go to the hospital.All the time,we would find empty shotgun shells in the woods.But I'd never heard anyone shooting in the woods.But still,there were spent shells.Kenny said there were bears living in the woods too,but I never believed him.The woods were just not big enough.A bear was so big that I would have been able to see it from anywhere in the woods,and I'd never seen one.Besides,this woods was right in the city,and everyone knew there were no bears in the city.
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