Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Cadre

13


By the end of second grade, my circle of friends had pretty much formed up. Gone were some early nursery school and kindergarten friends whose families had since moved, or had simply been placed in the other classroom when our group was split-up for the beginning of second grade. In was a new kid or two who had moved into the region...
I might need to explain: While some cities have multiple school districts for a single city, rural school districts encompass a large land area and draw in the students from tens, twenties, or thirties of miles away to have enough to fill a classroom per grade. In the case of my second grade, while the first grade class had been a bit large, by Nineteen Seventy-One a school about fifteen miles away just didn't have enough students anymore to justify the expense of having a building of its own, thus those kids were merged in with our kids and our second grade class became half again larger. That's why it had been split between two teachers. I was lucky in that most of my friends from first grade ended up in my second grade class.
But a couple did not and that's when I discovered I was an out of sight out of mind friend. During the first month of second grade I tried to keep in touch with the couple of friends who had been merged with the other classroom. But by October, with my other friends right in front of me, it was always easier to go out to recess with an activity involving them in mind, or to set-up play dates, or in the case of one new kid, mistake my coat for his and not realizing it until I got home and we had to sort it out that evening between our parents.
This kid was 'Jonathan' and he was of a wing of a wealthy family that had moved into the area before second grade started. After the coat mix-up, we would spend time at each others' houses. While mine was pretty big compared to some of my other friends, his house was about thrice the size and on the shore of a nearby lake. And by thrice the size I mean the rooms were three times the size of the rooms of my home, all large and cavernous with plenty of windows looking out over the lake. The smallest room of the house was the kitchen and a row of rooms adjoining the second story garage where the ground opposite the lake was higher. While the house had an official front door and entryway, we never used it, instead going through the garage for play outside away from the lake, or taking the glass doors of the living or dining room for play on the yard in front of the lake. During Summer this would include play in the lake or the occasional motor boat ride.
Jonathan was always even tempered, at least with me, though he did like to play a prank on days when I was at his house toward the late afternoon. Having once mentioned that I had watched Sesame Street as a youngster, Jonathan and his siblings would use that as an excuse to watch it with me, which was odd as I had long outgrown it and hadn't watched it in years. But as it turned out they had never been allowed to watch it, they used me as a reason to see what it was all about under the guise of being a good host to me. The fun thing was, after the first couple of times, they didn't get the urge to watch it again until they noticed their father was coming home, either his car spotted approaching through the woods, or the sound of the garage door opener whirring. Then Jonathan or his sister would say, ''Hey, you like Sesame Street, its on now!'' And they would rush to the television in the living area and tune it in and Jonathan and his sister would then, when lucky, be able to sing along with the show as their father walked in. In retrospect, I realize it was just to get his goat and horrify him with the thought that his 'upper level' kids had been exposed to that 'lower level' stuff all afternoon long.
Then there was Peter, the longest-time friend who I met in nursery school, we had become best buds by kindergarten. In the early years, he was about eighty percent friend, twenty percent frenemy. An example was when he was over to my house. I showed him Bumpa's watch which had been given to me once he had been sent off to the nursing home after his stroke. It was kept in the top drawer of my dresser and after some other play, we later returned to my room to play with some clay. I excused myself for a bit to use the bathroom and when I came back and settled down I found him mashing the watch into the clay. When I noticed this I asked for the watch back and he wouldn't give it to me, he just kept on mashing it in, completely covering it. Stunned, I called my mother and got the watch back. We asked why he had done that and he said he didn't know. We did another thing or two and it was time to take him home. From that day onward, while we remained friends, I never pointed out anything I particularly cared for to him just so it would remain safe.
While I had remembered watching Star Trek during the original run, he discovered it when it hit afternoon reruns; this spawned us spending much of our playtime parroting Star Trek as the Kirk & Spock pair. Despite my having the classic Spock hair cut as a child, he insisted on being Spock, even one time showing how he could tape the tips of his ears into points. As Elementary School went on and other science fiction television shows came briefly to the prime time line up, we would play based on those as well, though nothing ever over shadowed the Star Trek inspired play for long. By Middle School, the balance had changed to more fifty/fifty on the friend/frenemy range and by High School it settled to thirty/seventy. We could never get the clay cleaned off the watch and it was soon discarded from ruin...
Paul's family moved into an abandoned dairy farm about half a mile away from my home. We had visited one another during an in-house recess in first grade and quickly became friends. He was that perfect mix of charm & mischief and we loved each others' home settings. He seemed to love the huge patch of woods surrounding my home, I loved the abandoned dairy farm that was his home. The most notable part of his home was the vast barn, designed to house all the cows during milking, it was now a large empty space with some forgotten items stored in the lower level with the upper level comprised as two long lofts where the hay had once been stored. Ropes had been tied to the center pitched roof beam and we could use the ropes to swing from one hayloft to the opposite, sometimes setting up the ropes ahead of time so we could swing from one side, grab the rope there to swing right back again without stopping. To the side of the hayloft level was a hallway with an old office room having a window in the door and a window looking out to his driveway. With a hook lock on the outside of the door, Paul showed me how it could be used to lock others in, specifically me; this was when I learned I wouldn't get hurt by breaking glass with the palm of my hand as I had been pounding on the glass in the door window in protest only to have the ancient glass break, allowing me to reach through and unhook the door myself.
Further down the hall, made up of old bare wood planking, were alcoves for tool storage, mostly now empty, and in one of them was a small hatch like door that Paul had one day figured out how to open. This lead us to the second wing of the barn, the upper level was a large, empty, storage space over the lower level which had been the bottling area. The bottling area had become the place where all the disused milk bottles had been tossed and abandoned when the place had shut down. It became a fun challenge to scamper over all the broken bottles without falling. Sometimes when I would get home, I'd have to pull some bits of glass from the bottom of my sneakers so they wouldn't tear at my home's wood floor. The final part of the dairy farm was the silo. There was an opening from the top level of the milk bottling wing that lead into middle of the silo, then a wood board ladder leading to the top level. From there we could open part of the metal dome of the silo and see a great view of the surrounding land and the grass feeding field below, long since gone to hay.
On one of Paul's birthdays, many of us joined him for a party, then played in the barn wings, and one of the unsupervised activities was the silo jump. The ground at the base of the silo had become thoroughly soaked by rain creating a small mud pit, the game was to jump from the opening of the silo dome and land in the mud... Effectively a three story drop. Having had two collar bone breaks in the past, I think I was the only kid Paul couldn't tempt into taking the leap. Most the rest of the kids he did get them to try it, even one time pushing a hesitant boy. Very few of them would do it a second time, whereas Paul, with much practice no doubt during his free time, did the jump several times that day. As most of us where then all muddy, we had to stay outside and entertain ourselves by building forts out of a stack of hay bales and then having a mud ball fight until the various parents came by to pick us up one by one and get scolded by our chauffeuring parent. Paul was great fun, but by fourth grade his family moved away leaving a hole in all of our hearts.
While there were many other girls and boys I would occasionally visit and play with, Jonathan, Pete and Paul were the most common playmates I had during my elementary school years.





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