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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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