My Youngest Days

In my youngest days, as an infant and beyond, I must have been pretty agreeable. Mom told me I was always content to play outside in the dirt or the grass, and even in the mud. Sure, I had some toys and games. But no, I didn't need anything really special.

We lived above the Edgefield Tavern. Mom worked, so a Sid, babysitter would watch over me. Sid didn't always pay really close attention. It rained and became wet and muddy outside. In the alley beside the upstairs apartment, a lot of standing water had gathered. I was still young, maybe three or four years old. Sid did not watch me closely. I spent a lot of time playing in the water puddles, becoming wet and muddy. When Mom came home from working, that was the very last time she used Sid as a babysitter.

When we lived on East Street, on the west side of Uhrichsville, I could have fun just riding my small peddle-powered metal car outside by myself. I could peddle on the sidewalk and into the Grandison neighbor's driveway. My father bought that car for me. It is one of the only things I ever received from him. Mom gave me his first two names. He kept his last name. I didn't get it. We never met except when I was very young. I don't remember it.

Uncle Frank had bought a new Thunderbird. When he drove the car to Mom's apartment on East Street, I got really excited and ran out the glass-pane front door to see his bright new car. I somehow forgot to open the door as I ran through it. My white tee-shirt was covered with red blood; my red blood. It got all over his interior when he drove us to the hospital. I received one butterfly self-adhesive stitch near my jugular vein. But I bled very thoroughly.

When I got older and stayed with Mom's parents, on a farm, I loved to play with simple green army men, right out of a bag. Mom got those from Barney Gagner's Western Auto store in downtown Uhrichsville. Building forts and special areas from the rocky dirt and twigs and leaves laying around a Maple tree on their farm was a favorite pastime. It allowed me to figure things out, like solving a puzzle. Those skills would follow me for a long time into the future.

A friend and I would often scamper into the wooded areas to play and to run, to ride a sled in the snow, to explore the brown, leafy autumn hillsides with flowing, bubbling streams. Uncle Jim owned the fifty-two acre farm. He built some ponds with rocky and mossy waterfalls on the property. There were tall, large brown electrical poles with darker oily stains stationed right down the center of a hillside. We rode a sled down the cut-a-way paths between the poles. One time, Alan and I steered the sled smack-dab into a pole. But we were young, Nothing bothered us at that age. I was in third grade and Alan was in fourth.