Gasoline on a Stick

I had a long conversation with my sister Joy last night.  She wants to come down to visit and I have to say that I'm all in favor of that - I love seeing my siblings and I think her plan includes a stopover in the lower righthand corner of Kansas to pick up Judy and then to drive the remainder of the way here.  If I know those two, there will be no quiet between Kansas and here.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon lately: Talking to a sister always brings back memories of childhood; talking to a brother always brings back sports or military or travel experience memories.  And sure enough, the childhood memories came flooding back last night.

When we were very very small children, we used to strap on ice skates (hockey for boys, figure for girls) and then trudge across our snowy cold back yards to the pond at the back of Mr. McAllister's lot.  If we were lucky, the older boys had already shoveled the surface and made a very reasonable skating rink, but nobody actually objected to clearing the pond for skating if we had to do it.  Sometimes there would be a campfire once we arrived, but usually not and we would step off of the snow-covered grassy pathways, where we were awkward and prone to stumbling, onto the cold white crispy edges of the pond where even a minimally skilled 7 year old was as graceful as a ballerina.  The girls, invariably, would loop off from the crowd and delve immediately into practising the softly undulating curves of the figure.  The boys, predictably, would rush the center of the pond area  like Merrill's Marauders. This was where the roughhouse games were played, and where a hocky stick that may have started life as a broom was brandished in a shouted challenge to other boys to come face the manhood tests of the ice.

These gloriously cold days were always (not sometimes, always) cut short by the screech of the dominant male eagle calling his offspring back to the nest to eat.  There were several variations on this eagle's cry, but none as consistent and unfailing as the one directed at us.  We knew, of course, that this was simply the whistle of our father summoning us for dinner, but what eaglet is able to resist the ancestral pull of that whistle?  Because really, what eaglet doesn't know its father's unique screech?  In any event, we would then, reluctantly, start the trek home.  The younger ones, whose laces had become so loosened during the day that the skates hung sideways on our feet, would put our heads down against the wind and push slowly, relentlessly, through the now bitter cold to our house, and the welcome of a kerosene furnace that melted more crayons over its life span than anyone can honestly remember.

We would gather coats and blankets, chair cushions and whatever other padded materials we could find, and, after lying down on our backs, slide the skates off of our now numb feet. And we would then place our feet, still in at least one layer of athletic sock, onto the sizzling hot surface of the heat barrel of that kerosene stove.  If you found the right spot and the right temperature, it was possible to leave your feet there for a few minutes before they had to be cooled back down on the floor.  Mittens, gloves and outer jackets were draped over the top of the heater so that they too could dry out and warm up in anticipation of their next use.  The first tingle of circulation returning was immediately greeted by the pain of the thousand little pinpricks that always accompanied the warmed blood.  We would then lie there and talk about kid stuff, and sometimes the younger ones would fall asleep until supper was ready.

We had summer time memories too.  We came from a small neighborhood that was populated by large familes, and so we had a pool of lots and lots of kids to draw from when it came to games. And we had some epic "kick the can" games that started and ended in front of Leonard's garage on Mildred Avenue.  It wasn't unusual to see 40 children scatter across the neighborhood, screeching their eaglet screeches, when the can was kicked.  I remember several nights where, having been captured, we would wait in the driveway by the Leonard's house and delight to see Chrissy pull out her twirling batons and gasoline cans.  The other guys and I always admired Chrissy's courage in plunging those batons in the gasoline and then lighting them so that she could twirl them - we knew that we could do neither.  She always seemed to do this at twilight, and the glow seemed perfect to us.  Even today, a whiff of gasoline burned into an old rag evokes Chrissy and her batons. 

As we got older, the distances that were traveled from the base became greater, the "team pairings" a little less subtle, and it became obvious that the game had become more of a community babysitting mechanism for countless little brothers and sisters, while the older kids could participate in the groping sessions a little further away from the base.  The boys used to love to introduce visiting female cousins to the rituals of massive kick the can games where the best hiding places were often dark and well-padded; and I'm sure that the girls in our neighborhood shared the same enthusiasm with visiting male cousins.