Salad days
judgment green
wings untested
life unseen
soaring spirits
buoyant dreams
endless visions
plans and schemes
ideals of beauty
reason, truth
halo’d by snow
but more by youth.
Apologies (and thanks) to Shakespeare.
Thanks also to Wabash College for use of this photo,
and to S.W. Berg for sending it.
Many the Christmas
has faded away,
but here are a couple
preserved for today.
The curly-haired toddler,
a bit knobby of knee,
recalls the first Christmas
for cute little me.
The other, my parents,
with some of their caucus,
a nefarious bunch,
unruly and raucous.
A time to be serious
about four-in-hand,
and to mutter at tinsel
hung strand by strand.
Life wasn’t perfect then,
but still I hold dear
the Christmases seen
in life’s rearview mirror.
That’s my dad in the middle, and my mom is the one looking down at him; I can’t tell if she’s thinking what a great guy he is or his collar needs more starch. You will notice, dear reader, the Christmas tree in the far right of the photo. If you can remember the insanity of hanging tinsel strand by maddening strand, then you also remember the days when ties were what you could always get your dad for Christmas.
Summer afflicts me with memories.
Like family vacation. A surfeit of togetherness. Dad’s mother, our beloved Grandma O’Hern, sat between my brother and me in the back seat. Poor Grandma. My brother loved confinement as much as I did and we were not anyone’s first choice of traveling companions.
Our expeditions almost always started with a new comic book, a thing of beauty and a joy for…well…five minutes. After that the only thing it was good for was rolling into a tube and clobbering someone. (But that was only because he clobbered me first.)
There were, of course, no such things as seat belts. We could kneel in the back seat and look out the back window, trying to see if where we’d been were any more interesting than where we were. Nope.
Rolling the windows down (aka air conditioning) had nothing to do with pushing a button and everything to do with grabbing a knob and turning for dear life. Reverse to roll back up. A life skill we’d already acquired. Boring.
The view from the back seat had greatly to do with the back of my mom’s head and the back of my dad’s head. And sameness out the windows. Devoutly did we pray for Burma Shave signs, when there would be respite from sameness. At the end we’d all shout out “Burma Shave!” and then I’d lapse back into a comatose state of childhood on hold.
There were “guessing games,” of course. And singing. And coloring books. For some reason, though, my parents got touchy about melted crayons under the seat. Was it our fault the summer sun was hot?
The years distort, I know, but I’m fairly sure that’s my dad’s voice asking “Are we there yet?”
Oddments 