I suppose what makes a man is in part what each of us did
when we were children. What were you up
to when you were a little boy? I ask
about the boys because I had a younger sister who participated in none of what
kept my friends and me busy running around outdoors. Below are the opening few pages of "So
Dad, What Makes a Man" that describe what I did, mostly out of sight of my
mother.
“Jeez,
you can stand on a beer can and see Denver from here,” a college classmate once
said to me while visiting the Panhandle of Texas. It is flat out there. Those vast expanses of unbroken sky became so
ingrained in me that to this day I seek living spaces and vacations with
extensive views.
I was
born on these high plains in the early forties. The petroleum company my father
worked for built our tiny community, which was surrounded by wide-open prairies
except for an occasional farmhouse. The wind blew continuously through the elm
trees that had been planted to break it up. I divided my first twelve years
between Bunavista and a similar company community north of Amarillo, called
Cactus, Texas. Both towns held around five hundred employees and their families
who lived in multifamily, white-shingled buildings whose size indicated the
employee's level in the company hierarchy.
Relatively
isolated, crime was unknown, and we felt safe. Our moms shooed us outside
during the day, where as young boys we did young boy things. We ran around in
only shorts, playing ball in the fields, trying to force black tarantulas out
of their spider holes with buckets of water, catching the lizards we called
horned toads and rubbing their bellies to make them go limp, capturing a bunch
of big red ants in a quart glass jar Mom used to can fruit, and dumping them on
the bed of the little black ants to see what happened.
All
neighborhood garbage was dumped in an open-topped cast iron incinerator that
had natural gas outlets in the bottom, so when it was full, the trash was
burned on the spot. Before it burned, it was a great place to climb into and
root around, collecting, for example, the mercury from discarded thermometers
to play with. We walked down to little gullies to search for crawdads in their
holes at the waterline or hiked out to a farmer's windmill to capture the frogs
or bull snakes around the water trough. Or we crossed the highway—a no-no, of
course—and played on the railroad tracks that paralleled it, where freight
trains of over a hundred cars passed daily.
We'd
catch someone's cat and pitch it high up against the wall of the two-story,
six-family dormitory we lived in to see if it also landed on its feet when the
surface was vertical. Most of them did. We found a ladder to climb so we could
stick our arms in the open-ended crosspieces of hollow clothesline poles behind
the dorms to retrieve sparrows' eggs or their chicks to feed the snakes we
caught. If it rained or was too cold, we'd go into a basement below the
dormitory and roller skate on the concrete floor.
I look forward to hearing what kept you entertained as a
young boy.
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