I recently attended my granddaughter’s first cheer-leading performance. Is that what you call it? A performance? Anyway, she’s cheer-leading for Pop Warner Football games with another friend of hers. Their first game was 90 minutes away—at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning!—at, as it turns out, the high school that was the rival of my high school. I’d spent my childhood in this town but, during middle school, moved away to the neighboring town.
This high school stands only a few short miles from my childhood home. Boy, the streets sure seemed longer back then… If I recall accurately, our annual football game against them was at our school during my sophomore and senior years and on their campus during my junior year, so I had attended only one game at this stadium.
Thanks to my earlier drive-thru of a Starbucks, my eyes were open enough to see the little girls begin gathering on the track while the game got underway behind them. Quickly. What’s the most traded commodity in the world? Actually, it’s oil. But the second most traded is coffee. And I ordered a cup that was so strong, it may well have been oil. It had the same consistency…
My GDaught is on the viewer’s left.
The cheering was something only a grandparent could love, and I did love it. The team for whom they were cheering won the game in such a one-sided victory that I found myself silently rooting that the other team would at least score once or twice.
Following the game, we said goodbye to my daughter and granddaughter and drove one block to the west and about a half mile to the north. When I was little, that distance took forever to walk or ride on my bike. Within moments we were slowed to a stop in front of my childhood home. In those days the house was white and had a blue shingled roof. Today it is yellow and the roof is brown. The field that was next to our home is now houses, our dirt driveway is now concrete.
The flood of memories was torrential. I rode my bike right there. My young mother stood there with my newborn sister. My dad posed with his golf trophies for my Polaroid camera right there. All of us neighborhood kids had a carnival in this yard; we set up a lemonade stand over there. My grandparents visited us in this house and they stood right there. I saw them there, in grainy black and white memories. Were they younger in those old reels of 8mm film than I am now?
I could only linger there a few moments as the house sits on a corner and there is nowhere to pull over. I did not want to pull into the driveway and cause any inconvenience or alarm to the current residents. So, I crept along for as long as I could before I had to drive on. I inched my car forward and slowly passed the Miller’s house. Up the hill to the right lived the Thomas’. And next to the Millers were the Shinavers. I spent hours playing there. Hours and hours and hours.
Click here to order my Kindle Short.
This part of the road, where our houses sat, is on an s-curve of sorts. There are no sidewalks and no room, really, for anything more than one car in either direction. When we were kids, cars flew through these curves at dangerous speeds. Our mothers did not like us to play anywhere near the street. Had any of us been in the street when one of those cars roared around the curve, we would not have stood a chance.
I passed the Shinaver’s driveway and one of our more brilliant ideas flickered past my eyes. As I prepare to explain this, I have to steel my spine against the chills which traverse it. Not only did our homes sit on this curve, the street bisected a hillside. The Thomas’ home was on top of the hill above the road, and ours sat below the road, down the hill. And as you went from our house, past the Millers to the Shinaver’s, the homes sat farther below the hill. Our home had a slight incline to the front yard, the Shinaver’s sat down a pretty good sized hill.
It was at the bottom of this hill, their driveway, where we stood that day. We’d had the bright idea of giving pony rides to our siblings. We got one of the more gentle horses out of the corral. We put a halter on it and someone stood, holding the halter while another of us tied a long rope around its neck. To the other end of that rope, we tied the handle of a Radio Flyer wagon. You know the one of which I speak. They were everywhere in the 50’s and 60’s. Our plan was for one of us to lead the horse by the halter, while the other acted as a carnival barker and lined up the rest of the kids for their turns.
Illustration by Bill Russell
Once the rope was securely tied to the handle of the wagon, we turned and asked who wanted a free pony ride. For some reason my friend’s sister, Laura, was first. At this time, I doubt any of us were 10-years-old, so Laura easily fit into the wagon. As she was getting settled, the horse moved a bit and the rope pulled on the handle and it swung forward and hit the horse on its hindquarters. A fraction of a second later, the horse was gone. The 50 feet of rope was gone. The wagon was gone. Laura was gone. One instant they were there, the next they were rapidly ascending the hill that was the dirt driveway.
Laura clung to the sides of the wagon with admirable strength. Her hair whipped behind her and her screams rivaled the siren of any emergency vehicle in both intensity and duration. Our moms bolted from our houses. Moms on neighboring streets ran from their houses. The horse ran up the driveway, made a right turn into what would have been oncoming traffic and galloped down the street; the wagon swinging a wide arc about 40 feet behind. We scrambled to the top of the hill and did our best to give chase. The horse and the wagon easily outdistanced us and we immediately lost sight of it around the treacherous curve. Running with all of our might, we rounded the bend and found the rope and overturned wagon in the pile of powdery sand at the base of the Thomas’ driveway. There was no horse and no Laura.
We pounded to a halt at the bottom of the driveway. A commotion up above at the Thomas’ house drew our attention. Mrs. Thomas was outside of her house, the horse’s halter in one hand and the other trying to gain control of the still frightened animal. Good. We didn’t lose the horse. We had the rope and the wagon. One sister couldn’t be that big of a thing, right?
From below the wagon, which sat, half buried in the silt-like sand, we heard a muffled cry. Upon closer examination, we saw some of Laura’s hair fanned out from the edge of the wagon. We quickly overturned the wagon and found Laura, covered in sand, hair disheveled and hundreds of muddy tear streaks down her cheeks. While we stood, blinking, still too young and stupid to know what to do, Laura was snatched from our midst by her mother. As fast as she and the horse had lurched from us a few minutes before, her mother acted with equal lightning speed and ran Laura back home.
You wonder why some believe in Guardian Angels? This is a perfect demonstration. Laura was unhurt. No broken bones. No bleeding. No bruises. Nothing more than nearly having the doo doo scared out of her. The large pile of silky soft sand had collected at the bottom of the Thomas’ driveway from the countless excursions of their cars down the hill. Of the untold hazards that awaited Laura and the wagon—the asphalt and the jackasses in their speeding cars and eucalyptus trees and mailboxes and more—this was the exact spot the rope came untied from the horse’s neck and the wagon flipped her right into the big soft pile of sand.
Did we get in trouble? Oh yeah. I don’t remember exactly what happened to us, but I do remember Duane’s mother inquiring repeatedly and with a preponderance of decibels as to the state of our thinking before attempting such a stunt. I think there were threats of putting him and me into that wagon and lashing it to the frightened horse so we could experience what his sister endured. There was talk of us being grounded for life and/or beatings to make a medieval dungeon master pleased.
Laura survived the free pony ride. Duane and I survived whatever punishment was meted out by his mother. And our houses still stood on the same spot I left them more than 40 years ago. As I drove away, I did take one surreptitious glance into my rear-view mirror to see if I could catch a flicker of light, a glimmer of a reflection, an intimation of light that would betray the lingering presence of those neighborhood angels…
