When I Was Immortal

It doesn’t seem that long ago… and it seems a lifetime ago.  Gee, to be exact, it’s my lifetime ago.  I was young and the thought of the end of my life—go ahead, Bill, say death—was not even a blip on my radar.

Those days melt into one another across the arc of my lifetime.  And, while some are clouded by the fog of my hazy memory, some moments appear in vivid detail.  One morning I bolted from our house and ran across the open field to join up with some friends.  There was really no need to run, yet it felt so good I simply had to run.  Though probably not much older than ten, if that old, I was keenly aware of how good it felt to be able to run.  My arms swung and my legs pumped and I leaped over small boulders and across minor ditches.  It felt wonderful to stretch my legs and my muscles!  Now I get short of breath tying my shoes.

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As I try to recall that feeling now, it really doesn’t compare to the exhilarations of my current days, which include, for example, standing in front of a urinal, waiting for my bladder to create enough force against my enlarged prostate so I can complete the simple call of nature.  My days then consisted of running and jumping with wild abandon; sun on my back, breeze in my face and the smell of recent rain filling my olfactory cavities.  My entertainment today is listening to the sounds emanating from my creaking joints and trying to discern if they coincide with some pop song of years past.  Heck, last week I had to climb under my desk and cycle the power for the modem and I swore my knees were playing Wooly Bully.

Matty told Hatty…
About a thing she saw…
Had two big horns…
And a wooly jaw…

In those days we’d climb the eucalyptus trees that lined our street.  We’d pull clumps of long sweet grass from the rain-softened soil and throw the attached dirt clods at each other.  Or dig trenches in the fields to prepare for some upcoming, imagined battle.   Or build a fort out of an old chicken coop.  Or climb in the trees again.

My father had converted our garage into a family room and replaced the heavy wooden door with a sliding glass door.  The old door laid in our back yard, such that it was, until one of our Santa Ana winds came and hurled it into the neighboring field.  This led us to seize the opportunity and excavate underneath the door and create our own secret cave.  Somehow we sneaked some birthday candles from one of our houses and scooped out little holes into the walls and, voila! we had flaming torches.

All day we worked and climbed in and out of our secret cave that no one could really even see unless they happened to glance in that direction… I guess all of the excavated dirt, still damp from the previous storm and piled to cover the door, was rather conspicuous.  Returning home to get a drink of water or try to find some matches to light our torches caused us to be noticed by our mothers who commented—and I must say, rather loudly—as to the layers of dirt/mud we had caked to the front of our clothing.  We hadn’t considered that scooting into, around within and out of our secret cave might get us a bit dirty… Dirty to the point where it looked like all of us wore the same brown clothing.  But who thinks of that kind of thing when you’re engineering?!

Did Hoover think of that kind of thing when he was building his dam?  Did Lincoln concern himself with getting dirt on him when he built his tunnel?  Did Mississippi’s mom scold him each day he came home while working on his river?  Hudson, his?  Niagara his falls?!  No?!  Yet our mothers seemed to have some aversion to our shirts and jeans being caked with little more than 26 layers of dirt and mud.  Sheesh!  Mothers…

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But we couldn’t be bothered with that!  We had to keep building and, even more than that, hiding out in our secret cave.  Nothing could keep us away!  For nearly a week, we used our cave for secret meetings about who-can-remember-what.  In fact, I was so defiant in my disregard for the cleanliness of my clothing that I ignored all pleas and orders and hid out in our secret cave time and again.  Punishment be damned!  Until I saw a centipede crawl past my eyes, about three inches from my face.  Then I was done with that cave.

For many months, at Duane’s, they’d been getting fill dirt next to their house.  It was a foundation for the future expansion of their home.  It was a long-term project and the piles of dirt became hardened over seasons of rain, wind and summer heat.  Somehow we’d found sheets of old plywood and, again, made caves by laying the panels across the mounds of dirt.  We imagined ourselves as miners and we tunneled around.  We took table spoons from his kitchen drawer and used those tools to dig for gold.  Or treasure.  Well, we dug.

As children often times do, we decided it would be cool to actually live in the tunnels.  We discussed how it would be possible to survive off the food in their garden, such that it was.  And being pretty stupid, we somehow thought our parents would never think of looking for us under the sheets of plywood.

We sneaked—Heaven knows why we were sneaking in broad daylight and when no one else really cared what we were doing—from the tunnels to the garden.  Using our best clandestine field maneuvers we learned from watching Combat! on TV, we brought back dilapidated and worm-eaten pieces of Swiss chard or something sort of leafy. Thinking back on it now, had our mothers served us some fresh, neatly trimmed, steamed and buttered Swiss chard for dinner, we’d have moaned and wailed about having to eat vegetables.  But we divided up this bounty and ate it, dirt and all.  We even had two tomatoes that were each no bigger than a golf ball.  Delicious!  Maybe a touch gritty…

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Naturally, by real dinner time, we’d gotten pretty hungry and decided that the aromas wafting from our mothers’ kitchens were reason enough to abandon our plans of living beneath the earth.  How long can one survive on a morsel of tomato and a bite of Swiss chard that wasn’t even appetizing enough for an insect?  One hoped Hoover, Lincoln and Niagara had better meal planning on their projects than did we.

But what a feeling to be young!  We played, dug caves and tunnels, built forts, climbed trees, ran, jumped, threw, caught, fell, got up… Oh, the go cart we built and rode from the top of a hill, down a public street, with no real braking system or steering controls previously tested… and lived… barely.  We did all of that and more.  And we were immortal.  We never thought of getting hurt.  Stupid kids?  Yes.  Guardian Angels?  Had to be.

Had to.

But we lived and had fun and enjoyed our youth and our exuberant and vibrant health.

As I stand here before the toilet, I also wonder why I can remember all of this so vividly and not why I came in here in the first place.