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Days Of Innocense

My house, Danny’s house, Rick’s house, Mark’s house, Donna’s house and sometimes Diane’s house. Every day after school we would gather in front of someone’s TV and watch the Mickey Mouse Club.

Childhood friends… They reside in the dark, almost lost recesses of your mind and can come up for a peek every once in a while. Their appearance can be caused by something as simple as a bird’s song, or a scent on the air. Hearing Doves coo in the early morning will always remind me of my first love, Donna. We lived two houses away from each other and were born on the same day with-in an hour of each other. She loved to listen to the doves and I would sit with her on the sidewalk to listen, too. We were five years old and destined to be married. Our birthdays were the same, we listened to doves together and watched Mighty Mouse cartoons faithfully every Saturday morning. With that, we could build a lifetime together and buy a couple of babies when I had enough money. Ah… Memories.

The names listed above were my closest friends and, Oh, the adventures we had in a large farming community in North-Eastern Iowa. Old Widow Hayes had a large garage about the size of a barn with a couple of loose boards in the back. At times we would sneak in and explore the treasures there. Not treasures to most people, but things which would make our imaginations soar. Boxes with old clothes that the girls wanted to try on. That old car that hadn’t been driven since forever would be used to chase down gangsters with Eliot Ness or become the cockpit of a bomber over Nazi Germany. My favorite, an old Indian motorcycle that hadn’t moved since Mr. Hayes died, that quickly became a horse that I would ride along with The Lone Ranger and Tonto or Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy. The air was dusty but always with a thick smell of the lilac bushes that were planted all around the garage.

My number one, bestest friend was actually my big sister, and what boy would admit that? Yes… I was the oddball among my friends because I actually got along with and loved my sister. We sheltered each other from the darkness and evil that lurked about, in our home and elsewhere. We played together, we prayed together, we huddled together in fear and laughed together in joy. We would comfort each other after either one got whipped, because if one of us did wrong, we were usually both punished… One should have prevented the other from doing wrong. At the time, I didn’t think it was fair to either of us, but it brought us closer together. To this day, half a century later, I can count the fights we’ve had on one hand and have fingers left over. How often I have wished that on other families.

As the years go by, friends and family part ways and spread out around the country. I now live in Georgia, my family lives in Iowa, Alabama and Kentucky. I have maintained contact with family through the years with mail and telephone, but friends are a different story. Through the miracle if the internet, I have found Mark again, living in Indiana, Danny died years ago in a car wreck, his sister with him. I never found Dianne, but I found Donna many years ago while I was in the Army. She had become an anti-war activist and would not even speak to me. Rick is the only one I have found still living in Iowa. We sometimes communicate through the internet, but he has formed strong political ideas (that border on the insane) and they conflict with mine. Three girls I dated back in Iowa have died; Cancer, alcohol and Deep Vein Thrombosis. Two of them I actually loved and cared for, but time and distance have softened the blow. We can’t go back and un-do or re-do the past, but we can cherish the memories we like and let the rest fade into oblivion. Continue reading

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