I work in an office in Bismarck, North Dakota, so when the
weather is nice enough; I try to go for a 10-to-15 minute walk during my coffee
breaks. Yesterday was the first day in a couple of months that I had tried to
walk outside as I’m afraid of falling on the ice. But the ice has now mostly
turned to slush and the sidewalks are generally dry, so it seemed like a good
day for a walk.
That is…until I came upon a section of street where there was
no sidewalk. Instead, it was just packed snow where hundreds of walkers had
been before me…and some dogs. I had to sidestep the doggie do-do and the yellow
snow. I kept on walking until I reached dry sidewalk again. For whatever
reason, that spot of dirty snow reminded me of walking in Roundup, Montana, when I
was growing up.
And then I got to thinking about being a kid in the 1960s
versus being a kid today. We not only knew our neighbors, they were our best
friends…or in my case…some were also my cousins, my aunts and uncles.
When we learned to ride bicycles, we rode them all over town…and
never once wore a helmet. Depending upon the age of our bikes, we would put a
chain and a padlock on them when we rode them to school, but if we were at the
city park, a grocery store or a baseball diamond, the bikes were perfectly fine
without a lock.
We didn’t have car seats for kids. I stood in the front seat
between my parents when we drove to Billings or Deadman’s Basin. My older
siblings were in the back seat. None of us were wearing a seat belt.
If you were an adult, it was almost a certainty that you
smoked. My mom and dad didn’t but my uncles and several of my aunts did. I had
a neighbor who ran a grocery store and smoked cigars. My mom had two uncles,
who were our neighbors, that smoked pipes and nearly everyone else smoked
cigarettes. To be honest, I haven’t smelled tobacco smoke from a pipe in
probably two decades, but I remember I used to like it.
Right before I got out of the car to go to Grandma’s house,
mom would make sure my face was clean. If it wasn’t, you could bet she would
lick her thumb and then scrub the grime off me with spit. I wasn’t the
brightest boy in the world, but I knew that wasn’t sanitary. So I tried to keep
my face clean…at all costs.
When I was in second grade, I had the honor of having to
attend summer school. I think it was a week or two in the summer and it was
either in the morning or the afternoon – but not all day. The extra schooling
was to help my reading skills and comprehension. Anyway, I would walk to
Central School from our home north of the hospital and my dog Lady would walk
beside me. Then she would stay at school until I was done for the day and walk
home with me. I loved that dog. I was away at college when she died and I was
still crying.
Our dog wouldn’t hurt a flea…or so I thought, but she did
bite a meter reader and maybe someone else that she considered an intruder. I
don’t think we ever chained Lady. We lived by the hills so Lady was free to go
and chase rabbits. If she caught one, she’d drag the carcass back to the yard
and snack on it…for days. We always had bones in the yard that she had found
and was snacking on.
We had a light pole on a small grassy island in the middle
of an unpaved avenue. One of my mom’s two uncles would take turns walking to
the light pole and turning on the light. I guess there was no electronic eye in
those days that would automatically turn the street lamps on. In the summer
time, we would play “Hide and Seek” and the pole was “home.” You could hide almost
anywhere in the neighborhood, so once you were found; it was always a race back
to the pole to see who could touch it first.
Dad changed the oil in the family car on that avenue and
since it wasn’t paved, he never bothered to collect the used oil. It just ran
down the avenue and sunk into the ground. That avenue is now covered with
asphalt, but I wonder if all the used oil would now be considered a hazardous waste
by the EPA. I’m sure somebody would make you stop that if you tried it today.
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