I was nine until November of 1968. My mother had just married a man with three kids, all older. We moved to Fresno and they put me in a Catholic school. I stayed away from home late one time, playing pool in a friend's garage up the street, and my mother freaked out and ran screaming for me up and down all the streets. My stepbrother found me. I was grounded for two months, which included Halloween. We had a pingpong table that we got with either S&H Green Stamps or the Blue Stamps. A black and white teevee set. One Panasonic transistor radio. Haircuts from Travis in his shop behind the grocery store with a giant neon-outline pig sign on the roof and flashing-in-sequence pennies going up and over into it. Comic books were like a dime or 12 cents. The SuperBall had just been invented. I invented pulling up worms from the school playground and dropping them into the squirrel cage blower of the window-wall heater /SPLAT/ all over the room. I played The Dictionary in the class Word Play, with my head stuck out through a hole in the cover. The words wanted to come out. They'd say, "We are the nouns. Can we come out?" I: "Okay. Okay. You may." I'd heard someone, an adult, refer to Miss Esswein as a wop, so I repated that where she could hear, and there was a huge thing about that. One freezing day I was on my way home from school on my bike and I went racing across Belmont Street without looking out for traffic and missed being flattened by a quarter of an inch, all the cars screeching to a stop. I just kept going. Bottlecap collection. Grounded again for setting a fire in the wastebasket. Beebee gun treks out into the farm fields to shoot at birds and cans and sticks. Craig and I stole 100 baseballs from the college, dribbled them out of our clothes all the way home on our bikes, so that by the time we got there we had maybe five left. All-day car trip to visit the man who raised my stepfather (his stepfather), where I was introduced to Pogo books. Choking on chlorine in public pools, burning my bare feet on the sidewalk and pavement. A contest to see how long I could sit in the car in the hot sun with the windows up. That's only some of it. I think my life was immensely more full and eventful then than now. Now I go to work, and get ready to do my show, and do that, and go to Juanita's and help out there, and do my show, and go back, and record an event every once in awhile. Hmm.
I was nine until November of 1968. My mother had just married a man with three kids, all older. We moved to Fresno and they put me in a Catholic school. I stayed away from home late one time, playing pool in a friend's garage up the street, and my mother freaked out and ran screaming for me up and down all the streets. My stepbrother found me. I was grounded for two months, which included Halloween. We had a pingpong table that we got with either S&H Green Stamps or the Blue Stamps. A black and white teevee set. One Panasonic transistor radio. Haircuts from Travis in his shop behind the grocery store with a giant neon-outline pig sign on the roof and flashing-in-sequence pennies going up and over into it. Comic books were like a dime or 12 cents. The SuperBall had just been invented. I invented pulling up worms from the school playground and dropping them into the squirrel cage blower of the window-wall heater /SPLAT/ all over the room. I played The Dictionary in the class Word Play, with my head stuck out through a hole in the cover. The words wanted to come out. They'd say, "We are the nouns. Can we come out?" I: "Okay. Okay. You may." I'd heard someone, an adult, refer to Miss Esswein as a wop, so I repated that where she could hear, and there was a huge thing about that. One freezing day I was on my way home from school on my bike and I went racing across Belmont Street without looking out for traffic and missed being flattened by a quarter of an inch, all the cars screeching to a stop. I just kept going. Bottlecap collection. Grounded again for setting a fire in the wastebasket. Beebee gun treks out into the farm fields to shoot at birds and cans and sticks. Craig and I stole 100 baseballs from the college, dribbled them out of our clothes all the way home on our bikes, so that by the time we got there we had maybe five left. All-day car trip to visit the man who raised my stepfather (his stepfather), where I was introduced to Pogo books. Choking on chlorine in public pools, burning my bare feet on the sidewalk and pavement. A contest to see how long I could sit in the car in the hot sun with the windows up. That's only some of it. I think my life was immensely more full and eventful then than now. Now I go to work, and get ready to do my show, and do that, and go to Juanita's and help out there, and do my show, and go back, and record an event every once in awhile. Hmm.
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