Like a lot of you, I have many fond memories of the halcyon days of my childhood, when the world was still innocent and unblemished. Tink's post on the age of innocence got me thinking about all of this. Seriously, my youth really was resplendent with innocence and wonderful memories but we all know that there was more to the story than we could understand then, don't we?

A truly cynical person might say that 'innocence' is a euphemism for 'ignorance' and there may be some truth to that but I do think it's a little more complicated. If we were sheltered from the harsher realities of life, was it to keep us ignorant or to protect us until we were better prepared to deal with those realities? My parents lived thrugh WWII so they certainly knew something about the harsher realities of life. 

One of my earliest memories is of a warm May or June morning, when kids from our local church dressed up and marched around our neighborhood collecting donations for The Primary Children's Hospital, in an annual event called The Penny Parade.  I must have been preschool age, too young to participate, and I ran out to the front yard and watched them march by, horribly jealous that I couldn't join in.

The memory is so clear that I can feel the warm air of that June morning every time I think about it. I still see the cotton from the cottonwood trees, glistening in the shafts of sunlight that broke through the leaves like tiny, lighter-than-air diamonds afloat in the sky. The warm morning was sweet with the scent of the Russian Olive trees in bloom, an aroma which to this day gives me pangs of nostalgia.

There is a children's song we used to sing about the coming of summer that is intertwined with this memory. “I looked out the window and what did I see? Popcorn popping on the apricot tree.”  It seems like an apt metaphor for that day.

When I was very young we lived in a cinder-block house in a neighborhood of cinderblock houses that were thrown up in a hurry after the war.  I only have one memory of that time and that is of my older cousin sleeping over, and she and my sister having great fun by terrorizing me. They convinced me that my shadow on the wall was really the boogie man and he was going to eat me as soon as I fell asleep. Thanks, sis.

  A favorite pastime was going to the double feature at the Ritz Theater. My cousins and I would meet nearly every Saturday for the matinee, usually a western double feature, and on really special occasions, a horror triple feature. I usually had to argue with the folks to get to see those because they thought I was too young and I would be terrorized, but I usually won and they were usually right.

Thre was one film called The Hand.  I don't know why I remember this but it was the 2nd of a triple feature.  For months afterward I dreamt of that hand crawling around on it's own, strangling people. I developed a habit of checking under my bed for stray hands before climbing in.

 

My uncle worked the Ritz matinee as a projectionist and he would often let us kids sit on folding chairs in the projection room, watching the movie through a little window, while he supplied us with candy and popcorn. If I could get a friend from school in, I was big man on campus, at least until the movie ended. How wonderful, right?

Years later we found out he was a child molester, though my folks must have had some inkling, since I was under strict instructions not to go to the projection room unless I was with a group of my cousins and friends.

My memory is so vague on this that I'm not 100% sure it happened, but there are snapshots and short video clips that play in my head that piece a story together.  My uncle gave us cousins a ride home after one matinee, with an unplanned stop at his house, where he offered us candy to have an 'underwear' party. I walked home rather than participate, despite my cousins telling me that I was being a sissy and it was okay, they did it all the time and you got candy.

So much for safety in numbers. When I showed up on the front porch, my parents were horrified at the thought of me walking home at that young age and they called my uncle and and gave him the what-for.

That particular uncle's kids all were bedwetters well into their teens. Oh, the joy of a large extended family that all know way too much about each other. One of his kids, who was several years older than me, was a James Dean-ish character with a ducktail haircut, a 50's hot rod Ford that sported cherry packs and baby moon hubcaps and neckers-knobs on the steering wheel. I never saw him wear anything other than jeans with with the cuffs rolled up and a white t-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled into a sleeve. He was one cool cat and also the first member of the family to be drafted.

  When he came back from Vietnam around 1970, my cousins and I eagerly went to visit him at my Grandma's house, expecting Mr. Cool to regale us with exciting war stories like our Uncle Dave did about his days as a tank commander in North Africa in WWII.

What we found was a sullen, jittery, empty hull of a man-boy with a vacant look in his eyes. He barely spoke and when we pressed him for stories of Vietnam, all he would say was “It's a hell hole.”

He lived a troubled life for the next 20 years and died alone in his living room in his early 40's. I could give you the medical reasons for his death but I know it was Vietnam that killed him.

I was in the 2^nd grade when Kennedy as assassinated. I had just come back from lunch and was getting a drink at the large stone drinking fountain on the school playground when the Principle came on the PA system and told us to go to our classes immediately.

We had no idea what it was about but we knew from the urgency in the Principle's voice that something big and bad had happened. Given that we were always practicing air raid drills, the buzz was that it was a nuclear attack from the evil Russians, our mega-villians du jour. Once we were seated in the classroom, we were told that the President had been shot, which made no sense at all. You can't shoot the President. He's the President, for God sake.

  We sat in eerie silence listening to the radio through the PA system while our teacher quietly sobbed. After a few minutes, we heard Walter Cronkite's famous announcement that the President was dead. When I got home a short time later, the TV was on and my mother watched in silence and she tried to hide her tears.

Dad came home from work early and I went with him to the High School to pick up my sister from band practice. When she didn't emerge at the time we expected, dad went inside to find her, leaving me alone as dusk descended on the Valiant station wagon parked in a lonely ally behind the high school auditorium.  I was terrified that the President's killer would find me before dad and sis showed up.  After all, if he could get the President, then no one was safe.

That night I lay in bed listening to my own heartbeat in my pillow, convinced that it was the footsteps of the President's killer as he walked toward Utah on a single-minded mission to get yours truly. I finally manged to sleep after I convinced myself that he was in California and he couldn't possibly walk to Utah overnight.

Of course he was in California, because everything evil came from there or Russia. In the days that followed I became obsessed with how long it would take a man to walk to my house from California, asking almost everyone I knew what they thought on the subject.  I was not relieved or convinced that the threat was over when Oswald was shot but when I was still alive after a month, I decided that Oswald must have been the right guy, though I still had lingering doubts about how long it took to walk from California to Utah.

  A few years later, when I was in Jr. High, I laid in bed one June night crying my eyes out and begging God not to let Bobby die. I had bought the dream completely and, with another Kennedy clinging to life, it felt like the end of everything. I bargained with God, promising to give up masturbation if only he'd give me just this one thing. When I awoke the next morning, Bobby was gone. I have been masturbating with gusto ever since. Take that, God.

Oh those halcyon days of my childhood when the world was still innocent and unblemished.  I really did have a pretty idyllic childhood but I think we remember those days as innocent, not so much because they were, but because we were, at least until we weren't anymore.

I came from a loving home with good parents who really tried to give us a good life. I am eternally grateful for that, especially when I see how so many others grew up.

  There were trips to Disneyland, Yellowstone, trout BBQ's and watermelon busts, fireworks, wresting on the front lawn with my cousins, Easter suits for me and dresses for my sisters, homemade rootbeer, moth-ball smelling grandmas, Penny Parades, first kisses, horse shoe pitching and of course, popcorn popping on the apricot tree.

I wonder if I can still "take a handful and make a treat?  A popcorn ball that would smell so sweet."

"It wasn't really so but it seemed to me..."

Thanks Mom and Dad, for keeping us innocent for as long as you could.  You must have known it was a losing battle but you still tried.