Back To My Childhood

For some reason I thought about living on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, going to grade school, and having two older brothers to make my life fascinating. My brothers had paper routes and also had meetings in our garage, in the attic space with the other paper route boys. I would climb on the roof with my next door neighbor and stomp around making as much noise as I could to annoy them. They would come streaming out and try to catch us, but we were fast, and had a head start using back yards to escape.

My oldest brother , seven years older than I was, sometimes took me on his route when he made collections. He showed me the trees that grew nuts, different kinds. And then the house that had the zombie living in it. He talked this up a lot, and finally I went to the door with him, and sure enough a zombie would come to the door. He just shuffled, his face was long and dreary looking, and he talked like he had something in his mouth getting in the way. Now that I look back on this I wonder if he didn't have a neurological disease or something like multiple sclerosis, or Parkinsons, which was probably true, but my brother worked it to scare me. The chestnuts really interested me, because there were two kinds. The horse chestnuts I had collected all my life from the trees in front of our house. Trees that were huge. But there were the kind you could roast and eat growing near the zombies house and we would collect them also.

Those days of being young, being teased and teasing, riding bikes recklessly, playing hide and seek, doing games like being dectectives shadowing people, playing cars, dolls, growing up without even paying any attentions to anything much, but looking back and realizing that history went on about you anyway. There was the polio epidemic, having to stay away from crowds, and no swimming in the lake or at pools. There was the War, and Dad going off to the South Pacific. There were Japanese where we lived who just disappeared. There was an awful lot of eating fish as it was cheap and available in Seattle. I was aware of things happening, and could be afraid in my mind, but I also was mostly on my own. My Mother had depression and would be in bed for days. We had a woman who came in to help out, Maud, and I turned to her mostly because Mom was just not there. Funny, when I talk to my brothers, they had not noticed. I sure did.