Time and Childhood

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The kids are alright. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read.

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Time and Childhood

By Ray Tabler.

The other day a stray thought unlocked a torrent of childhood memories which waited patiently for decades to tumble out like opening the door of an over-stuffed cupboard. Simply put, my early years resembled the movie Stand By Me, only with not nearly as many adventures and certainly no dead bodies. The school year was more conventional. But come the long, hot, humid, lazy summer days, my brother and I were out the door as the sun rose, usually back home for a bologna sandwich lunch, then home only as dusk made it too dark to see (and the ghosts and hide-behinds stirred).

Where did we go? Depended on the day. To the east was a small woods and an old, non-operational, farm we wandered around. The old man who owned the place was in a nursing home by then. His house was haunted, or so we believed. To the south was a trucking terminal. We’d sit in the long grass, watching the 18-wheelers roll in, load up, and roll out again. A small store was about a mile’s walk to the north. When we had a few dimes they’d buy comics books, candy bars, and bottles of Chocola. Between home and the store there was an interstate highway a-building for a couple of years. On Saturdays and Sundays, the construction workers weren’t around to keep us from playing on the big, yellow idle bull dozers, earth graders, and dump trucks.

It was one, extended blur of unplanned, unsupervised meanders. I sometimes wonder what my father thought about the lives we led in those years. He was born in the 1920s, and his boyhood days consisted of staring at the backside of a mule over a plow, followed by informal apprenticeship in a machine shop during the great depression. He left his one-room school in the 8th grade, and then worked as a welder, building landing craft for European and Pacific beach invasions. Youthful enthusiasm prompted him to sign up in 1943. By his own admission, he probably did more for the war effort welding together LSTs on the banks of the Ohio River than planting (and digging up) landmines in the Italian mud. But that wasn’t the type of decision a young man could or would renege on in the 1940s. My dad was the cantankerous sort. He and the US Army had issues with one another. Still, they decided to tolerate each other for the duration.

Maybe because of that early hardscrabble and wartime experience, my dad tolerated my boyhood idleness with good humor. He did impart less than flattering opinions as to the personalities and behaviors of farm animals, particularly mules. The urge to build a better life for your children is a powerful motivator I didn’t fully understand until I had kids of my own. Although those golden, wandering summers did eventually end. I worked as a helper in the welding shop my family ran during middle and high school. Which mainly consisted of much bolting and unbolting of equipment, and holding pieces of metal while my older brother welded them in place. Occasionally, he’d “accidentally” touch me with the hot welding rod, just for fun. Brothers… My father’s father certainly had it rougher than my dad or me, with even less schooling and a longer tenure staring at the backside of a mule.

During college, my mother urged me to learn how to weld better on weekends, in case this engineering thing didn’t work out. Honestly, there have been times I wish I’d listened to her. Fortunately, engineering did work out for me. I got a good job, moved away, got married, and had kids. My children grew up under very different circumstances. More affluent. More indoors. More supervised. Almost a different world from me, or my father, or his. Still, I think they’ve turned out alright. Certainly, more adapted to the future than I am.

And that’s the whole point. The future is always roaring down on us like a runaway beer truck. There’s no reasoning with it, no slowing it down, no stopping it. My dad might’ve worried that I never learned how to hitch up a mule. I’ve wondered if my kids might actually need to know how to write in cursive or dial a rotary phone. Maybe my kids will stress over their kids relying on AIs too much. Do what you can, and trust that your kids will handle what comes their way. You did. Your parents did. It’s literally bred into us.

END.

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