Home: The Strongest Conjuration

Home is our first place, our first people. It is the filter of our memory. It is where we find love and peace, nourishment and pleasure and where we move pain and distress into the shadows.  We lift up devotion and glorify the hardships. Home is both spirit and place.  Ancestors linger.  Home is one place, any place and every place.  To be homeless is to be without friends, family and beauty. Consider the contradictions:

Home is the place that keeps calling us back –

Old homes! Old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter.    - Madison Cawein

His native home deep imagined in his soul.     - Homer ("Smyrns of Chios")

How deep and powerful is the one home place?  Here is my great grandfather’s house.  The house stands today, unoccupied, on land that has been in the family for more than 160 years.  It centers seven generations. Its weathered and rugged appearance represents the durability of home and family.  The history of my father’s family is well known and documented by both text and images. Here are the images of the seven generations – from my children to my great-great-great grandfather and grandmother.

Sarah (1980-) and John Max, III (1983-)

John Max, Jr. (1950-)

For me, the first home is Marion and Montford Cove.  It is the dwelling place of my parents and grandparents.  I played in the woods and fields of my ancestors.  My son was christened with water from the old home place.                  

John Max (1928-1997) & 4 grandchildren

Though I have called other places home, there is for me this first home.   My path extends backwards through many generations.  

But, the contradiction –

Where thou art, that is home.     -Emily Dickinson

My home is in Heaven.  I am just traveling through this world.    – Billy Graham

John Max, Jr. & Hicks (1899-1972)

George (1872-1956) & 5 of his children

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
 

Thomas (1838-1881)

There is a rocky peak along the spine of Grandfather’s Mountain where you stand with one foot in on the eastern side of the continental divide where the water flows to the Atlantic and one foot on the western side of the divide where the water flows to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a wide view of the homeland that includes most of the Catawba River valley to the southeast and layers of mountain ridges stretching into Virginia and Tennessee.  Home stretches to the horizon and beyond.

John Hosea (1802-1884)

 

John Hosea and Lydia Louisa were the first generation of my family to be photographed. These images were probably taken a few years before the Civil War. The family genealogy has been traced back three more generations.  John Hosea’s father was William and his grandfather was James.  His great grandfather, also James, immigrated from Northern Ireland to the American colonies in the 1750s.

Lydia Louisa (1814-1900)

 

Thomas and James Hemphill, of the Revolutionary War generation, were among the planters who brought African slaves to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and were among the settlers who pushed Catawba and Cherokee Indians out of Carolina.  If I could trace my complete genealogical tree back to the generation of James, the Scots Irish immigrant to the colonies, I would find 256 great grandparents.  That lineage could include African and Native American blood as well as Irish, Scots, English, German, French, Italian, Dutch and Spanish.

This past summer I spent a couple of days in the Great Smoky Mountain camping, eating, drinking and swapping stories with three Cherokee Indians. As great as the struggle must have been for control of the homeland, our ancestors absorbed something from each other. Our stock grows constantly fuller.  There is common brotherhood. If we keep expanding our family tree, doubling the number of grandparents with each generation, in 38 generations we have approximately 256 billion grandparents – a number that exceeds more than all the humans who ever inhabited the earth.  We exist on a tiny branch of the one human tree.

But the massive size of the homeland clouds a more essential point.  We are obligated to home for our own well being and for all the succeeding generations.:

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.          
  - Benjamin Franklin

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.     - Confucius

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.    - Charles Dickens

 

Natural Born Skeptics

Children are natural born learners. It may not seem that way after they've been in school a few years, but trust me, as Socrates said, "The power to learn is present in everyone' soul." Notice that Socrates located the "soul" as the locus of learning, not the "mind".  How quickly and easily children learn to talk is the universal example of natural learning ability.  If infants and toddlers weren’t naturally curious and attentive, they would never learn the distinction between “Dada” and “doggy”.  All furry things that move, eat and make noises would just be “doggy” – even kitties, hamsters and grandpas. But two year-olds sort out the physical and behavioral distinctions between mommy and daddy, kitty and doggy.  They misname things, but the errors don’t last long. Their ability to discriminate among the sounds of language and the objects and people of their environment allows them to speak the right name to things. 

Not only do they name things, they own them.  The world revolves around them. “I see my big moon,” said my two year-old Sarah.  It wasn’t just a shiny orb in the night sky. It wasn’t earth’s satellite.  It was her moon. Ownership established by her delight and proclamation.

All sorts of things can get in the way of increasing one’s vocabulary and discovering how the world operates.  The obstacles to natural and fast growth of vocabulary tend to be school, parents and grandparents.  Young parents - guard your children’s natural curiosity and desire to learn.  Things get in the way, including you.  You are their protector, but you also are the constant censor of their experiences:  “No . . . Put that down . . . Don’t eat that . . . Stay away from that . . .” Your children are going to challenge your “No’s” and question your reasons and explanations.  Be patient and forgiving.  Toddlers will soon turn into teenagers. For safety reasons, you may have to stand your ground and set limits, but – wait, I didn’t intend this to be a parenting lesson. Back to the children, their ever-growing awareness and curiosity.  Here’s a good story some of you already know:

Sammy the dog gets run over by a car.  I come home one afternoon and 4 year-old Sarah comes running down the driveway.  “Daddy, Daddy, Sammy got dead.”  After some tears and hugs, Sammy gets put in box, wrapped in a baby blanket and buried on the hill in the backyard. After supper, Sarah gets a book and her little red chair and starts out the back door. “Where you going,” Mom asks.  “Out to read to Sammy.”  The book is a picture book titled Bored, Nothing to Do.

Sarah and Sammy

Later in the evening comes the inevitable question, “Mommy, what’s going to happen to Sammy?”  Mommy says that Sammy has gone to live with Jesus.  Sarah’s face droops, “But he’s my dog. I don’t want him to be with Jesus.  He’s my dog.” Whatever Mommy said next was not very comforting to that 4 year-old.  A few days later, Sarah and her best friend dig into the grave, feel under the blanket and confirm that Sammy is, indeed, still in her backyard.  Thank goodness, he’s still her dog.  Not only are children natural born learners, they are natural born skeptics of authority. And that’s a good thing.

There is more to the story of the death of Sarah’s dog. It’s not just about curiosity and authority.  It’s way deeper. Little children may have some spiritual essence, but they certainly are not theological humans.  They, generally, understand the world based on what they can see and touch. They own their world and will not easily give up possession.  Some of us never, not even at the age of 60, give up possession of our world.  Side note: I’ve noticed that some very young children have an innate sense of fairness and concern for others.  For other children, fairness is only whatever is in their best interest.  I’ve seen children take perverse pleasure in hurting animals or people. How our conscience grows and develops is one of life’s profound mysteries, which probably explains why the growth and development of humans belongs to the realm of the spiritual rather than the psychological.

About 28 years ago I wrote about Sarah and the death of her dog in an article for the Macon Telegraph and News. I cannot recall how I ended the article, but it must have involved trying to coach parents about how to explain death and what happens after death. A few days after the article came out I got a six-page letter from a lady that was full of biblical quotes.  She concluded that I needed to reconsider my theology because I was in danger of dying and going to hell.

Twenty eight years later I believe that neither Sarah’s father or mother had much control of her spiritual development.  Not that we didn’t try. But learning about spiritual matters is controlled within our own spirit.  When I review my daughter’s life today, I think things turned out quite well. But learning anything, simple or complex, is controlled within the spirit.  As parents and teachers, we can try to help. We can provide good models, clarity and opportunity.  But it might be easier to get in the way than to help.

Somebody out there is still sure I’m going to hell. That’s their problem.

Virginia Avenue II

On a cool afternoon in March my brother and I stood on the crest of the hill above Virginia Avenue looking down on the little house of our childhood.  The gray wooden siding was faded. Crumbling and rotten wood clung to the edge of the carport. Otherwise, it had not changed. We had walked up the hill from Vale Street, through a lot where new town homes were being constructed, and stood in the Duncan family graveyard about 30 feet from our old backdoor.  The two intact gravestones were still there, along with a collection of other fragments. The internments pre-dated the Civil War.  As a child, I used the old gravestones to mark my place in a longer view of time.

The leaves were off the trees, so we had a good view of the whole neighborhood on the southeast side of Marion.  I pointed out to Joey the north side of the wooded hill where we had built the lean-to shelter that he had burned down. On the south side we had constructed the oil can shed the wind had blown down. We traded other memories of childhood exploits. I was the oldest and most nostalgic. For me, childhood had been about freedom. I walked home from elementary, junior high and high school.  As long as I checked in with Mom, the whole south end of town was my playground.

In the summers, my bicycle gave me access to larger terrain. I pedaled to Grandmother’s house on the mill hill in Clinchfield, mowed the grass, ate dinner and watched Gun Smoke with her. I cruised down Airport Road beyond the north end of town to where my friends lived on the hills above the Catawba River. I labored up and down the twisting 15 miles of country roads to my Grandfather’s house in Montford Cove.

Summer days and nights were mostly unsupervised.  I met friends at the soda fountain in the Dime Store.  We bought peashooters and went to the matinee at the House Theater where we sat through double features and sent peas streaking like shooting stars through the movie light - until we got old enough to realize girls wanted to hold hands. We camped in the woods behind the house or on the summit of Mt. Ida.  We roamed the town after midnight, walked naked along the railroad tracks, broke windows in abandoned buildings, and raced laundry carts around the Laundromat. We smoked cigarettes, told dirty jokes, had peeing and spitting contests and made liberal use of our expanded vocabularies.  We raced bicycles, homemade cogwheel carts, and skateboards.  We built things and destroyed them.  We climbed the rock faces of the old quarry at the base of Mt. Ida.  And survived it all – mostly.  Somehow, we grew up, became more constructive and less destructive, developed better tastes and decision-making skills, learned social tact and moderated our language.  We got jobs, got married and had our own kids.

Our children lived a different childhood – less freedom and more structure.  We feared for our children in a changing world. We believed the world was more dangerous.  Roaming unsupervised exposed children to all the things we could not control.

As I stood on that hill overlooking my childhood I realized the insignificance of the changes to the physical world but the vastness of the changes to the social world.  I felt sad.  But should I?  Was I just being an old man unwilling to consider the possibility that change is good? I don’t think so.  Here is what I have seen of childhood during the past 30 years.

Only kids in the ghetto and the country roam anywhere.  Kids in the suburbs are held captive in afterschool programs.  They either attend soccer practice, karate or music lessons, or they go home and plug into the television or computer. If they get exercise, it’s dancing with the Wii machine.  They are afraid of the dark, of spiders, snakes and other kids.  They are overweight and over-controlled. They might be gifted at school but when they become teen-agers they will be unpracticed at decision-making.  It will take them years to learn by trial and error what I had discovered by thirteen.  Their experiences with woods, streams, hills and streets are zilch.  For the young, all bird songs sound the same.  Stars are just dots of lights in the night sky.  I know am generalizing, that all childhoods are not like this, but there is common pattern to growing up that leads many of my college students to the bewilderment they face today.

A little girl has a 50/50 chance of having a baby before she get married.  If she’s lucky enough to avoid premature motherhood, she might finish college but need another six years to find a career.  And she won’t worry about it much.  She has to find something worthy and she can live at home and continue to eat mom’s cooking.  Her boyfriends will wonder aimlessly through a similar pattern.  They will enjoy college for six to eight years or until they max-out their eligibility to play sports.  If they get a college degree it will probably be in communication studies, psychology or sports and exercise studies, which prepares them for nothing other than the need for another degree.

I know. I am just a curmudgeon who excels in hyperbole.  Maybe I’m the stereotypical guy who thinks he has to be bad before he can be good. The current generation of youth is kinder, more respectful of their parents and more tolerant of people with differences.  But let’s see how they turn out.  They are more patient, but I fear, more clueless. Will they see the future with the sense of urgency that seems necessary?  Has their lack of freedom caused them to miss things that others see and hear?  Will they be imaginative and passionate enough to solve the problems we are leaving them?

Cumpulsory Schooling?

I hate to go against President O’bama and our local superintendent of schools, but I don’t think we need to raise the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 18. In fact, I’m not sure a compulsory attendance law is a good idea at all.  How’s that for flying in the face of popular common sense? Note my “not sure” stance.  Let’s see if I can convince you and me that requiring students to attend school is not only unnecessary, but in some cases, is cruel and unusual punishment for students and teachers. 

For some students, schooling is an anti-intellectual experience. For some, the problems start at the beginning. They never fit in comfortably with their peers. They discover early that learning in school is difficult.  It’s a source of embarrassment. Parents and teachers fret over their “failures”.  To protect their ego and self-esteem, these unfortunate students employ defense mechanisms: they convince themselves they don’t care; they don’t like reading and math; they either withdraw to avoid calling attention to themselves, or they become aggressive and disruptive. By the end of elementary school, some of these students have become hard-core problems for teachers and other students. The irony for these unfortunate students is there is often nothing inherently wrong with them.  Circumstance has them on a different learning schedule.  If reading instruction had begun at age seven instead of age five, they might have been fine.  If they had been given better instruction or more time to master the basics of adding and subtracting, they might not have been so befuddled by multiplication. But the curriculum is rigid. A child not showing signs of reading by age six is at risk.  If they don’t catch up to their peers by age seven, they will know failure and stress at a young age.  It is an experience that is hard to get over.

On the opposite end of the failure scenario is the boredom scenario experienced by the most able students – the children who absorb information from a multitude of sources and develop reading and mathematic skills in spite of a dreadfully slow pace of instruction. If these quick learners are compliant, they are not a problem for schools in the early years; but as they get older, they use their creativity and energy in ways that give teachers and students real headaches. In many school systems, the intellectually quick students are about as likely to drop out of school as the intellectually slow students.

Now, consider the need for freedom, dignity and self-determination for all human beings. Students wait to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water and to eat.  They wait to be called on and to be told what to do next.  It is a life governed by the clock and the calendar.  It is a life of constant testing and grading. Students have to show over and over again what they know and can do. The number of times they have to hear about nouns and numbers, fractions and fragments seems to never end. They have to defend themselves against bullies. School can be a social boot camp. And students cannot quit and tell the sergeant to shove it.

School, even at the kindergarten level, is a formal institution.  It has regulations, policies and commitments to keep to taxpayer and politicians.  With end of grade tests, it has a tight schedule for learning from which teachers and students cannot escape. Given the rigidity of formal schooling, children should only go to school when they were ready to learn.  If they were not ready, they will be exposed to failure. If teachers judge students unready or unwilling to learn, they should be sent home.

No adult would tolerate living or working under similar circumstances that many students face. But we will require our (or other people’s) children and teenagers to do what we would not do, even when the evidence suggests it is not in their best interest. I suppose we do this because we think there are no other options. We cannot have gangs of young ruffians roaming the city streets.  We think we must continue to hope that schools will solve the social problems that other agencies of society have been unable to solve.  While we wait, the kids keep going to school. 

I invite your responses to this.  We are all teachers and we are obligated to nurture our children and guide our teenagers toward adulthood.  You surely have ideas and stories to contribute to this discussion.

It Takes a Village

If we are natural born learners, why do we believe everyone must go to school? Let’s consider a brief history of school.  Where does the idea originate?

The Book of Proverbs in the Bible’s Old Testament contains admonitions that children should pay attention to their teachers, that learning is valuable and there are consequences to suffer for those who do not attend.  In Plato’s Republic, Socrates speaks at length about the power and importance of learning and about the appropriate curriculum for schooling the young. He did not think young boys should be exposed to the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The stories were too violent and showed the flaws of gods and heroes.  By profession, Confucius was a teacher.  The Analects of Confucius is the collected wisdom that Confucius imparted to the children of China’s aristocrats, including the importance and never-ending nature of learning.  All three sources are about 2500 years old, right at the early edge of recorded history. Schooling is an old idea, but it assumes many forms and varying possibilities for who could be teachers and who could be students.

Although the idea of school originates most clearly Jewish, Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, the availability of formal schooling for everyone is far more modern.  In fact, almost all aspects of modern culture pre-date common schooling – mechanical technologies, industry, commerce, politics, government and the arts developed well before schooling became widely available. So, one could argue that formal schooling for everyone is not a necessary element of civilization.

In America, it was not until the 1820’s that the need for wide spread schooling became apparent because commerce and industry needed an educated work force.  The origin of many public school systems and public colleges can be traced to the early 19^th century. Although Thomas Jefferson insisted on the value of education in a democracy, he was an old man before his own state of Virginia committed to building its first state university. Ironically, the driving force behind public education was industry and commerce, not democracy.

The early days of public schooling in America were rather awful.  The curriculum was limited both in breadth and depth; teachers were usually only a little older than their pupils; there was no such thing as teacher training or standards; culture wars were common over everything from who could attend school to the content of the curriculum. In the Philadelphia riots of 1844, churches, homes, and market places were burned and 30 people killed over whether public schools should use either the Catholic or Protestant bible. Girls and young women were either excluded from schooling or assigned to segregated schools.  In southern states it was a criminal offense to teach slaves to read or write.

The American public school took its modern form in the early 20^th century after child labor laws excluded children from being employed in factories and mines and mechanization changed the nature of agriculture. As adults were consumed by commerce and industry, there had to be a place in society for children and adolescents.  School, for better or worse, became that place and it evolved from a five or six year experience to a 13-year experience.

People like me – white Americans over 60 years old – often think of the 1950s as the golden age of American public schooling. Since women of that era were still mostly excluded from higher paying professions, there might be reason to believe that teachers back then were more capable. But, non-whites will certainly have a different memory – of underfunded schools and worn-out textbooks handed down from the white-only school system. And where were the children with significant disabilities schooled? We don’t remember them being in the public schools because they were not there.

Schooling is not a flawed idea, but its execution is flawed. Its effects are not uniformly beneficial, in part because we often ignore the natural agents and mechanisms of learning, and in part because rapid changes in culture have altered the learning environment in which children live. The availability of parents, family and community members to play a role in children’s learning have declined or, in many cases, disappeared. It does take a village to raise a child, but the saying stands in stark contrast to the reality that most children do not live in anything that resembles a village.  They live in attendance zones.  Automobiles, transit lines, patterns of work, shopping and entertainment define the real village. The concept of village now has no geographic center and school attendance zones usually serve several mutually exclusive villages.

Children do not necessarily need schools, but they do need real villages and good teachers. Good teachers could be anyone, anywhere, anytime. But modern culture has lost the capability of providing a wide range of natural teachers. Schooling has not adapted to a world in which the geographic village has disintegrated.  We live in the 21^st century, but the structure of schooling is still based on 19^th and 20^th century models that assumed the existence of coherent communities, supportive parents and the power of self-driven learners. Fixing our schools would be easy if all our children lived in nurturing communities.

Becoming Literate

I was five years old and hazardously bored watching my parents and neighbors play Canasta. My mother tore a piece of paper off the scoring pad and wrote my name in large letters – JOHNNY.  “That’s how you spell your name,” she said. “Go practice writing your name.” I traced the letters, then copied them and from that point on always knew how to spell and write my name.

In the first grade I sat in the small wooden chair in a semi-circle with a few other children.  The teacher pointed to the picture on the flip chart of Dick and Jane.  Below the picture was a word.  The teacher said, “This word is look, l-o-o-k.” She named the letters as she pointed to them. “You can remember this word because the two letters in the middle are round like the eyes we use when we look at something.”

In third grade my friend Richard was reading a book with pages full of words and no pictures.  The book was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, about the first flight of American bombers in World War II over Tokyo.  Richard showed me the few pages in the middle of the book with old black and white photos of the B-17 airplanes and bombs exploding on the city.  When he returned it to the library I checked it out and read it. 

That same year, Kelly and I snuck a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer in his mother’s kitchen.  We took them to the creek behind his house where I smoked my first cigarette. A few days later I suggested we get some of his mom’s cigarettes and go to the creek.  My friend said he couldn’t, that his mama would whip him if she caught him sneaking cigarettes again. I learned something about risk-taking and sneakiness.

Anyone can tell stories about learning – academic and intellectual skills, the behaviors and habits that connect us to our friends, mannerisms that we think are a part of becoming older, more able and more admired – how to wear our hair and our clothes, to walk and talk, to behave sexually and to play sports and music.  We learn by being taught, by imitation and by trial and error. If learning goes well, if we get enough help from our parents, friends and teachers, we learn to think ahead – not just toward tomorrow or next weekend, but further into the future, toward what we want to be and how we want to be.

Learning never stops.  Living is learning.  We may become tired, frustrated and lose confidence in ourselves as learners; but even those are learned beliefs about who and how we are.

Schools exist to promote learning. The learning promoted by school is institutionalized learning accumulated over centuries.  Though it varies slightly from place to place and time-to-time, we all know – generally – what comprises school learning.  It is academic and intellectual – reading, writing, mathematics, the natural and social sciences, the arts, plus other things depending on institutional mission and community values.  School learning is skills and concepts graduated on the premise that learning correlates to the age of the learner, thus we have grade levels based on chronological age.

In many ways, schooling is a strange idea based on faulty premises – that teachers know what to teach and how to teach it, that 20 plus children placed in a room all day with a teacher will cooperate with the teacher’s intentions, that hundreds of children or teenagers in a school will bend their collective will to the charge of a few dozen adults who intend to teach them, that all eight year-olds are enough alike that we can create a third grade curriculum that starts in September and ends in May, and that the next year, all those eight year-olds who have become nine will be ready for the fourth grade curriculum.

I have been a teacher for almost 40 years, but when I step back and shed the history and methods of schooling and consider its purposes and the premises, I am amazed that it actually works – sometimes. 

Virginia Avenue 1

Our house, built of timber cut from my great-grandfather’s farm, was planted on a wooded hill above the intersection of Virginia Avenue and South Main Street.  In a neighborhood of small homes we were perched on the crest of the hill and mostly invisible to our neighbors. Trees protected us on every side.

* * * * *

An overnight snowfall turned the world outside the house silent. No traffic on the roads. The television played in the living room. The aroma of bacon frying in Mom’s cast iron skillet filled the house. I lay with my head at the foot of the bed and watched snowflakes sifting through the trees. A small hemlock at the edge of the woods sagged, its boughs heavily laden with snow. In an oak tree, a squirrel clung to a length of twine that dangled a cob of dried corn. The squirrel spilled more kernels into the snow than he raked into his mouth. The corncob slipped from the twine and dumped the squirrel into snow. He grabbed the whole cob in his mouth and headed up the tree to a main fork, perched there and resumed gnawing at the kernels. A blue jay swooped past, but the squirrel paid it no mind.

Ten minutes later, I stood in sock feet on the floor furnace grate and slipped into my blue jeans.

 * * * * *

From the windows in our small dining room, when the trees were bare, I could see the two gravestones on the hill in the woods behind the house, only a few yards from our window.  I studied their engravings carefully. They were old, neglected and weathered.  Only two names were decipherable – Thomas Davis, who died in 1864 and Jewel Davis in 1857.  Pieces of gravestones lay scattered around the two intact stones – a family graveyard fading into the shadows of neighborhood history. The graveyard fixed my understanding of time. Thomas Davis passed during the Civil War, a hundred years before my childhood. His wife never knew that war unless her ghost haunted his house. Where did his house stand in 1864? Perhaps down in the creek bottom, now lined with houses along South Main and the little textile mill across the creek.

My father owned half the woods on the crest of the hill separating our street from the row of houses behind us.  It was only a few acres, but trees and thickets shielded us from parental supervision. We thought. On the far slope of the hill, just beyond the gravestones, a thicket of mountain laurel spread under the understory of oaks. At six years old, the thicket was our hide-away.  Betty and I crept into the tangle of limbs and found an opening where we played doctor and nurse.  I examined her and she examined me. We confirmed the differences between boys and girls. 

A few years later, Bobby, Steve and I used a piece of plywood and a cinder block to build a table inside the laurel thicket.  In a tin can we kept marbles, matches, an old knife and a deck of playing cards. We played strip poker, but no one ever removed the final piece of cotton.  Without a girl player, what was the point?

We used a wagon and a wheelbarrow to tote loads of discarded oilcans from the service station at the corner into the woods.  It took weeks, but we accumulated enough cans to build a small shed using scavenged planks to keep the lines of cans straight and level.   An old blanket made the roof.  Within days a wind blew down the shed. The phone rang in our house with a grumpy complaint about scattered oilcans in the woods behind a neighbor’s house. Bobby and I spent the next Saturday afternoon hauling the cans out of the woods to the bed of Dad’s pickup. We did not get the pleasure of riding with him to the trash dump.

Bobby and I dug a foxhole at the edge of the yard.  Dad made me fill it in.  We moved deeper into the wood and dug a deeper hole.  We were going to build a tunnel until we discovered how much a little bit of dirt weighed.

Alan showed us how to climb samplings and swing them down to the ground.  When Dad discovered all the bent trees he told us to stop bending his trees. When I was in high school I learned from Robert Frost that it was a boy’s right to subdue is father’s trees.

Over the years we used an old hatchet and a hand saw to cut down trees – one from this acre, one from that acre. There were hundreds of trees.  Who would miss a few trees? Dad did.  Quit digging holes in the ground and cutting down my trees, he said. We quit for a month or so.  Eventually, we cut and trimmed enough trees to build a lean-to shelter. Boy Scouts had to practice lashing limbs together.  We built a three-sided shelter with a sloping back, a ramp to the roof of the shelter, our lookout for fathers.

The shelter was our engineering summit. Enough is enough, said Dad.  We played games, held scout patrol meetings and camped out in the shelter until my brother turned over an oil lamp and set it afire.  The Marion Fire Department, sirens and all,  put out the fire.