Black Lives Matter activist 'lost a testicle after being shot in the groin with a rubber bullet fired by LAPD officers during protests in Los Angeles'

I am interested to hear about the burnt house and the worst farm. Tell me.

Ain’t life grand?

You know, I feel lucky, and I get the feeling you have the same sentiment. You just gave my nostalgic engine a yank on the starting rope.

I feel like I lived a life full of rich things, good and bad, experiences that I feel the young people entering this “safe” and weirdly homogeneous society will never know.

The concept of having a freedom, free of electronic tethers which I see now as tent stakes tying you to...something.

Of taking a picture with a camera, and not knowing for weeks what that picture would come out like.

We would go out with instructions to be home at 6 for dinner, and during the summer, could go back out until the street lights came on. And at 6 PM, my mother had a large metal triangle on our deck that she would beat with an iron bar to make sure you got back.

I remember being young enough (perhaps four or five years old) that as I looked into the night sky on a warm summer night and saw the twinkling of the stars, my little boy brain heard the mad chorus of crickets all around me, and concluded it was the sound stars made as they twinkled. I can remember that instant so clearly.

On Saturdays year round, you could finish your chores, and be free until dinner, generally six or seven hours. If you were at home around noon, you would get lunch. Mom would make it if there were one kid or six...:) If you weren’t at home, you didn’t have lunch. No penalty, no foul. That was, for a kid, being free.

I would be six or seven, and cruise off with an older brother or a friend to a candy store on the side of town that black kids lived in. It was two or three miles, and we walked. No cop car stopped to ask if our parents knew where we were, or judgmental faces from adults because kids so young were out so far from home. Nobody even batted an eye. We would look for soda bottles along the way, scouring the road, and sometimes you got one...sometimes two. Sometimes, none. Some were that odd looking Canada Dry bottle, green with the white globe logo on it. All were good finds for penny candy at the store.

We would eat the candy walking back, things like those wax bottles with the sugary multicolored liquid in them, or wax lips...Pixie Sticks...Brown Cows, things like that.

Hopped up on sugar, we would stop at a friend’s house who had a Weimaraner, big green eyes and a bony bump on its head. They didn’t let the dog run free as so many did in those days, but kept it in a fenced in backyard. It was high spirited and loved to bite hard...as were we...:) We would taunt the dog, walking unsteadily on top of their fence as the dog leaped, growled, and snapped at us. Then, that was when the game started. When one of us lured the dog to the other end of the yard, one of the other kids would leap into the other end of the yard, and either try to climb the other fence, or if our friend who owned the dog was with us, we had to get to the open bathroom window and leap in, almost always to the sound of the grey dog’s fast approaching paws and the snapping of its jaws right behind our feet! And sometimes, the kid walking the fence would lose balance and fall into the yard where the dog we be on him, ripping at a sleeve or a trouser leg, growling and pulling at the hysterically laughing kid as he scrambled over and tried to climb back up the fence with the dog latched onto them! I never remember that dog’s name, but I do remember his yard had wires dangling through all the branches of large leafy trees.

I would see his dad in the yard, a long coil of wire and a crescent wrench tied to the end. He would swing the wrench and launch the wire over a tree branch, then drag it over to another tree. He was a Ham Radio guy. One night, his son asked if he could bring me down to watch, so we did. You could hear a foreign sounding voice...a very odd voice that seemed not to be a human 6000 miles away, but the machine itself speaking. His father had headphones on, cigarette in mouth, glasses, and turned to me and said “Do you want to say hello?” as he gestured towards the microphone (one of those silver, bullet shaped ones, I think) I leaned forward and said hesitantly “Hello?” From out in the ether, that odd voice said “Hello! What is your name?” I told him, and asked him where he lived. Now, I don’t remember exactly, but I swear it was an eastern bloc country like Poland or Romania. I don’t even know if those countries allowed it or if people just did it. As the person spoke, it was clear, no static, and extremely flat in tone. But the sound wavered ever so slightly now and then. All the while, the dials of the device lit the dimly illuminated space under the stairs in the cellar with a pale yet warm white, nearly yellowed color. For some reason, while talking I was looking at his father’s face, lit like the moon with one side in the dark, the other side visible, one eye watching me as smoke swirled up.

Funny. As I have crossed and am approaching another threshold in life, the memories I have seem to take on a vivid light inside my mind. It is as if they are a little video clip that you can play over and over again. Almost all of them seem to only last seconds.

But looking back at them now...yeah. Treasured memories.

Ain’t life grand?

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