Bear on the Mountain

The bear’s smell arrived before the animal did. I balanced precariously on one foot, shoe for the other in my hand. “Keep still, Miller!” Johnson, the counselor nearest me hissed in warning. Then the bear lumbered around the bend in the trail above us. The smell was stronger, and reminded me of pork chops, which seemed a strange thing, considering that I was about to be within an arm’s length of a creature who might look on me as lunch, rather than the other way around. With deep whuffing sounds, the bear padded down the trail, flanked on either side by the other campers and counselors, a dozen feet apart.

Standing up and not standing up

The summer I was eleven years old, I badgered my parents into sending me to summer camp at The Baylor School for Boys, where I would be going for school the next year but one. This was the first time I ever spent a sizeable block of time away from my family, and I suffered much homesickness. A boy’s summer camp in the 1950s was a fairly rugged environment for the sheltered child I was. I was just strong enough not to call my parents and beg to come home. Over all, camp became enjoyable.

Cicada Overture

As mid-summer heat builds, the cicadas are tuning up, their oddly metallic chirring erupting in bursts, rising and falling. I listen to the sounds that so identify summer for me, that evoke past summers in my childhood, when air conditioning was only for businesses and theaters. At home we had electric fans strategically placed about the house, and we children drifted off to sleep surrounded by the hard-edged sussuration of cicadas.

I was speaking tonight with an acquaintance who hails from Mississippi, and we compared notes on pre-A/C Southern Life. Being from Mississippi, the young man could top any story of heat that I could offer. I have been to Mississippi to visit my sister a number of times in the past twenty years, so I have a glimmering of an idea of what real heat is. As my sister says, though, “Y’all, we do have air conditioning now in Mississippi.” Grateful thanks ascend from visiting family for that healing fact.

Nostalgia softens memory, and makes the associations attendant on the cicada concert happy ones.

Sunday Paper Wars

Growing up, my sisters and I competed for many things, from who chose the TV programs to after school snacks to who got the funnies in the morning. If you were able to read the funnies completely before your siblings did, You Won. Sunday was the Playoff each week, whoever won first access to the Sunday Funnies was the champ for the week.

My sisters, being devious females, younger than I, would use my status as eldest and male to undermine me at every turn. Skillfully, they would sob and enlist my mother as referee in many disputes. “Skipper, you are the oldest and a boy, you should be nicer to your little sisters.” Sometimes I had to give up the hard-won Sunday Comics.

Sulking, I would sit at the counter in the playroom, spooning in my cereal and waiting for the crumpled and stained pages of Dagwood, Dick Tracy, Lil’ Abner and Peanuts after my sisters had worked their destructive worst upon them. Of course, my sisters never gloated, never smirked at me over the ruined pages of the comics. Not much, they didn’t.

Many years later, tempered by real life and children and now grandchildren, my sisters are quite nice and generous to me. I know that is only because they now have their own Sunday Comics, though.

A World of Play

Growing up in an expanding neighborhood on Lookout Mountain in the late 1940s, before television or the electronic world which resulted from the invention of semiconductors, I roamed the mixed woods and homes within a few blocks of our house, often with a group of children of varied ages. We might play a game of sketchy baseball, without bases or complete teams, or football without goal lines or pads. We explored the woody areas not yet turned into yards and houses.

The Baby Boom Moves Me

I finished fourth grade at Lookout Mountain Elementary School at the end of May, 1954. I was ten years old, one of the last of the “war babies” who were born before the end of World War II, after which returning servicemen began post-war families which would provide the “baby boomers” born from 1946 to 1964.

By 1954, the crush of expanding birth rates made Lookout Mountain School very crowded in the lower grades, K-3.  Those parents who lived over the Georgia State line, still on Lookout Mountain, but outside the tax reach of Hamilton County, which administered the elementary school, faced increased out-of-state tuition for their children. My sisters and I were transferred to Fairyland School, the Georgia school about a mile south of the state line.

This was a great change for us, my three years younger sister and I, taken from an upper-middle class school to classrooms with teenaged boys still in fifth grade. At the time this was a culture shock I could have done without, but in retrospect, it prepared me for a larger world which existed outside of the confines of the suburb of Chattanooga which contained most of the truly powerful and wealthy citizens.

I found myself in class with boys beginning to shave, with some boys who came to school without shoes, unable to read. Rough manners, usually, and the boys gave rough responses to smart-mouthed suburban kids – as I found out to my cost.

A good thing, in retrospect, and I would not trade the experience for anything. The sixties were just ahead, with social and economic changes I could not yet imagine. My education was not only that conveyed in the syllabus, anymore.

Generations

Moving through the third childhood of my family, starting with my own, then my children, now my grandchildren, I watched a softball game last night. Our granddaughter played a kindergarten level game with other little girls, some even smaller than she, some bigger. She was serious about her game. Her father was the same. I was not, in my time, but did show up. Apart from being unable throw, catch, bat or run well, I was a natural. Now I benefit from the enthusiasm of both my granddaughter, and my son before her.

I Go to the Museum

My mother was a dedicated advocate for all manner of art and culture for her children. Devoted to music, she faithfully took us to the Chattanooga Symphony Children’s Concerts, where we fidgeted through various classical works. Sometimes these concerts were enlivened by visual aids, as when a cartoonist improvised sketches for works such as Peter and the Wolf, one of the more child-friendly performances.

My mother took me at around eleven years old to the recently opened Hunter Museum, on the bluff overlooking the Tennessee River. I might not have enjoyed wandering through room after room of mostly 19th century American art, but my mother was crafty.  She chose a week when a traveling exhibit of the inventions of

A Leonardo drawing

Leonardo da Vinci was on display. This was my first introduction to the breadth of Leonardo’s interests, which encompassed not only painting – I had encountered the Mona Lisa in school art class – but sculpture, drawing and inventing a bewildering variety of devices from war machines to mechanical wonders such as a helicopter, and a flying machine with man-powered wings. Most of these inventions were never completed and tested, but the exhibit featured a number of models made to assist the visualization of their complexity.

A model of a helicopter

I loved the displays, and especially the drawings, with Leonardo’s unique mirror writing, which made his left-handedness less of a problem for him.

I have spent adult time in the Hunter as well, once I grew older, but that day will always be special for me, and another reason to value my mother and the time she invested in my education. She sincerely believed that education should not be confined to school and my teachers. I am blessed with her memory.

I must also mention, however, that one memory of that visit to the Hunter is not quite as elevated in tone. At some point, Mother allowed me to explore by myself as she investigated exhibits not to my taste. I had seen one sculpture attracting my eleven-year-old, ah, baser interests. A life-size sculpture of a nude young woman, no doubt with great artistic value, but I was attracted by…other attributes. Heh. I don’t think my mother knew of my little private viewing. I certainly never mentioned it.

Wedding Blues

In 1952 my Aunt Barbie was married. The family gathered in Arlington, VA, some of  us staying in a rambling old house my grandparents had rented for the summer. My grandfather was stationed in Washington pending the Army sending him to Korea. The summer was very hot, even in June, as were the summers throughout the early ’50s. The street in front of the house, where the busses stopped, had pavement that had softened in the heat so much that ridges of asphalt had hilled up against the curb. Under the deep eaves of the house, shaded by tall trees and windowed with crank out casements, however, breezes gave relief.

None of us had met my future uncle Tommy before arriving in Arlington. Tommy was staying in the house, tucked away in a bedroom on the third floor. We arrived early in the morning, having stopped overnight on the road in a convenient motel, my parents exhausted from loading up three children and driving almost six hundred miles the day before. Uncle Tommy-to-be came downstairs to greet us in his bathrobe. We all liked him immediately, such a gentle and affectionate man. My Aunt Barbie beamed and clutched her fiancé’s arm. She was my godmother as well as my aunt, and had given me a big hug and kiss, which at the age of eight I bore as well as possible, loving her for loving me.

In fact, I was ambivalent about my aunt getting married and moving out of my grandparents’ house. She would no longer be there when we visited my Nana and Boozle, but off somewhere with her husband. They would be married. At eight, changes of this magnitude were disturbing. I remember sitting beside her in an upstairs porch that night, opened casement windows admitting breezes from under the eaves murmurous with pigeons. She was dressed to go out with my future uncle, perfumed, made up, harnessed with mysterious undergarments which I could feel under her pleated and starched blouse as I nestled next to her. I thought to myself that soon such moments would be gone. Things would change. Welcome to life, I might have said to myself, but reflection is not natural to boys who are only eight. To girls, perhaps. But not to me that hot night.

Things worked out, as they do, and visiting my Aunt Barbie was even better once she and Uncle Tommy were married, adding another layer of comfort to my extended family. I love them both in  ways that an eight-year-old boy could not have understood. Life does that for you, every seeming loss is often a blessing for the years ahead.

Fishing and the Moonshiner

Many years ago, I went with a group of other boys, mostly younger than I, with several of their fathers on a Saturday in June, bound down to North Western Alabama. Our destination was a cove carved out of the west flank of Sand Mountain, a portion of the Cumberland Plateau. The stated purpose was to go fishing in the mountain stream, Long Island Creek, that had created the cove, named for the quite long island in the Tennessee River, just above where the creek emptied into it. In truth, the men wanted to give the boys a chance to get outside, out of our suburban neighborhood, and see a slice of Appalachian history and geology.

Catching a few fish, and observing wildlife were useful incentives.

After a longish drive around the northern end of Sand Mountain, we swung south and west, finally turning into a narrow, rutted road nearly over grown with weeds. We could only penetrate a few hundred yards before the cars had to be parked. We got out and explored an old cemetery just at the end of  the usable road. One of the fathers remarked that family members visiting the cemetery had probably kept the road passable to just that point.