When I went back to Ohio last year, I drove past Eckles Lake, which was a big pond that was operated like a swimming pool. It had a raft in the middle that you could climb on, a rope swing that you dropped from right into the water, little boats that you paddled around, and lots of other fun stuff. It took me back to the time in the dim dim past when I was one of the kids being loaded in the car with the Crawfords to go to Eckles Lake, where we could swim and jump from a rope swing into the brown lake water. The memory is very dim, but I was small and quiet and shy, and did not stand out and kept to myself as far as I remember, with all those little Crawford kids and all their Christian hoo hah. I remember talking to Libby, who was my age about kissing, and she was of the opinion that when people kissed in the movies, they did not really kiss, they only pretended to kiss, and I said really? She seemed to be quite sure about it.

Thinking of that made me think of the other girls who were my friends as I grew up. There was Karen down in Worthington. Karen Kratch We used to play all the time. I remember hanging out at her house. I have this really idyllic memory of it all, with the neat concrete sidewalks along the clean black asphalt street, all edged with perfect curbs and a grass strip between the curb and the sidewalk, and little patches of grass with young trees growing in front yards in front of nice little white houses with yellow trim and fake shutters and brown composition roofs. I find the orderliness of it all to be idyllic. That’s why I said that. There’s a certain calm about the memory that I crave even now. Little worlds with no surprises, where things are in control. I could walk down about three houses to Karen’s house. She had an older sister who played with us, too. I don’t remember her name.

I think it was Karen’s older sister who had the idea of putting on a shadow play. We put up a sheet, and did a shadow operation using a spring loaded toy knife whose blade would retract into the handle as you cut with it so that it looked like you were making a deep deep cut, and we cut open the patient in the shadow theater, and pulled all kinds of funny stuff from her stomach, like a fish, and a toy pistol and whatever other funny junk we could find. We used to have a lot of fun, I think, but it's all very fuzzy and unclear.

I remember feeling very good about the neat sidewalks and the nice lawns and the smell of the air in the fall. And it's about this time they took a black and white Kodak Brownie camera picture (one of those tiny snapshots they had in the fifties with the wide white border and the small exposure within the border). The snapshot was of me on the up-side-down wheel barrow, sitting astride it facing the large rubber wheel. I do remember sitting there and spinning the wheel, and watching it go round and round, with the grooves in the rubber appearing to wobble slightly side to side as the tire would spin, and putting my hand on the wheel to stop it, and feeling the rubber of the spinning wheel rubbing against the palm of my hand.

And then there was the time I was sitting on the beach with my striped red and white swimming trunks, and I'm about five. It’s the Atlantic Ocean. I'm skinny, I look kind of frail staring out at the flat Atlantic as the waves lap my thighs. Becky sits beside me, a self-confident self-assured fifteen, she explains that tides, Robbie are caused by the moon. Did you know that? The moon pulls the water out, and then it lets it flow back, and it goes in and out like that twice a day, and sometimes the water gets really low and you can walk all the way out to that old piling out there. Did you know that? No, Becky, I didn't know. I can barely remember how I used to feel when Becky talked to me, how it used to feel to be five, with a sister of 15, another of 14, and a brother of 9 or 10. I think it was a combination of awe, dependence, and mixed in was this other feeling, a kind of stubbornness, a resistance, a feeling that yeah, you may be bigger than me, you may know more than I do, you may have more experience that me, but you aren't me, you'll never really understand what it is to be me, nobody will be me. Part of the me was me and Mom, and our very special closeness, or Mom's rubbing my legs when they ached, My understanding of Mom. I think I felt what mom felt, and it wasn't always pleasant. I didn't understand it, but if my felt a little edgy, a little sad, a little mad, frustrated, powerless.

I'd take it all in, and think about it, and finally ask "So when will the water come up? Is it coming up now?" and she'd tell me how it was still coming up, and if we kept watching we'd see it. And we sat and sat and sat, and sure enough the gentle warm summer waves would begin to touch my toes as Becky and I sat watching the surf come in, warm in the August sunshine, soft wind in our faces, eyes directed to the endless sea, and the heartbreaking horizon that rimmed the depths. I remember what it was like to have sand on my wet feet, and to be a skinny kid, standing dripping in my wet red and white striped swimming trunks, shivering, goose bumps peppering my stark white skin.

A little later on up in Delaware County, I made friends with Donna Percy, and we constructed a little world under a big leafy bush in her front yard.