IT'S WHAT YOU DID

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (04-24-25)

     The calendar says it's spring, so I guess it must be, even though spring came in like a lion and seems to have eaten the lamb it was supposed to go out like. Anyway, I should be out building a fort right now. That's what we did when I was your age. We would find a suitable place in the woods, and construct a simple shelter strong enough to withstand a category 5 school year. 

     As in any real estate venture, location is everything. It needs to be far enough away from the house so that you can pretend not to hear your parents calling, but close enough so that if an actual wild animal appears to have legitimate claim to the property, i.e. is bigger than you, you can get the hell out of there.

     If your parents built you a tree fort, they probably did so thinking that whatever it is you're doing in that fort, at least you're doing it close to home. Which is stupid reasoning because 88 percent of accidents occur within five minutes of your home. And I would guess that a good 50 percent of those occur in a tree, or on the ground near one. It also probably makes your parents complicit in aiding and abetting the delinquency of a minor, and the minor's goofy next door neighbor.

     My wife says she was walking the dog in the woods and came upon a fort constructed with a car door as one of the walls. That's an example of either a really ambitious fort, or really bad driving.

     I guess it really is spring because you can hear the frogs croaking in the ponds. They do this to attract a mate, because have you seen a frog? Looks alone are not going to do it. Surprisingly it works, although I recently made a similar noise at the dinner table and "attraction" was not the vibe I got. The sound also gave us kids an indication as to their whereabouts, which was in a pond near our house. We would find tadpoles and put them in a jar with water in it. That's what you did back then. Why did we do this? Partly to gain an understanding of biological development, and partly because the adoption process is much easier than with human children, plus it's hard to find a jar that big.

     We also used to hunt for salamanders, and if we found one, we would put it in a shoebox with some grass, and poke holes in the top with a pencil. It took us a few stabs at the proess to figure out that we should have put the salamander in AFTER poking the holes. Also we should have taken the shoes out first. Salamanders aren't particularly attractive either, and if you do come home with one, your Mom is likely to give it that "what rock did YOU crawl out from under" look. 

     Amphibians in general were constantly being harassed by us, and if I was an amphibian I would have put out a restraining order. When I hear that amphibious vehicles were employed in World War II I scoff, because we would have had all of them in a shoebox within the week.

     Did you play "cops and robbers" when you were a kid? Well, the game has changed. Kids are so sophisticated now, I can't even imagine myself as a pre-teen "robber" anymore. Am I simply going to sit in my room and engage in internet scams? Outside the house I'm careful not to leave any DNA evidence, and I don't use any saliva on anything I eat or drink. 

     Me and my friend used to climb trees. There was a huge evergreen tree in back of his house, and we could get about three quarters of the way up in before the air got thin and the branches even thinner. Why did we want to climb the tree? Did anyone ask Sir Edmund Hillary why he wanted to climb Mount Everest? Did anyone ask John Glenn why he wanted to orbit the Earth? Did anyone ask Amelia Earhart why she wanted to disappear while flying a plane? Well, people did ask those questions, but nobody asked us. I guess the answer was that it was our only chance to look down on people. I notice that when there is a housecat in a tree, people scramble to call the fire department to rescue it, even though a cat is perfectly capable of getting down by itself, then vomiting on your newspaper. When people saw US in the tree, the similar reaction was, "there are two boys stuck atop a tree! We MUST rescue the tree!" There was talk of shooting us out of it. I'm not certain the fire department would have been called if we were stuck in the tree AND on fire. But that's just what you did back then.

     Did you do any of these things? Why, of course you did. We didn't have any of these new-fangled things you kids have today, like social media, cell phones and angst. All we had were things you could fangle out of some string, construction paper, really blunt scissors, a deflated kickball and a chemistry set that we could use to blow all of the above up. Why, when I was YOUR age, we used to do things like stick the word "why" in front of a sentence. Why? Why, I'm not sure why. But that's just what you did back then.