"Thank Heaven for Little Boys" --by Lerner and Loewe, 1957

Darryl remembers,

     "I was quite young when we lived in Cary, so my memories are mostly about playing with friends.  I had four neighborhood friends--Larry Yarborough (next door), Steven Paste (across the street to the left), Jay Lawrence (a red-head) and Dee Dunne (a girl, up the street at the last house.)
     The four of us spent a lot of time in the creek behind Steven’s house, where we often pretended we were Daniel Boone and other frontiersmen fighting off Indians.  Probably the Daniel Boone series on TV along with a Daniel Boone outfit Mam made me, complete with a coon skin hat, sparked my imagination.  We also spent hours chipping away at a large quartz like stone near the creek that we believed contained hidden gems."


Bit of history:

     "In 1775 Daniel Boone blazed his Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky.  It was the principal route used by settlers to reach Kentucky from the East.
     The Wilderness Road was steep, rough, narrow, and it could only be traversed on foot or horseback.  Despite the adverse conditions, thousands of people used it.  In 1792, the new Kentucky legislature provided money to upgrade the road.  In 1796, an improved all-weather road was opened for wagon and carriage travel.  The road was abandoned around 1840, although modern highways follow much of its route."


     "At the end of our street past a tall barbed wire fence, a handful of abandoned shacks stood in waist high grass; we pretended that a dead man lived under the porch of one of the houses, and if you stepped on the porch the boards would pop open and out he would come. We were fascinated by the houses and would spend time a lot of time there egging each other to step on the porch.

     My fondest childhood memory is of the "fog truck" that would traverse the roads on summer evenings, spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes.  Once we knew it was coming we would jump on our bikes, wait at the end of the road, and follow it around the neighborhood, inhaling the fumes. I'm sure it killed most of the mosquitos, and, years later, many of the people, too.  Is that why I twitch so much?


 In by Andrew Hudgins
 

When we first heard from blocks away
the fog truck’s blustery roar,
we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals,
and scrambled out the door

into an evening briefly fuzzy.
We yearned to be transformed—
translated past confining flesh
to disembodied spirit. We swarmed

in thick smoke, taking human form
before we blurred again,
turned vague and then invisible,
in temporary heaven.

Freed of bodies by the fog,
we laughed, we sang, we shouted.
We were our voices, nothing else.
Voice was all we wanted.

The white clouds tumbled down our streets
pursued by spellbound children
who chased the most distorting clouds,
ecstatic in the poison.


 

     I used to create vignettes on my bedroom window sill with rocks and plastic dinosaurs.  I constantly rearranged them.  As a child I liked to pretend--I had a vivid imagination and seldom lived in reality.  Life was pretending.

     I don’t remember much about school, other than I didn't like it.  As an adult when I look back over my educational experiences,  I wasn’t thrilled.  I think that for someone as creative as me, school was nowhere near as interesting as my imagination.  I struggled to read and comprehend and so never felt comfortable in class. 
     Nor did I like rest time when you had to put your head down or lay on a mat.   I remember when we went to church, I would be dropped off at Sunday School--I hated that, being away from Mam and Dad.  I cried and cried.  What I did like about school was drawing and creating artwork.  Only then, I felt confident. Still do! 

Darryl, around 5 years old

Larry, Darryl, and Barbara

Darryl and Mam in our backyard pool