The garbage truck is slowly making its noisy way back down the other side of the street. The plastic cans don’t make the same racket that the old 50 gallon barrels of my childhood did; even then the trucks came up the alley, not the street. Alleys were the domain of us kids then. We played catch or baseball in them when the streets were busier with cars, or we didn’t mind a more restricted game, alleys being narrower than streets. They were cooler on a hot day than the asphalt out front, and we were less observed by parents back there. Adults rarely seemed to travel alleys. Occasionally a grownup would appear long enough to empty a household garbage, or dump lawn clippings along the outside of the chain-link fence. But, for the most part, the alleys were ours. A short cut to a friend’s house, we usually knocked at the backdoor, or stood at the fence and yelled. They yelled back.

I do not know why my mind goes where it goes sometimes. Last night I woke up remembering an incident from when I was a kid. It was one of those little happenings in life that were no big deal, not worthy of sharing as a significant life experience, only a little thing. My mind grabbed onto it though and, as brains abhor inactivity, the thread was picked up. Mentally, I wandered through a junk drawer of odd memories, before going back to sleep. I have no reason to relate them to anyone, but I’m going to anyway.

I was probably seven or eight. I had a new box of caps for my pistols. Caps came in a red box, several rolls stuck together in a tube, the rolls were separated by   serrations and pulled apart. Each roll was two layers of thin paper, a bottom white layer and a top red layer. Little dots of gunpowder alternated with holes on the roll. A blunt pin in the pistol fit in the hole and moved the roll forward after each cap fired. This resulted in a long, charred reel of tape that was torn off and tossed to the ground after a serious fire fight. On Saturday afternoons, the ground behind any decent “cover”, such as the rear fender of the neighbors car, was littered with the used tapes. Caps were not cheap at 10 cents a box. It was of course possible to play guns without the caps, but the click of metal on metal was just not the same as the pop of a cap. It was unsatisfying. (Similarly, using a pit toilet when camping is quite possible, but without the resounding flush at the end, it is just not the same.) Having a surfeit of caps, I decided to collect the gunpowder from each dot, with the vague idea of making dynamite. It is possible I was watching too many westerns on TV at that point in my life. Sitting just outside of the garage, the Wyoming sun making me sweat, I began carefully pulling the tape roll apart and scraping the powder into a tiny trophy cup I had won at the fair. Using an old popsicle stick as a scraper, I was careful. Well, I was careful until I got impatient, which I’ve since learned is a key characteristic of my personality. I switched from the popsicle stick to my pocketknife.

All of this is only the preamble to the actual recollection, background only for that one brief spark, the puff of smoke, the crack of the powder, and the singed eyebrows.

The tears in my eyes from the explosion, minor though it was, are the logical segue for where my thoughts went next, my sister and I crying at the edge of the river, my father in his police cruiser. Somehow, at the age of six and five, my sister and I crawled down a manhole and followed the drainpipe for most of a mile to the outlet at the edge of the North Platte River. I don’t know how the manhole cover open, I don’t know how my father, on duty at the time, found we were gone, or figured out where we had gone. I only remember us sobbing because we knew we were in deep trouble when we came out of the huge concrete pipe and he was standing there.

I hung out with two older boys who lived down the block, the Holtons. We played stretch occasionally with our pocketknives. I had short legs, I always lost. Bored with the pitiful “thonk” our knives made, Chris, the older of the two, brought out a butcher knife to use. It stuck deeply into the ground with a solid sound. Apparently, it was forgotten until a few days later when I found myself in their yard, alone. My memory is only of me running home, bleeding. I’d nearly cut the top of my little finger off. I do know that I was “grounded” for a week after. It was the first week of summer.

I suspect I was going back to sleep at his point, recalling only a black dot in my palm where my sister had stabbed me with a lead pencil and a scar on the back of my hand where Lydia had drawn blood during a scary movie.

The garbage truck is gone, not even birds singing just now. Maybe it is the strange times that bring these memories back. Quarantined at home, contemplation and reflection happen. I am not sure why or how these old happenings come back. They just do and it is a part of the experience we are having. Take note. Move on.

Unwanted Travels