Summertime Blues

Couldn’t wait for the summer with no school, but by the end of the first week, I needed structure.

When I think back about my childhood, it occurs to me that I didn’t ask many questions. I really disliked school, but I have no idea if my siblings disliked school or not. Being an introvert and self centered really cuts down on incoming information.

Summertime on the farm was a delight and disappointment for me. Delightful because no school, no bullies, no days spent inside. Disappointing because after the first two weeks of no supervision, I was sure to turn my time into a shipload of ideas that would sink me in trouble once again.

I paid no attention to my three sisters, or whatever they were doing. My brother and I usually spent the days racing around our dirt track on our motorcycles. At least until the forth or fifth crash, or until something broke on one of the motorcycles, and we had to drag the broken bike back up to the barn to repair it.

The racetrack was a monument to the persistence of youth. My brother and I had ridden our little ford tractor to the township hall, and borrowed the antique road grader. We brought it home and slowly graded a quarter mile dirt track, going around and around, day after day, until we had a perfect oval for racing and crashing into one another.

Luckily for my brother, he had a sense of when one of my ideas was going down in flames, like the time I built an airplane out of some select clear pine boards that my father had been stockpiling for one of his jobs. The lumber was prohibitively expensive, and my brother was out of sight when my father came home.

One of the ways we spent our time was going through magazines and comic books to find advertisements that we could clip out and send in the mail to get a prize. X-Ray glasses, Secret decoder rings, and Live Sea Monkeys. We didn’t know it was all crap. It almost didn’t matter. What mattered was that you would be receiving your own mail! With your name on the front of the letter or package. That meant you were important. Who knows how many people had seen your name on the front, as the package traveled on its way to your house.

Counting down the days after you sent in a request, till the time it might arrive in the mail, was filled with dreams of the life changing content of the package. So it was that when it was time for an expected delivery, one or all of us kids would be jockeying for position to be the first to reach the big galvanized mail box that sat at the edge of the road in front of our farmhouse. The rule was no one could run to the mailbox until the mail car pulled away from the stop. Then it was a free for all.

The initials RFD stand for rural free delivery. We had a mail carrier that used his own car to deliver mail to all us farmers and people living in the countryside. The schedule of mail deliveries was pretty much the same every day. 10 AM. That was unless break time for the letter carrier stretched into a longer break. He usually took his break in the little village about a quarter of a mile down the road. A church, a grocery store, and two bars was the extent of the town. The letter carrier would always take his break at one of the bars.

The amount of time he would spend on his break, would determine the quality of his performance for the rest of the route. We were only the second stop after the bar, and occasionally got no mail, someone else’s mail, or a combination of ours and others. The easy way around this was to put the wrong mail back in the mailbox and raise the flag to signify outgoing mail. I was loathe to do this as it seemed to me like a slap in face to the letter carrier, pointing out his mistakes when all he was doing was trying to get through the day.

With this somewhat erratic delivery method came inspiration. If we received one of the neighbors mail, it was only a short quarter mile jog to their mailbox to deliver their mail and to rifle through the mailbox for anything belonging to you. This is of course highly illegal. But I doubt many farm kids back then were arrested for mail tampering.

One of the questions I never asked was why the letter carrier sometimes spent a little extra time at the bar. I always assumed it was because he liked it. But what if it was really that he knew, just down the road, as soon as he closed the lid on that mailbox, five dirty and screaming children would try to attack his car as he was driving away.

I hope you liked this look at my early life. If you did, share it with someone you like.