Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 19, 2013

And Grandpa Had To Crank His Own Phone

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When I was a youngster, my friends and I were keenly aware of the seasons. Perhaps that's because we lived in Michigan, where we actually had four of them. There was fall, when the air turned crisp and apple cider turned hard. There was winter, which lasted for eight months, when the roads were clogged with snow and salt, and tongues stuck to pump handles. We also had spring, which lasted for three days, and then we had glorious summer, which in Michigan extended from late July to mid-August. and allowed us to don our thermal trunks and swim in those lakes which had finally shed their ice. And since we had no cell phones, we actually learned to look around us and notice the seasonal changes.

Much of what I remember about those days involved things. When I say “things,” I mean objects, activities, and even clothing. For example:


FALL - The school year always began in the fall, which fell immediately after Labor Day. If anyone had suggested starting the school year before Labor Day, he'd have been branded a communist and run out of town on a rail. But of course that was back when towns had rails.

In grade school, many of us were gamblers. We didn't gamble for money; only for marbles. Most of the boys who lived less than a mile from school had to walk to school. In those days, before the world went loony, you never saw long lines of automobiles in front of elementary schools delivering children. One of my friends, Jeff Beavan, lived half a block from me, and was allowed to catch the bus. Due to our location, I was not eligible for bus service. But many of us who had to take that long walk every day took a bag of marbles with us.

The way we played marbles was always “for keeps.” Our game was never the civilized game where kids sit outside a circle and shoot their marbles with their thumbs. That was okay for girls, but we boys preferred a manly “shootout.” This involved one of the players tossing his marble some fifty or sixty yards onto a lawn, and the other trying to hit it with his marble. The shooting would continue until a marble was hit, and the winner won the marble. The only real rule was that the marbles used had to be of approximately equal value and size. There were regular “aggies,” “puries,” “cat eyes,” and larger marbles, which we called “boulders.” Ball bearings, or “steelies,” were prized because they were indestructible. The exercise we got shooting marbles on our way to school helped us develop excellent eye-hand coordination and a clear understanding of Newton's third law which states: “For every action, including an extended search for an aggie in a yard full of leaves, there is an equal and opposite note for tardiness sent home to your parents.” Or something like that. By the time I was thirteen I'd lost all my marbles.


WINTER - Ice skates and winter in Michigan go together like elevators and broken cables. By the time I was in grade school I'd mastered the art of tying my ice skates, standing proudly erect on the surface of a frozen lake, and falling down. The eye-hand coordination I'd worked on during fall marble season did not translate into eye-foot coordination in wintertime. I also mastered the art of falling while standing perfectly still on my army surplus snow skis in the back yard. To my credit, I did learn how to walk halfway out into a neighbor's yard after a heavy snow, and then walk backward, carefully retracing my steps, leaving incontrovertible evidence that an extra-terrestrial wearing size 5 rubber boots had walked halfway across that yard and then been whisked up into the stratosphere. And speaking of boots, I'd also learned how to conveniently misplace mine in shrubbery on the way to school and then retrieve them on the way home. No virile eleven-year-old wanted to show up at school wearing rubber galoshes.


SPRING - Spring was the season for baseball. When I played baseball with neighborhood kids in the park, I sometimes wound up playing third base and encountered ground balls. I'd been taught to put myself directly in front of those warp speed grounders so that if I mishandled one, I could block it with my body. But since my body only weighed about 80 lbs., and since straddling those grounders put that bouncing ball directly en route to my nose and other vital organs, I opted for the safer “crouch to the side and snag” technique. This seldom worked.

Kites, which required minimal coordination on the part of the ground crew, also loomed large in the spring. A friend and I once tried to launch a large box kite with a cat on board, but the cat had sharp claws and no interest in space travel, and the flight was aborted before takeoff.

Spring was also a time for pocket knives, which many boys carried to school. Some of us used ours to carve very educational phrases into our wooden desks. Nowadays, if a grammar school child were to be caught with a pocket knife the teacher would take decisive action and immediately wet her pants.


SUMMER - In the old days, schools stressed memorization. And when summer vacation arrived, kids all across the nation still repeated those immortal Shakespearean lines: “School's out, school's out, teacher's let the fools out!” Which is not to say I don't remember anything else about those short Michigan summers. I also remember something or other about trying to tow a miserable little 2 horsepower push mower behind my old Hercules bicycle. Uphill, with no brakes. I survived.


I recently watched a video of a line of ten or twelve very serious looking schoolchildren walking down a sidewalk, quietly texting each other on their cell phones. Walking and texting. Texting and walking. Had I attempted that at their age, I'd have hurt myself.

On the other hand, now that I'm way past maturity and have learned to carefully apply all my mental powers to a wide variety of tasks–none of which I can remember at the moment–I wouldn't worry a bit about surviving serious injuries while walking and texting. That first collision with my mailbox would kill me.