Dec. 07, 2002 - 20:25 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Goes With The Gender

Today is Pearl Harbor Day wherein we mourn those who died and were crippled at that time. But I remember that after that there were many more lives lost by our service men than were lost at Pearl Harbor. Not that I think we should not remember Pearl Harbor, but that we should also remember the whole war and the sacrifices made thereafter along with it. My opinion.

Unique animals are boys, ambivalent creatures who herd and yet try to be stand alone individuals - but dressing in the garb that the other guys wear, having their hair cut just like the group. Seems like each generation has their group of rugged individualists. Today is what ? The Goths ? Or has something come up since then?

I am thinking tonight about us when I was a kid. Seems it was a boy thing to have a club of friends, a clubhouse, an oath, secret password and NO GURLS ALOUD. The kids I ran with had headquarters in the basement of an old empty store building, a dusty, scroungy place really but secret it was, we could enter and leave unobserved by adults. We had moved some wooden boxes around using two of them with an old door on top for a table. Other boxes for seats. Each of us would spend a few pennies for candles so that we could have light. A couple of old saucers rescued from an alley trash can for ash trays. Rule of the club, ya hadda smoke ! We elected a leader, of course it was the guy who pretty well ran the group anyhow, by a majority vote and he pledged his honor and integrity to serve, guide and protect the group. That accomplished in words of boy caliber. We decided we didn't need a secretary but opted for a Sergeant At Arms. Supply duties were handled by each of us.

We dared not build a fire in the basement so our edibles usually consisted of what we could bring from home, ready to eat, and what weird things we ate, and enjoyed. Stuff that would have turned our stomach in rebellion if our Mom's had put it on the table. But we were doing our guy thing. Each of us would bring our own drink, sometimes one or another of us would score an extra bottle of soda pop to share. Occasionally someone raided the closet in their cellar where the home made root beer was kept.

We held an official meeting or two but soon it became a social gathering along with making nefarious plans for Halloween or in the summer a hike to the river to play. Some of the wild things we planned each of us knew that those things were pipe dreams but oh, did we ever talk a good game.

Wicked we were when we had the chance, someone was always managing to kype a bottle or two of home brew from the store of an uncle, grandpa or dad. Ooooh, we were real lawbreakers, cause prohibition was still in force. They were opened and passed around, as they were consumed we put on a drunk act that was the forerunner of Foster Brooks performances.

We were in our own little empire, in bits and pieces growing up at our own speed. We did some of the same dumb stuff that grown ups did, in fact in admiring imitation of grown folks actions. Smoking ? Ha, men smoked, so in our clubhouse we did too. Some of us learned to roll a pretty fair cigarette too. But we all perfected the nonchalance that we thought grown up smokers had. Learned to blow smoke rings and stuff.

And our clubhouse was different only in the locale I guess, as communications with other boys our age informed us that secret boys clubs were common then.

I don't think we were vicious or thieves nor did we lure the innocent into our net. The term to describe us would have been amoral maybe. We scrounged playing cards and played a form or poker that we thought was real poker and we used bottle caps for chips. What a scene, sitting on boxes around a rough table playing cards and smoking cigarettes in the best grown up manner we could muster.

The joy of it maybe was that it was something of ours, unknown to the parents and not subject to grownup supervision or knowledge. It was super secret and our approach by various routes was stealthy so that we would not be discovered by one of those dreaded oldsters.

Funny too, we were quite responsible, taking care that no flame came in contact with flammables other than to light a cigarette or the candles. Without argument pop bottles were taken back to stores for the deposit and trash carried out and put in trash cans in the alley. There were things we knew that would be dangerous so avoided things like that. We had some grand old sessions of bullflinging, big talk, wild guessing about 'women' and what we planned on being when grown up.

Funny, I don't feel a damned bit ashamed of anything we did. We harmed no one and did things we would have done anyway when apart from the grownups.

In fact, I think we were in the process of growing up, there were no fights, sometimes differences of opinion would be argued about but no hard feelings resulted.

How long did it last ? I never kept a log but would venture to say maybe from the beginning of the fifth grade until gradually we would drop out one at a time as each of us discovered that girls actually didn't have cooties and were pretty neat to know so became busy on that score.

I don't know how things are in the present day, but in my time I would have said it Goes With The Gender . . . . . . . . . . .

Blog