I lived in a brick duplex. In a circle of brick duplexes. On a military base. And I had a mulberry tree.
Not the mulberry bush of “here we go round.” This was a towering leafy shade-crowded, ladder-limbed berry gushy playground. A hundred feet tall if it was an inch. It must have been as tall at its crown as the neighbor’s house was at its second floor roof peak. A hundred feet easy. Looking up from down. When I was 7 or 8. A hundred feet of limbs here and there, of nasty tasting useless fat purple berries, of limbs that seemed to dip low at the passing of bare feet, beckoning, inviting, calling in leafy whisper.
And answer we did. Summers in Baltimore were as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth. But we didn’t care. We had trees to climb, an endless lawn to play on. Swings 20 feet high. A sand box the size of Rhode Island. A pool just for the non-coms kids with three diving boards. Our bikes. The forbidden treasures of Colgate Creek- a slimy stinking barely-crawling open sewer with belly-up turned fish, old tire carcasses, and mysterious rainbow glimmerings on its surface. The test hill where the military used to drive trucks and jeeps to see if they were fit for service.
The mulberry tree.
The mulberry tree was a stone’s throw from our duplex, with a circle of beaten down earth around it, beaten as hard as the tennis courts at the other end of our circle of houses. The circle? That was the common name for the cluster of duplexes that the non-coms and their families occupied in Fort Holabird, Maryland. Perched on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, just across from historic Fort McHenry. The same. Where Mr. Francis Scott Key penned that song that stirs so many hearts, our national anthem.
Forgive my digression.
It was a circle of brick duplexes, 4 bedrooms and a bath, hardwood floors, a florida room, full basement and coal fired furnaces. There were 15 duplexes, thirty families. The playground, a lawn the size of an airfield, tennis courts...and my mulberry tree. The circle lay somewhere just there from the entrance to the base. Bounded on one side by a siding for the B&O railroad, another by the base’s gym and laundry, another by unused barracks, and the last side by the tennis courts and a few barracks occupied by WAC’s.
There were the Toth’s next door, a childless couple with a dog named Candy. Sometimes they let me walk her. Truth is, she walked me as much as I walked her. And one night I cried in terror as I dreamed that someone cooked her and ate her.
There I go again.
Summers on the base were endlessly fun. John, my older brother and I had bikes, the ultimate freedom machines. Clunky though they were, with fat tires, longhorn handlebars, one speed forward and coaster brakes, they were our dream machines that took us from home to the pool, from the pool to the PX to buy root beer, from the PX to the library, from the library to Colgate Creek and home again.
Pick up games of baseball, played with bare hands, a bat, and a tennis ball. And I was always chosen last. Well, I was only about as tall as a well grown weed. Despite my size I played two seasons on our base little league team and we won the league one year. Thanks to a tall skinny freckled boy called Steve Dupre who could hit like a jackhammer and throw like a tornado and run like a greyhound.
Invasions of Japanese beetles were meant for batting practice. Dusk was for playing kick-the-can or for catching fireflies. Winters for sledding down the test hill.
And summers. For the shade of the mulberry tree.
The mulberry tree. It was at the duplex nearest ours. Tall enough to overshadow the south side of the house, like I said, it was at least a hundred feet tall. We climbed it all summer long, my brother and I and our friends. We spilled from our bikes and tore for the bottom-most branch, a short jump up, a leg over, a hoist from the arms. Branches beckoned here, there. Some shot out over space like the 3 meter board over the deep end of the pool. Some snaked and rollercoasted along, treacherous with dips and turns. Some, some shot up toward the blistering muggy sky.
Climbing must have been something innate, second nature. I could climb that tree before I could ride a bike. My hands found knobs of old branches to stick to. My feet found twisting, turning ladders of leaf and bark, and stuck to them like library glue did to a grubby hand. Prehensile toes we had, I am sure. Who wore shoes? Shoes were for the other seasons, for school and for church. Summer was for bare feet, heedless of bees and glass. The grass, ah so cool in the heat, so perfect for our bare toes to wiggle in or fly across.
So we played in the mulberry tree. Sometimes we’d just climb for climbing sake, clinging to branches with dirty feet and grubby hands. Snaking upwards as high as we dared go, up where the trunk thinned out, where the top scraped the sky. Up where the vertical members began to bend and sway under our weight.
Sometimes we only climbed a bit, and sat a lot, though John, my brother, didn’t sit much one week. He and I were climbing a tennis ref’s tower by the courts, a rickety 10 foot relic of some other time. Bare wood clinging to bare wood with long rusty nails. John found one nail with his butt, letting out a howl that made dogs howl back. When he turned his back on me to climb down, there was a minuscule spot of blood on his shorts and a barely visible rip. But he’d sat on a rusty nail. And we knew what that meant.
Kids talked about the grossest things. And we had the oddest debates. How diseases would affect you. Why dogs ran on three legs. How to squeeze tobacco juice from a grasshopper.
Would gum clog your guts if you swallowed it?
Lockjaw. We’d talk about that one in hushed tones. If older boys were around, the outcome was grimmer with each telling. His jaw froze shut and he could never talk or eat again. All his muscles locked up till he froze like “Swinging Statues.” Even his eyeballs couldn’t move, so the rest of his life they had to turn his whole body when he wanted to look another direction. How could I question such knowledge, such wisdom. I was 8, the really smart guys were, golly, 11 or 12?
So John sprinted back to our house, despite the pain in his butt, despite the dreaded treatment for lockjaw, despite what he KNEW was coming.
A shot.
In.
The.
Butt.
I followed closely, bare feet just grazing the grass. Back then I could run like an antelope across that expanse of grass, on feet that were destined for running. Mainly I ran behind him cuz I wanted to see what happened.
No luck.
John was quickly whisked off to the base dispensary, where they did things amid the stainless steel and porcelain and smell of alcohol. Amid the bright lights and the green linoleum. Course they wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay and wait. Wait for the tale of the needle. The tetanus shot needle. You could never see it coming, cuz the shot was in the butt. Still, we’d sob in anticipation and wriggle in Mom or Dad’s arms.
The indignation. Pants yanked to ankles. The chill of alcohol on the skin. The stab of the needle. Ooww. Ooww. A needle the size of a tent stake, a soda straw, driven in by a muscular corpsman, who had tattoos on his forearms of glaring dragons, driven in like he was drilling for oil. Felt like he not only pounded it in, but then wiggled it around.
Exploring.
Having found no oil, suddenly the pain stopped, the pants came up, off we went. All done.
My desire to see John’s pain and indignation was a bit sadistic, I admit. Though in later years, John and I became best friends, I was subject to his temper from time to time while we were yet young. Revenge was not a concept I really understood, except as I’ll get you for that!
Ha. Getting back at my big brother was a wild notion. One that did not come to fruition for many years. But a kid had to dream, right? Well, there was minor satisfaction when I would come home from a pummeling, or a wad of itchy seed pods stuffed down my back, or as the loser of a dirt clod fight. I’d get Mom’s undivided attention. A Kool Aid treat. A seat in front of the window fan.
And John would get a solid smack on the butt and some serious basement time.
So when he finally did come back from the clinic, having gotten his comeuppance, I mean his shot, I waited, gloating just a tiny bit, while he told the tale of the needle.
This base dispensary must have had some some truly strange men working there. Some good and kind ones too. But the last memory I have of that place was going in for our immunizations for our trip overseas. All six kids, Mom, Dad. Lined up ready for the needles. And there amid the chrome and glass cabinets was a board of torment.
Affixed to the board were a dozen or so needles, one for each rank, starting with private and working up to general. Each needle labelled neatly, like a reservation tag, and with each rise in rank, the needles looked more and more threatening and bizarre.
Corporal was just an extra long needle. Sergeant had a curve in it. Lieutenant, a long hook. Colonel, a 4 inch zig zag. And General, a 6 inch spiral, like a corkscrew. I tried to imagine Nancy’s father, THE GENERAL Prather, getting that one in his hinie. It was not an image that I could coax to mind. Usually I only saw him at formation, ramrod straight in his open staff car, miniature flags fluttering from the fenders. Uniform starched as stiff as iron with creases that sliced the wind. Returning salutes with a snap that you could hear over the engine.
I am sure we stood mouths agape, eyes wide as saucers.
So John got his shot. I got my satisfaction. For a while.
Days under or around or in the mulberry tree. It could have been anything, that old tree. A pirate ship. A castle. It could have been the tree house in Swiss Family Robinson. But apparently we also used it for more mundane things, like our variation on dodge ball.
One of us stayed on the ground, chosen by “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a tiger by the toe...” The rest of us scrambled for the branches, legs and feet and arms hooking limbs like so many monkeys. Could we climb? Does a giraffe have a long neck?
And then the dodge ball started. The kid on the ground had a tennis ball and tried to hit whoever he could amid the branches. So we clung to the branches and trunk, trying to duck the ball that zinged through the leaves, clinging for our lives but trying to not get hit either. And whoever got hit was out and had to clamber down and replace the kid on the ground. Up went the last ball thrower. Down came whoever got hit. Seemed so simple then.
Fearless climbers we all were. Twenty feet to the ground? Nothing. A mere eye blink to climb down.
Until.
There is one way up a tree. You climb. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. You climb. And there are two ways down. One, you climb down. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. Just a reverse of going up, perhaps with a bit more thought, a bit more care.
There is another way down.
I was somewhere near the limit of my height. Four or five others clambered around me, likely my brother, my friend Stevie from across the circle, a couple others. Whoever was throwing sent a real zinger at me, like pitching to a star batter. I saw it coming and with a small sidestep, the ball went past.
I lost my grip as my weight shifted. I threw a arm out for the limb as I fell back. And fell.
Hitting.
Every.
Branch.
My descent was a cascade of images...each branch I hit, that pummeled my back, my legs. The leaves that slapped my skin as I plunged through them. The startled faces of the kids above me. I whipped through space at the speed of thought, missed the last thick branch and landed.
Crash landed. Flat on my back. A reverse belly flop. And knocked the wind right out of my lungs.
Have you ever done that? It is truly terrifying.
I couldn’t inhale. Every last cubic centimeter of air had been slapped out of me at the end of my gravity challenging drop. My mouth flopped open and shut like a sunfish suddenly yanked from the Chesapeake Bay and dropped on the ground. Like a balloon, tense with air, popped and deflated all at once.
I squirmed there on that hard packed dirt, my hands convulsed and grabbed at the air as if they could shovel some into my starving lungs. My feet plowed furrows in the hard packed soil.
Help.
Help.
Help me.
Help me.
My lungs started to work after an eternity of panic, of hgnnn, nnggngng, hrrrrhrrrhrrr, gasp.
Like trying to start an old pull cord lawn mover.
Yank. ch-cch-ch-ch-ch-cchh.
Yank. ch-chh-chh-ccch-poot.
Yank. chh-chh-chhh-poot poot.
Yank. ch-chh-chh. Pop. RRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Help me. Help me! Help me!
I lay there, finally. Sucking great bucketsful of air. Gorging on soggy Baltimore oxygen. Mixed with some Japanese beetles. Shoveling air into my starving lungs like Mr. Haywood shoveling coal down our coal chute for the furnace. Lay there till I knew I was going to live. I guess I wasn’t so sure for a while.
Later, I found out that my brother John, he of the tetanus-shot-in-the-butt, thought that I was dead. He told me he was terrified.
Terrified?
At long last I rolled over and dragged myself to my knees. And stood up. Shaky as a new calf. And staggered home.
John must have followed me. What else could he have done? Maybe he put his arm around me and helped me. Like the time after a Boy Scout meeting when he jumped a flight of stairs, sprained his ankle and I had to help him home, a good long walk of a mile or more in the fresh snow, arms around each other. Hop, step, slip. Late at night. Hop, step, slip.
Maybe he put his arm around me and held me up.
He must have.
The mulberry tree fell into infamy shortly after that. Someone came along and cut off the bottom limb, the one we boosted up to, that started our climb. It was a lot harder to get climbing after that. We had to give each other the leg up.
Boost me.
I grew a bit shy of tree climbing for a while. Not because of the fall. Because of having the wind knocked out of me. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Not on my brother in his worst moments. I’d rather have a shot in the butt than to repeat that.
Help me. I heard my words come back at me from the neighborhood bullies and jerks.
Tease me they did. Hey, there goes “help me.” I would hear as I raced by on my bike. Help me.
Now, lest you think my brother and I were at each others throats constantly. He stood up for me when I needed it. He was my near constant companion and friend, sometimes only friend, for our first decade and more. He defended me from hostile German kids who I had the temerity to insult in their own language. In their own neighborhood. Lifted a sled to his shoulder, ready to swing it like a club. Two against two. But he had a sled. Cocked and locked. Two against two-with-a-sled. No contest. The German kids backed down and backed away.
When we moved to Germany and looked for friends, John was there. When we moved back to California and looked for friends, there too.
So. There are two ways down a tree. Don’t do the second way. Nuh-uh.
Not the mulberry bush of “here we go round.” This was a towering leafy shade-crowded, ladder-limbed berry gushy playground. A hundred feet tall if it was an inch. It must have been as tall at its crown as the neighbor’s house was at its second floor roof peak. A hundred feet easy. Looking up from down. When I was 7 or 8. A hundred feet of limbs here and there, of nasty tasting useless fat purple berries, of limbs that seemed to dip low at the passing of bare feet, beckoning, inviting, calling in leafy whisper.
And answer we did. Summers in Baltimore were as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth. But we didn’t care. We had trees to climb, an endless lawn to play on. Swings 20 feet high. A sand box the size of Rhode Island. A pool just for the non-coms kids with three diving boards. Our bikes. The forbidden treasures of Colgate Creek- a slimy stinking barely-crawling open sewer with belly-up turned fish, old tire carcasses, and mysterious rainbow glimmerings on its surface. The test hill where the military used to drive trucks and jeeps to see if they were fit for service.
The mulberry tree.
The mulberry tree was a stone’s throw from our duplex, with a circle of beaten down earth around it, beaten as hard as the tennis courts at the other end of our circle of houses. The circle? That was the common name for the cluster of duplexes that the non-coms and their families occupied in Fort Holabird, Maryland. Perched on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, just across from historic Fort McHenry. The same. Where Mr. Francis Scott Key penned that song that stirs so many hearts, our national anthem.
Forgive my digression.
It was a circle of brick duplexes, 4 bedrooms and a bath, hardwood floors, a florida room, full basement and coal fired furnaces. There were 15 duplexes, thirty families. The playground, a lawn the size of an airfield, tennis courts...and my mulberry tree. The circle lay somewhere just there from the entrance to the base. Bounded on one side by a siding for the B&O railroad, another by the base’s gym and laundry, another by unused barracks, and the last side by the tennis courts and a few barracks occupied by WAC’s.
There were the Toth’s next door, a childless couple with a dog named Candy. Sometimes they let me walk her. Truth is, she walked me as much as I walked her. And one night I cried in terror as I dreamed that someone cooked her and ate her.
There I go again.
Summers on the base were endlessly fun. John, my older brother and I had bikes, the ultimate freedom machines. Clunky though they were, with fat tires, longhorn handlebars, one speed forward and coaster brakes, they were our dream machines that took us from home to the pool, from the pool to the PX to buy root beer, from the PX to the library, from the library to Colgate Creek and home again.
Pick up games of baseball, played with bare hands, a bat, and a tennis ball. And I was always chosen last. Well, I was only about as tall as a well grown weed. Despite my size I played two seasons on our base little league team and we won the league one year. Thanks to a tall skinny freckled boy called Steve Dupre who could hit like a jackhammer and throw like a tornado and run like a greyhound.
Invasions of Japanese beetles were meant for batting practice. Dusk was for playing kick-the-can or for catching fireflies. Winters for sledding down the test hill.
And summers. For the shade of the mulberry tree.
The mulberry tree. It was at the duplex nearest ours. Tall enough to overshadow the south side of the house, like I said, it was at least a hundred feet tall. We climbed it all summer long, my brother and I and our friends. We spilled from our bikes and tore for the bottom-most branch, a short jump up, a leg over, a hoist from the arms. Branches beckoned here, there. Some shot out over space like the 3 meter board over the deep end of the pool. Some snaked and rollercoasted along, treacherous with dips and turns. Some, some shot up toward the blistering muggy sky.
Climbing must have been something innate, second nature. I could climb that tree before I could ride a bike. My hands found knobs of old branches to stick to. My feet found twisting, turning ladders of leaf and bark, and stuck to them like library glue did to a grubby hand. Prehensile toes we had, I am sure. Who wore shoes? Shoes were for the other seasons, for school and for church. Summer was for bare feet, heedless of bees and glass. The grass, ah so cool in the heat, so perfect for our bare toes to wiggle in or fly across.
So we played in the mulberry tree. Sometimes we’d just climb for climbing sake, clinging to branches with dirty feet and grubby hands. Snaking upwards as high as we dared go, up where the trunk thinned out, where the top scraped the sky. Up where the vertical members began to bend and sway under our weight.
Sometimes we only climbed a bit, and sat a lot, though John, my brother, didn’t sit much one week. He and I were climbing a tennis ref’s tower by the courts, a rickety 10 foot relic of some other time. Bare wood clinging to bare wood with long rusty nails. John found one nail with his butt, letting out a howl that made dogs howl back. When he turned his back on me to climb down, there was a minuscule spot of blood on his shorts and a barely visible rip. But he’d sat on a rusty nail. And we knew what that meant.
Kids talked about the grossest things. And we had the oddest debates. How diseases would affect you. Why dogs ran on three legs. How to squeeze tobacco juice from a grasshopper.
Would gum clog your guts if you swallowed it?
Lockjaw. We’d talk about that one in hushed tones. If older boys were around, the outcome was grimmer with each telling. His jaw froze shut and he could never talk or eat again. All his muscles locked up till he froze like “Swinging Statues.” Even his eyeballs couldn’t move, so the rest of his life they had to turn his whole body when he wanted to look another direction. How could I question such knowledge, such wisdom. I was 8, the really smart guys were, golly, 11 or 12?
So John sprinted back to our house, despite the pain in his butt, despite the dreaded treatment for lockjaw, despite what he KNEW was coming.
A shot.
In.
The.
Butt.
I followed closely, bare feet just grazing the grass. Back then I could run like an antelope across that expanse of grass, on feet that were destined for running. Mainly I ran behind him cuz I wanted to see what happened.
No luck.
John was quickly whisked off to the base dispensary, where they did things amid the stainless steel and porcelain and smell of alcohol. Amid the bright lights and the green linoleum. Course they wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay and wait. Wait for the tale of the needle. The tetanus shot needle. You could never see it coming, cuz the shot was in the butt. Still, we’d sob in anticipation and wriggle in Mom or Dad’s arms.
The indignation. Pants yanked to ankles. The chill of alcohol on the skin. The stab of the needle. Ooww. Ooww. A needle the size of a tent stake, a soda straw, driven in by a muscular corpsman, who had tattoos on his forearms of glaring dragons, driven in like he was drilling for oil. Felt like he not only pounded it in, but then wiggled it around.
Exploring.
Having found no oil, suddenly the pain stopped, the pants came up, off we went. All done.
My desire to see John’s pain and indignation was a bit sadistic, I admit. Though in later years, John and I became best friends, I was subject to his temper from time to time while we were yet young. Revenge was not a concept I really understood, except as I’ll get you for that!
Ha. Getting back at my big brother was a wild notion. One that did not come to fruition for many years. But a kid had to dream, right? Well, there was minor satisfaction when I would come home from a pummeling, or a wad of itchy seed pods stuffed down my back, or as the loser of a dirt clod fight. I’d get Mom’s undivided attention. A Kool Aid treat. A seat in front of the window fan.
And John would get a solid smack on the butt and some serious basement time.
So when he finally did come back from the clinic, having gotten his comeuppance, I mean his shot, I waited, gloating just a tiny bit, while he told the tale of the needle.
This base dispensary must have had some some truly strange men working there. Some good and kind ones too. But the last memory I have of that place was going in for our immunizations for our trip overseas. All six kids, Mom, Dad. Lined up ready for the needles. And there amid the chrome and glass cabinets was a board of torment.
Affixed to the board were a dozen or so needles, one for each rank, starting with private and working up to general. Each needle labelled neatly, like a reservation tag, and with each rise in rank, the needles looked more and more threatening and bizarre.
Corporal was just an extra long needle. Sergeant had a curve in it. Lieutenant, a long hook. Colonel, a 4 inch zig zag. And General, a 6 inch spiral, like a corkscrew. I tried to imagine Nancy’s father, THE GENERAL Prather, getting that one in his hinie. It was not an image that I could coax to mind. Usually I only saw him at formation, ramrod straight in his open staff car, miniature flags fluttering from the fenders. Uniform starched as stiff as iron with creases that sliced the wind. Returning salutes with a snap that you could hear over the engine.
I am sure we stood mouths agape, eyes wide as saucers.
So John got his shot. I got my satisfaction. For a while.
Days under or around or in the mulberry tree. It could have been anything, that old tree. A pirate ship. A castle. It could have been the tree house in Swiss Family Robinson. But apparently we also used it for more mundane things, like our variation on dodge ball.
One of us stayed on the ground, chosen by “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a tiger by the toe...” The rest of us scrambled for the branches, legs and feet and arms hooking limbs like so many monkeys. Could we climb? Does a giraffe have a long neck?
And then the dodge ball started. The kid on the ground had a tennis ball and tried to hit whoever he could amid the branches. So we clung to the branches and trunk, trying to duck the ball that zinged through the leaves, clinging for our lives but trying to not get hit either. And whoever got hit was out and had to clamber down and replace the kid on the ground. Up went the last ball thrower. Down came whoever got hit. Seemed so simple then.
Fearless climbers we all were. Twenty feet to the ground? Nothing. A mere eye blink to climb down.
Until.
There is one way up a tree. You climb. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. You climb. And there are two ways down. One, you climb down. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. Just a reverse of going up, perhaps with a bit more thought, a bit more care.
There is another way down.
I was somewhere near the limit of my height. Four or five others clambered around me, likely my brother, my friend Stevie from across the circle, a couple others. Whoever was throwing sent a real zinger at me, like pitching to a star batter. I saw it coming and with a small sidestep, the ball went past.
I lost my grip as my weight shifted. I threw a arm out for the limb as I fell back. And fell.
Hitting.
Every.
Branch.
My descent was a cascade of images...each branch I hit, that pummeled my back, my legs. The leaves that slapped my skin as I plunged through them. The startled faces of the kids above me. I whipped through space at the speed of thought, missed the last thick branch and landed.
Crash landed. Flat on my back. A reverse belly flop. And knocked the wind right out of my lungs.
Have you ever done that? It is truly terrifying.
I couldn’t inhale. Every last cubic centimeter of air had been slapped out of me at the end of my gravity challenging drop. My mouth flopped open and shut like a sunfish suddenly yanked from the Chesapeake Bay and dropped on the ground. Like a balloon, tense with air, popped and deflated all at once.
I squirmed there on that hard packed dirt, my hands convulsed and grabbed at the air as if they could shovel some into my starving lungs. My feet plowed furrows in the hard packed soil.
Help.
Help.
Help me.
Help me.
My lungs started to work after an eternity of panic, of hgnnn, nnggngng, hrrrrhrrrhrrr, gasp.
Like trying to start an old pull cord lawn mover.
Yank. ch-cch-ch-ch-ch-cchh.
Yank. ch-chh-chh-ccch-poot.
Yank. chh-chh-chhh-poot poot.
Yank. ch-chh-chh. Pop. RRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Help me. Help me! Help me!
I lay there, finally. Sucking great bucketsful of air. Gorging on soggy Baltimore oxygen. Mixed with some Japanese beetles. Shoveling air into my starving lungs like Mr. Haywood shoveling coal down our coal chute for the furnace. Lay there till I knew I was going to live. I guess I wasn’t so sure for a while.
Later, I found out that my brother John, he of the tetanus-shot-in-the-butt, thought that I was dead. He told me he was terrified.
Terrified?
At long last I rolled over and dragged myself to my knees. And stood up. Shaky as a new calf. And staggered home.
John must have followed me. What else could he have done? Maybe he put his arm around me and helped me. Like the time after a Boy Scout meeting when he jumped a flight of stairs, sprained his ankle and I had to help him home, a good long walk of a mile or more in the fresh snow, arms around each other. Hop, step, slip. Late at night. Hop, step, slip.
Maybe he put his arm around me and held me up.
He must have.
The mulberry tree fell into infamy shortly after that. Someone came along and cut off the bottom limb, the one we boosted up to, that started our climb. It was a lot harder to get climbing after that. We had to give each other the leg up.
Boost me.
I grew a bit shy of tree climbing for a while. Not because of the fall. Because of having the wind knocked out of me. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Not on my brother in his worst moments. I’d rather have a shot in the butt than to repeat that.
Help me. I heard my words come back at me from the neighborhood bullies and jerks.
Tease me they did. Hey, there goes “help me.” I would hear as I raced by on my bike. Help me.
Now, lest you think my brother and I were at each others throats constantly. He stood up for me when I needed it. He was my near constant companion and friend, sometimes only friend, for our first decade and more. He defended me from hostile German kids who I had the temerity to insult in their own language. In their own neighborhood. Lifted a sled to his shoulder, ready to swing it like a club. Two against two. But he had a sled. Cocked and locked. Two against two-with-a-sled. No contest. The German kids backed down and backed away.
When we moved to Germany and looked for friends, John was there. When we moved back to California and looked for friends, there too.
So. There are two ways down a tree. Don’t do the second way. Nuh-uh.
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