Indiana

Patience...still under construction...working on hyperlinks and poems and words and such...but, until then, here's a peek:

I was born in Kokomo Indiana at St. Joseph's hospital in September of 1970. At the time, my father was over in Vietnam fighting a war I guess he believed in at the time. That's the only way I can explain somebody walking into a recruiter's office at the end of the sixties and saying, "Yes, I want to be a jarhead." So, my father was a Marine and doing his tour, while I was opening my eyes for the first time. I almost never saw my father. On his way to the Vietnamese shore, then onward to home, while bringing up the rear, his jeep broke down and got left behind by the rest of the convoy. As I understand it, he and his buddy got ambushed by some Vietcong. They played dead and managed to live somehow. I wish I knew the whole story. Apparently, shrapnel from a grenade that was tossed during the fight, caused my dad to lose hearing in his left ear. Thankfully, he wasn't hurt in any other way.

When dad returned from Nam, he was based in San Clemente, California. He moved mom and I out to California and we lived out there til I was about two years old. My very first memory is of going to the beach in San Clemente. I remember going over railroad tracks. Then I remember the beach and watching mom get swallowed up by huge waves, me crying because I thought she was going to drown. I remember my friend--the son of my parents' friends--and playing in the sand with him with my shovels and bucket that I filled with sand. I remember being afraid of crabs in the water. And I probably would have been afraid of the undertoad, if only "The World According to Garp" had been written then.

I guess that something about the war affected my dad. Mom has told us about flashbacks he would have that would cause him to swerve his car out of the way of potholes in the road, thinking they were craters left by exploded artillery. So, as soon as my father had served the required number of years, he left the military and fled back home to Indiana, taking a disappointed mom (who loved California) and myself back with him. At that time, we lived in the city, but dad really wanted to live out in the cornfields where he had grown up as a farm boy. So, by the time I had turned four, dad had moved us out into the Indiana countryside (again, to my mom's disappointment).

If you were to draw lines between Galveston, Young America, and Walton and make a triangle, our rented, two-story white house would have appeared pretty much in the middle of the triangle...surrounded by a gigantic cornfield on all sides out in the middle of nowhere. As a kid, this was the perfect place to grow up. There was lots of room to run and places to hide. My favorite place to explore was always the barn at the edge of the property. If I climbed the hill to its second story, I could enter into the hayloft, where I would often go when I was feeling particularly lonely or sad. Down below, in the lower section of the barn was were the cows had been kept with a side chamber with bizarre metal contraptions in it that apparently held the cows still while they were being milked. I remember swallows nests and spider webs all over this part of the barn, and daddy longlegs insects crawling all over everything.

It is impossible to describe in words just how great this house out in the country was. I lived there from '74 until my parents' divorce in '78. While my father was away working in the steel mill and my mother inside canning her vegetables and making her jellies and pies, my sis and I would go outside and play for hours. Lunch was never eaten inside, as there were always rhubarb stalks to suck on, plum to pick, apples on the ground, and blackberry seeds stuck in my teeth. Later, when dad came home, often we were out in the yard throwing a baseball around or I was learning how to change my grip when learning how to switch hit.

...the swarm of ladybugs that covered the house in red and black like a plague of locusts one summer...the winter the kittens froze together into one icy lump in the doghouse...the blizzard of '78 when the school bus dropped me off at the end of the lane and the snow was so deep that it came up beyond my knees with every step...the fireplace and the hot chocolate that was waiting for me when dad walked out and carried me inside, boots unlaced and packed with snow, freezing and crying...racing the puppies up and down the hill, then rolling down with them running and yapping then licking my face at the bottom...the autumn we dynamited the big tree in the field and blasted it into smithereens and splintered flinders of wood sent flying through the air...riding in the John Deer at harvest time...Halloween hayrides through the Indiana countryside...being afraid of the bogeyman in the fog, as I walked down that long and lonely lane every morning to go to school...Mary Ann, from the house at the end of our lane, and I getting into all kinds of mischief, drawing magic runes with chalk into the large stones behind her barn...digging out snow caves and icing the walls in the banks of snow that the wind would blow into high drifts over any ridge in the flat landscape...playing hide and seek in the endless rows of corn...

Here are a very few pictures from that time in my life, I hope you enjoy them. Later on in life, I had the good fortune of moving back to Indiana for a few months.  During the time that I was there, I drove out to the old house, just to see if it was still there. It still is, but with many of the trees cut down. I broke into the house through the cellar window and walked inside its walls for what will probably be my final time. Everything was as I remember it...except lonelier. I took some pictures from the two trips I took out to the old house. I hope you enjoy them, too.

 

    Our landlord, Rex McCloskey (whose son or brother, I can't remember which, raced in the Indy 500), one autumn he brought over a bunch of gigantic pumpkins for Halloween. We kept two for carving, one was over 100 pounds, I remember! (I don't think I even weighed that much then.) The rest we ate, as I looove pum'kin' pie.

The garden behind our house had lots of goodies: peas, green beans, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, corn, turnips, onions, and potatoes. Here we are, mom, my sister, and I, out in the garden gathering peas and beans.

    
   
  My mother sewed for us a lot back then. She was always making us clothes, or patching up the ones we had. I remember one pair of overalls that had logo patches of several different gas stations, long before this actually became stylish?!? Anyway, here are two picks of my little sis in a pretty dress my mother put together for her. On the left, sis is standing out in the front yard by the tire swing that hung from the oak tree (one of the few still standing). At her side is our dog, lassie. She was mostly a collie, I think. Well, it was nice to think that. To the right, sis is posing by our fireplace which was lit on most winter nights.  
 
 
   
  When I revisited Indiana a few years ago, I drove out to the old house just to see if it still stood on that hill out in the cornfields. As I approached from 500 E, I caught a glimpse of it over the harvested fields. The barn between the house and road had been razed while I was a little boy, but now it was plowed under. When I turned onto 1100 S, I found that the old gravel road had been paved in the time I was gone, but the long lane leading up to the house still cut a lonely path through the fields.  
 
 
   
  I drove up to the house and parked the little red Tercel (the one that swims in the water and does what it oughter--just like the little black duck). I parked by the old shed which still stood, but the blackberry patch to the right of it--the one you'd often catch me in red-and-purple-handed--it had disappeared along with so many other things I had remembered.

The front of the house looked the same though, and the two tall trees on the left still stood at the top of the hill.

  
 
 
   
  To the left is another view of the front of the house. You can see the paint peeling all over the exterior. I think the paint was always peeling from that house. The tire swing is gone (along with ghostly images of my sister and lassie).

At right, is the right side of the house. The trees used to mark the edge of the outfield when we played softball at the family gatherings. They also were my starting point when I ran and sometimes rolled with lassie's seven pups up and down the hill.

  
 
 
   
  To the left of the house was the most depressing site. Gone were the yummy blackberry patch, all the apple trees, a whole row of plum trees, the crab apple tree, the rhubarb and asparagus that grew in the yard, and the strawberry patch that grew beside the plum trees. I remember one autumn when Rex came out with this large machine that harvested all the apple trees then took 'em and mashed 'em all into cider which we funneled out of a metal bin into milk jugs. To the right is the old shed beside which we kept lassie's doghouse.  
 
 
   
  At left, the back of the house. This picture was taken from what the edge of what used to be the garden, the edge where the yard gave way to rows of corn that grew at least a foot taller than I, not counting their yellow tassles.

At right, the cornfield behind the house and then the woods through which Deer Creek ran. In summer, I would walk through rows of corn to the edge of the woods, but I was never allowed to go into the woods unsupervised.

  
 
 
   
  At left, Deer Creek in September, its shallow, lazy waters choked with leaves, as all the trees are dropping their autumn leaves. I remember my uncle Bill, a forestry student at the time in Purdue, would take me into these woods and identify for me every tree and shrub. Then he'd find an island to wade out to and lay down on the mossy rocks. I played hooky a day in November after the first good snow. Here is the lane, this time lightly covered in a layer of snow. This is what I saw many days when I leapt off the school bus in winter.  
 
 
   
  The front of the house in winter, when everything is greyish-white and there is no contrast, to separate the wide grey sky that seems to have blanketed the land like the light covering of snow. Behind the house, the obvious signs of a plow trail lead down the slope of the land to the woods. Bundled up in my winter coat and gloves, I walked down this path to see how the woods had changed in winter. From the bottom I look back and remember the large barn that once stood to the side of the house...the haylofts I used to hide in.  
 
 
   
  Deer Creek. One summer my father and I found a tree that had fallen over and caught itself in the branches of another tree. With sticks and branches weaved together, we spent several days in the woods constructing a three-sided shelter we meant to camp in that winter. My parents' divorce later that year changed all that. Walking back in winter, I found that lean-to, preserved enough for me to know what it had been...or at least what we had intended it to be. To a stranger, it might appear odd,  but nothing more.  
 
 
   
  At left, stretching upward into the grey, winter sky, a tall sycamore tree lifts its branches high above the other trees of the small woods. Sycamores, if you haven't seen them, are lovely in winter. Their grey-and-white-splotched limbs, splay outward and upwards like hands with many fingers tipped in snow. Their trunks reach out like spindly, twisted  arms thrust up from the ground. They are perfectly camouflaged like the Stuka planes I used to paint with grey and white Testor's paints, or the nazi soldiers fighting in Stalingrad that I used to move across hexed boards, and whose fates I determined with rolls of dice, all thanks to the genius of Avalon Hill and games like The Russian Campaign. Every time I see this picture, I am reminded of that silly Jim Nabor's song "Back Home Again in Indiana" that they get him to sing to start off every Indy 500 race.