Little Boy Lost: Volume One

Chapter Eleven

     While we're talking about my brother, I guess I'll go ahead and toss this next one in. Being older than me, I suppose that it was only natural for my brother to learn how to ride a bicycle much earlier than I did. He had a COOL bike, too. I want to say that it was colored gold and actually had three speeds, but I'm not sure about that last part. What I do remember for sure, however, was that it had a real BANANA SEAT on it. Now back in those days, a banana seat on a bicycle looked like...well, I guess that it kind of looked like a banana. Instead of being the relatively small black seat specifically shaped to anatomically fit your rear end, the banana seat was very long, instead. And while it started out relatively wide at the back end, it gradually tapered off until it came to a much smaller rounded point at the front end. And the whole thing was cushioned and padded just like you would expect a bike seat to be, as well.

     Perhaps one of the cooler features of the banana seat was that it made it really easy to carry a passenger. All that you had to do was simply sit your buddy down on the seat right behind you and have them keep their feet up. And to this day, I still have this vivid memory of my brother doing just that with me, too. It felt so totally cool to be sitting behind my big brother on that banana seat as he furiously pedaled his bike up and down Rockford Court and Wilkey Way. At one point he rode through a puddle, and I thought that it was so much fun that I started calling out for him to ride through more. My brother, who was having fun, too, was more than happy to oblige me. As a matter of fact, he rode us through a bunch of puddles. Unfortunately, neither one of us thought to factor in that the bicycle didn't have a back finder over its rear wheel. So as a result, all of the muddy water that we were riding through was being thrown up behind us and landing on the back of my shirt. Which just happened to be colored white, of course. Yep, I had an interesting time explaining THAT one to our mother.

     Now one of my more favorite memories pertaining to my sister has to do with ballet. My sister has always enjoyed ballet, and this stems all the way back to her earliest years. I can easily remember her practicing ballet in our home as she wore her cute little prissy tutu. And I guess that I thought her tutu looked kind of cool back then because, when she encouraged me to put on her spare tutu and join in, I didn't put up much resistance. And of course, you just know that my father had to have his trusty old thirty-five-millimeter camera handy for THAT spectacle. Yes, to this day, there is a small series of very good pictures in his old slide collection of my sister and me both doing ballet together in our tutus. So glad dad was able to immortalize that one for all posterity...

     One of my and my sister's more favorite lunchtime delicacies that my mother would fix for us from time to time was straight-up bologna and catsup. And this is pretty much exactly what it sounded like, too. My mother would take two or three slices of bologna, put them on a small plate, lay a generous portion of catsup down around them, drop a fork down in the middle of it, and then put it down on the table in front of us. We thought we were living in high cotton, too, because life just didn't get much better than that. It seems like she would also do the same thing at times with Vienna Sausages, but I don't remember that quite as clearly, if so. To this day, I do still consider Vienna Sausages to be a fine delicacy, and I continue to enjoy eating them fairly often, though. So, who knows, maybe she did.

     Most of my friends back then were the other boys on the street, but there were also a few girls my age around Rockford Court, and at times I'd have social interactions with them, too. I remember this one time when one of my neighborhood buddies and I were trying to talk to a girl that lived on the street and one of her friends. We were talking about where babies came from. Now none of us were old enough to go to school yet so I really don't know how THAT subject had come up. Still, we were talking about it and having a VERY serious conversation, nonetheless. And those girls were trying to tell us that girls had both girl babies AND boy babies. Well, THAT was the silliest thing that my pal and I ever DID hear, and we just weren't going to have any part of it. I mean, we were logically minded and soon to be Kindergarten educated young men, and it only made sense that girls would have girl babies but that only boys could have boy babies. I mean, just how stupid did those two girls think we were?