Growing Up

The world was introduced to me on this day in 1942, but the news didn't make much of a dent in all that other news. Besides my birth, the news of that day included the loss of an RAF P-40 in the Egyptian Sahara (that wouldn't be found for decades) and the German Wehrmacht initiated Operation Braunschweig, code named Fall Blau. Hardly noticeable to anyone but close family knew that Basil and Dot had a new son. Even my Grandfather, John F. McNamara only noted in his diary that James Elmer McNamara had been born. No hurrahs, no fanfare, not even a toast was offered. There was a war on, after all, and despite the recent victory over the Japanese fleet at Midway, Rommel still controlled North Africa, Hitler was hell bent on ruling all of Europe and Americans knew they were in for a prolonged, extremely bloody fight.

My father had gone to enlist that winter, despite my ensuing birth, because it was the right thing to do, but he was declared 4-F and sent home. He found a good job in the war industry, but housing was hard to find, so Mom, heavy with me, lived with her parents and Dad would drive up over the weekends if he could find enough gas tokens. Eventually, they found an apartment near his work.

After the war was over and the war industry jobs dried up, we all moved back to their hometown, a village of perhaps 400 souls, where I lived until I left home at age 19.

It is those interim years that I am remembering in this essay.

We went to church and Sunday school and learned about our maker, his son, and a ghost. We went to a two-room school where we learned arithmetic, reading, writing, history, geography, the Pledge to the Flag, flowers and trees, baseball, football, king of the mountain on snow banks, sugar on snow, marbles with a hole gouged in the school dirt driveway buy turning your heel and pushing down, mumbletypeg with our jack knives, and how to ride on a St Bernard. We said the Lord's Prayer, debtors not trespassers, in class every morning, but we weren't taught it in school because every single one of us already knew it, .

Playing baseball in a small field behind a two-room, eight grade school required some cooperation. Boys in the first few grades weren't invited, but usually by the time they were 8 or 9, they'd be included. In the spring, every recess and lunch hour would find the boys choosing up sides to play ball. Two of the bigger kids (eighth graders, you know) would toss a bat to determine who would choose the first player for his team, then they alternate choosing until all the boys had been selected. Naturally the better players would be chosen early and the younger ones last, but everyone played. We could usually get in a couple of innings before it was time to go back to class, but the teams remained the same for the day, through lunch and afternoon recess. It never was terribly important who won.

In the fall, football was the game of choice and we chose up sides pretty much the same way, except we wouldn't have a bat to toss. We played tackle football and the big kids were smart enough to avoid tackling too roughly, but we'd occasionally go home with our shirts torn and nearly always dirty.

When it rained, we'd stay inside at recess, but when it snowed, we'd be out at every break. The plowed snowbanks would often be three or four feet high and would serve as a hill to climb and push others down in King of the Hill. We lived about half a mile from the school and there were times I'd ski, cross-country style, on top of the snowbanks along side the highway, across the loose plank iron bridge and down the lane to the school building. After school, we'd go over to Potato Patch to use the rope tow that was powered by an old Pierce Arrow automobile. The car was jacked up inside a small shed with the rope wound around one of the rear wheels.

My Dad always had a garden with sweet corn, green peas, beets, radishes, leaf lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and string beans. Mom had a large, shallow metal pan that she'd carry out to the garden before supper to pick the veggies we'd have for supper. Sandwiches, with mayonnaise spread thickly on white bread with a big thick slab of tomato didn't need bacon or lettuce, just a liberal sprinkling of salt. Another favorite was a lettuce sandwich. Just white bread with mayonnaise, several freshly washing and still damp leaves of leaf lettuce with a sprinkling of sugar.

My wife, a native Georgian, often comments when we pass a house with a garden, saying that they have a good looking crop of turnip greens. Northerners would say it was a good looking turnip crop. I don't particularly care for either part of the plant, but my spouse will put a mess of the greens in as pot with water and possibly something else, stinking up the house. Some of our neighbors back home would do the same with beet greens and dandelion greens, but in my family, we just ate the beets and threw the greens on the pile behind the shed.

My cousin Fred lived about a half mile from us and we'd play together often. One summer day, he told his mother he was going to Jimmy's house and I told mine I was going to Freddie's house. We met in the middle and played in a shallow pool we'd made earlier by stacking stones in the form of a dam across a small brook. The water was at most about three feet deep and while we didn't know how to swim, we knew how to hold our breath and crawl across the bottom of that little pool. We'd gotten away with our little deception several times, but on that day, Mom needed to go somewhere and I was to go along with her, so she called Fred's mother to tell me to come home. Oops. Our mothers decided to go find us so each set off walking towards the other just as Fred and I had done. The game was up. We got caught.

That summer I got sent off to 4-H camp so I could learn to swim. Our county was allotted two weeks at the state run facility, but the $8.00 for one week was about all my Dad felt he could afford. I wanted the pleasure to last longer, so I withdrew $8.00 from my savings account at the Mascoma Bank and spent two weeks at camp. I came back home able to swim the width of the brook, knowing how to peen a small piece of tin into a crude ashtray, and wearing a lanyard around my neck that I'd woven together using flat, plastic coated string.

Many summer afternoons would find a group of boys gathering on the local prep school's baseball diamond for a pickup game. Just like across the highway at school, we'd choose up sides, but now the players might be as old as 17 and as young as 9 or 10. Our bats were usually taped with black friction tape to keep the cracks from spreading and quite often, the baseball would be wrapped with friction tape as well, it's cowhide long ago worn and torn. There is a particular aroma from a baseball with no cover, and I'd recognize it anywhere. Not every kid had his own glove, so they were swapped when the other side took the field. The prep school always left home plate in the ground, but we had to draw squares in the dirt to mark first, second and third base.

Other afternoons, we'd bike over the hill and down to the covered bridge for a plunge in the pool below. New Hampshire brook water comes from mountain springs, refreshingly cold, so cold in fact, that I never could just wade in. There was a cliff above the pool, perhaps 12 or 15 feet high. I'd go out to the tip of that cliff, stand there for what seemed like hours trying to get the courage to dive, then with a spring from my young legs, perform my version of a swan dive, leaping far enough out to clear the ledge that went out in the water a few inches below the surface. That first exhilarating plunge into water that just a few months earlier had been solid ice was all it took. I'd scramble back up to the ledge and do it all over, but waiting only until other swimmers were out of the way.

The summer of 1960 was a turning point in many of our lives. We'd graduated from high school, many of us had been accepted by colleges of our first, second or third choice, and this was to be my last summer of total freedom before entering a different world in a different city.

I still go back home now and again. My mother and father have passed on, but Mom's only sister, age 99, and Dad's younger brother, age 90, still live there. I've taken my Georgia Peach up numerous times to let her get a feeling for what it might have been like. A couple of years ago, we tried to go up in the winter so Sara could really experience a New Hampshire winter, but winter bypassed them, so all she saw was an anemic 4" snowfall that had all melted away by noon. Early that morning, we stopped in a shopping center and a local couple noticed out Georgia license plates, asked us what we thought of New Hampshire. They laughed when we told them we'd been hoping for a real snowfall, and then I admitted to having grown up just a few miles away.