Things I Miss from Childhood in Erie, PA

This list could go on forever if I inspected my childhood closely enough, as it could for all of us, I’m sure. I started jotting these down over a month ago. I'll stop here for now.

• Milkweed on the wind.
• Yellow dandelions up and down the whole block for the first few weeks of summer.
• Blowing dandelion seeds into the air.
• Grasshoppers I captured in my metal Adam-12 lunch box walking through Ford field on the way home from school.
• Grasshopper tobacco spit in my Adam-12 metal lunch box.
• Neighbors on Grant, Ford and Montpelier.
  (DiTullio, Mahler, Clutter, Kahil, Yosten, Bricker, Goss, Chipoletti, Campbell, Nickel. Tommy Kahil moved away when I was very little. Rich Nickel was my best friend for years. I was also very close to Mike Guyton. I’ve lost track of them all.)
• The smell of lake water.
• The smell of standing puddles on humid summer days.
• Wasps hovering over standing puddles on humid summer days. 
• The crack of frozen puddles under my feet on frigid days.
• Larry Pintea and the Erie Times-News.
• We Love Erie Days. I did and still do.
• Love Boat and Fantasy Island and Gene Rayburn and Charles Nelson Reilly and Karen Valentine and a million others. Oh my, Karen Valentine.
• There is a sweet grass that blooms in summer that I can only rarely and briefly smell in Michigan; I wish I knew what it was, but when you live with it, you don't describe it, it just touches you and drifts away.
• Cicadas singing loudly in tall maple trees.
• Cicada exoskeletons clinking to craggy old maple tree trunks.
• Mom and Dad working in the yard when I come home from school.
• Patchy clouds against a blue sky.
• Cold mornings and dew in summer.
• The canary yellow house with white trim on my paper route that cooked bacon and eggs every Sunday morning.
• Waiting for the school bus.
• Staying home from school and watching game shows and daytime talk shows like Mike Douglas.
• Dad saying "Verrrrrrry interesting, but schtoopid." He liked funny German characters like Arte Johnson (Laugh-In) and John Banner (Hogan's Heroes).
• Thunderous, torrential storms.
• Power outages, candle light, oil lamps, and playing board games with mom and my brother Tom and sister Linda.
• The crisp edge of an old oil lamp wick and the smell of one burning.
• Candles that drip.
• The smell of an extinguished candle.
• Wet woolen mittens drying on the heat register at school.
• Mom telling me not to eat all the nuts and mints she set out for company.
• The smell of moth balls.
  (The Shrine Circus came to town once a year, and my Grandpa Cairns took me and my little brother Tom each year. One year Grandpa bought me and Tom little gifts of our choice. I chose a little plush stuffed monkey. I slept with it in their house that night, and many nights after in my own house. It smelled of moth balls. My guess is the Shriners mothballed them between seasons. Or they bought a batch that someone else had mothballed. It's a delightful smell for me to this day.)
• Grandmas and grandpas.
• Bethel Baptist Church.
• Strawberry shortcake made with drop biscuits.
• Children on bicycles.
• The sound of children playing.
• Security, hope, optimism; a fortress of caring adults that never let anything harmful near.
• Summers that seemed to last forever.
• My own room.
• My own time.
• My mom and dad.

I don't expect anyone who doesn't know me to care about this stuff, but I think someone someday a few rungs down the DNA ladder will, just as I do my own parents, and their parents. If you stayed with me this long, perhaps you miss things like this too.

Started: 2012-04-15