Friday, July 23, 2010

Just A Minute, It'll Come To Me...

The kid came out of nowhere.
My pal, Terry, and I were riding our bikes early in the afternoon of a hot Michigan August.  We had to have been around ten or eleven and the bikes were fairly new, probably from the previous Christmas.  I remember priding myself in "knowing this town like the back of my hand".  Only an eleven year-old would take pride in the kind of knowledge it took to master a village of approximately eighteen-hundred people.
We were riding near the old pickle factory, a less than splendid old building on the "wrong side" of the railroad tracks.  The boy rode up behind us on a feeble looking girls' bike which had been given a less than adequate recent paint job.  House paint would be my guess.
He looked to be about fifteen or sixteen; practically a grown up in our purview.  He overtook us like a cop pulling over a traffic miscreant and flashed some kind of badge he had encased in an old wallet.  The young guy claimed to be some sort of secret police officer and wanted to know what we were doing riding our bicycles in a restricted area of the town of Leslie.  As I recall, both of us were scarred but suspicious of this self important bigger kid, but what did we know?  He was older and, like a teenage baby-sitter, someone who should be treated like an adult.
Why am I reflecting on this as I wake up this morning?  Good question!
As I slowly come out of the ether, I recall that the kid had white adhesive tape wrapped around one of his beat up black oxford shoes.  At the time he pointed to the tape and informed us that this was indicative of his rank in the secret law enforcement organization that employed him.  We bought the  whole story and vamoosed back to our own neighborhood only later beginning to question the authenticity of the, (we later realized), self appointed lawman.  This morning, more than fifty years later, it came to me that the boy had white tape around his shoe simply to hold it together.  He was poor and probably jealous of the relatively new bikes ridden by Terry and me.

Memory...what an amazing and deceptive maze.
I remember the kid, his bike and shoes; even his face.
Now.....the name of that actress I've seen a couple of hundred times on that favorite TV show of mine...
By the way, what the hell is the name of that show??
You know the one.
Don't you?

No comments: