My argument is, of course, that of the physician in England whose cure for the world’s ills was simple: everybody go to bed for three days.
Every time I get into an argument these days, somebody jaws me about now look here, you say there is no progress, well how about disease, what do you think it was like in the eighteenth century? What I think it was like—and I am not against progress, I just think we’ve taken in a lot of crud along with the good, and I’m not sure if they’re separable—is that it never occurred to people then that they shouldn’t hurt, and therefore it didn’t hurt them as much as we, who now know things needn’t hurt, think.
We were bored, when we were kids, but we never thought that a day was anything but a whole lot of nothing interrupted occasionally by something. My kids are bored. I was bored. But I didn’t know the word.
I know the word all right these days. And the situation. And so do millions of other people, who try to get away from it by furious activity of all sorts. That they never escape it seems only to drive them on to more extended attempts, and they hunt it out of their children with the same intensity, and very much the same results. From long ago when Bea Lillie (or was it Fannie Brice, same words, different accent) did the thing of clobbering a hand-held kid and hollering, “I brought you to the beach to enjoy yourself and by God you’re going to enjoy yourself,” to the kid I saw at a swimming pool the other day, frog-flippers on his feet, goggles and a snorkel tube on his head, a plastic inflated raft with a clear panel to observe through under one arm, standing at the edge of the shallow end of the swimming pool, there doesn’t seem to have been much change. This kid couldn’t swim. He was watching, perhaps with envy, certainly with interest, an infant of two or three who stood in a puddle, stamping with her left foot, getting dirty water in freckles all over her.
After a while the infant sat down in the puddle and did nothing. My little boy had gone swimming. My wife had gone swimming. I had gone swimming. We all sat in our own little puddles and did nothing. We were doing nothing. We were not particularly worried about it. That’s one of the reasons you come to a swimming pool. To sit on your duffs and swim and after a while, just sit on your duffs. There is a difference between doing nothing and being bored. Being bored is a judgment you make on yourself. Doing nothing is a state of being.
Kids know about this, if you’ll leave them be.
It is now time to talk about clothesline.
Clothesline was to my childhood what Scotch tape is to my kids. Clothesline was the universal matter. Clothesline was what, when you decided on any project, you had to find first, unless you were indoors, when what you had to find was a hairpin. This you found by finding your mother.
Clothesline was, for girls, skipping rope. It was used by boys for tying each other, and any girls handy, up. Sometimes this was done against the tyee’s will, but almost as often it was done with permission. One of us had seen Houdini, all of us had read about him. We tied each other up to see how long it would take to get free. We tied up prisoners. From time to time, and now I cannot get inside that year’s head, we tied each other up just for tying each other up. No game, no revenge, no torture, no acting out. Just tying up, as sometimes we ran around and screamed just for that itself.
Clothesline was used for fastening things together, for example, fastening two kids together, back to back, as above. It was used to harness a batch of little kids together for use as horses with a delivery wagon. It was used the same way with a sled, and sometimes instead of little kids we used the patient collie who lived next door.
Clothesline was used, between the clothespoles in our backyard, as a tightrope. Call me a liar, but there was a time when we thought we could learn to walk a tightrope and we tried it, although despite our best efforts, what we did not learn to walk was a very slack clothesline. It was used as a high-jump standard, and the day one of us found a bamboo pole in the center of a rolled-up rug, it was used as a pole-vault standard too. It was used as a climbing rope, for the ascent of garages, it was used as a belt, as a lasso (which we pronounced then “lassoo” and I learned later is really a lariat, which I still pronounce “larriet”), as a part of something we called bolas, a kind of Gaucho “lassoo.”
This was made by tying a couple of rocks to both ends of a piece of clothesline. This assembly was whirled around the head and let go, and it wrapped itself around the clothespole, other kids, and one’s own ankles with equal force and pain.
Clothesline was a sort of natural resource, found in abundance growing in backyards, and it was The Law that when it did not have clothes on it, it was borrowable. It was not permitted to cut it, however, and once it was necessary to cut it, unless it was a very long clothesline and the loss would not show, you had to steal it. Then it was all right for belts and bolas. I just remembered a game of my early childhood, which was to run through the wash, and feel the damp and clean-smelling sheets against one’s face. Do that with an electric drier! Along with clotheslines, sort of the fruit of this freely growing vine, were clothespins, for which we had a number of uses. In my town, they were the clothespins without springs: they could be made into dolls, they were good for digging, they made fine tent stakes, they could be turned into a sort of primitive pliers, and with the aid of a few strips of wood and a couple of nails, a toy in which two figures with little wooden hammers struck alternate blows. We thought of clothespins generally as just something good to have a few of stashed away. They were very good-shaped things. Once in a great while we would encounter a spring clothespin: these were real treasures, and were carried clamped on the finger until incipient gangrene set in.
Clothesline was also good for wrapping around things, for practicing knot-tying with, and the frayed end was a very pleasant thing to stroke one’s face with. It was pretty fair chewing. I hate to leave this subject, but I have to tell about torture. Torture can wait. I haven’t mentioned clothespoles. These were not those upside-down umbrellas you don’t see very much any more. These were honest upright poles, set at the corners of a square. They were as big around as my head when I first learned to walk, they had an acorn-shaped turning on top, and a cross pole. They were painted white, and were for a long time a corner in “Puss in the Corner,” later home base in hide-and-go-seek. Later on, a big tree was home base, and this tree was, I now realize, one of the many things in my childhood that I knew with a sense that I no longer know anything with. I knew that tree not by sight, or smell; not by location, or height, or kind: I knew that tree by forehead. As I knew the picket fence by sound; the ornamental iron fence outside the Bailey Estate by getting my knee caught in it; the stair banister at home by behind, the red leather chair by coolness on my thighs, the washcloth by taste. Somewhere in here belongs the way your fingers got wrinkled in the bath, when you had stayed too long. And that thing we did, at what age I cannot tell, of running a needle along underneath the skin of our hands. It did not hurt, but it was frightening, and that was part of why we did it.
I seem to have gotten past clothesline and into torture. Very well, there was that kind of self-torture, like with the needle. There was the holding of breath, and the not-blinking of eyes, the drinking of nauseous mixtures, the eating of untried substances, the first corncob pipes, the cigars, the pulls at the wine bottle. It was prohibition, or else we could have done a lot of that.
But I meant the torture of other kids. There was a definite series of tortures, physical ones. I don’t mean that general casual torture that all kids practice, like plain hitting, like mud-throwing, isolation. These were things we did to each other to see how well the other kid could stand up. There was the Indian Wrist Burn. This consisted of grabbing another kid’s wrist in one’s two hands, placed close together. One hand twisted clockwise, the other counter. It hurt like hell.
There was the Indian Scalp Burn. This was done by placing the palm flat against the newly haircutted back of another kid’s neck and pushing up against the grain.
There was the Indian Chest Beat. This
was usually the climax of wrestling. You had another kid down. In the books like Tom Brown’s Schooldays you were then supposed to have licked him and would let him up, but in our friendly circle, the minute you let him up he would walk away three or four paces and then jump you or heave a rock at you. It was almost always so with fights when I was a kid. In all the books, the until then mild boy hammered the villain with straight lefts and right crosses until he sank on the ground never to rise again. Our fights didn’t work out that way. In the first place, we took turns being the bully, and in the second place, fights never ended. I had a fight with a guy who is now, they tell me, a distinguished physician in my home town. Then he was not. He was a boy named Piggy. I had a fight with Piggy that went on for two months, after school, every day. We were both heartily sick of it, but the other kids thought it was great and Piggy and I hammered each other day after tiresome day.
But the Indian Chest Beat: you were on top. You placed a knee in each of the underdog’s elbows, as you sat on his stomach. You beat, alternately with each clenched fist, on his breast bone until he cried or you were tired, or somebody came along. This also hurt like hell.
There was old-fashioned arm-twisting, frog-marching, there was The Drill, the Hammerlock, the Toe Lock, there was a charming thing called Punching the Muscle. This was simple. This involved a series of punches, as hard as possible, in the muscle of the upper arm until a kind of paralysis set in.
This last was not always a torture. It was sometimes part of a game called Two-For-Biting. I understand the heathens call this two-for-flinching. It went on all the time. It involved walking up to another kid and thrusting your fist in his face without any warning. If he pulled back, or blinked, you then said, “Twoferbiting,” and hit him in the upper arm, twice, as hard as you could. He then theoretically waited until you were off guard, and did the same to you. If by any chance, he tried and you did not startle, you got to hit him. If he tried and, banking on your pulling back, touched you on the face, you got two free shots on him. It is my feeling that I walked around most of the years of my childhood with a constant supply of three wounds. A black-and-blue upper arm from this, a scab on my knee from falling down, a swollen wrist. The wrist was swollen either from the Indian Wrist Burn or from the choosing game of scissors-paper-rock.
Now, in this, kids also seem to be different today. I don’t see it going on, and I don’t hear about it, and maybe it’s just that I’m being as unseeing as any parent—but I don’t think so. I don’t think kids beat up on each other as much as they used to, just the way you don’t see fights between men as much as you used to. I know all about the crime rate, and about mugging, but it’s my belief that that’s different: that’s for money, and it’s for keeps, and it’s with knives and blackjacks and guns, but generally I don’t think kids get whipped any more, I don’t think as many husbands put the slug on their wives as used to, and I don’t think kids clobber each other as much as they did. I think that’s wonderful, unless it means that people deprived of small violence need big violence. Perhaps it means, let us hope, that people unused to violence will never accept it casually. I wouldn’t know.
I do know I never liked very much being slugged, and I never liked very much slugging people, and when I was thirteen and tired to death of fighting Piggy, I decided that maybe one of the best things about growing up was you didn’t have to fight any more. With fists. I swore a great oath about it. It’s been no trouble to keep.
If I were asked—and since it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will ever ask me, I propose to ask myself right now—what two objects seem to me now to have bulked the largest in my childhood, my answer would be prompt. Garnets and chestnuts.
I have saved them for the last because that’s another thing I did in my childhood, and I wish I could do now—save the best for the last.
I never saw anything more beautiful than my sister’s Roman-striped hair-ribbon. I am reconciled at last to never seeing one like it again. Nothing will ever look or taste as good as the Country Gentleman corn I ate, there will never be quite as satisfying a dish as a mound of mashed potatoes and the round spoon making a crater on top and filling it with gravy; I will never feel quite the quality of despair I once felt at flunking algebra, nor will I ever feel quite the same thrill of niceness, eternity, and yes, beauty, as my first—and last—comprehension of Euclid; no book will ever start, “‘Tom!’ No answer. ‘Tom!’ No answer;” I will never smell anything so satisfying as the very first encounter with my own smell as a male, not a boy; no Super-Constellation will ever fly as wonderfully as the first model airplane built from plans in The American Boy; I will never have a friend like the friends I had then; I am pretty sure now I will never find an arrowhead.
But all the same, the best for the last: garnets and chestnuts. The rockpile on the vacant lot was composed, perhaps all, surely largely, of what we called and what may have been sandstone, and we found out fairly early that if you pried at it with a knife, you could split it into sheets. There was slate there also, and that could be split in sheets, but by banging, not by splitting. The slate could be chipped into arrowheads, and we made a kind of cave-man knife of it, too. But one day, splitting the sandstone, we found little red nuggets in it. We spent some time, prizing the little nuggets out. Did one of us know then that these were garnets, or did we not know until we showed them to a grownup? It doesn’t matter. We knew they were stones, we knew that they were precious stones. When we found the word garnets, we knew that they were precious stones used in jewelry, that they were practically the same as diamonds, that our fortunes were made.
People, grownups, don’t know, or don’t want to know, how important money is to little kids. When I see my kids with dough in their kick, I remember quite clearly what cash is to a child. It’s like a gun to a man on the frontier; it’s an equalizer. My kid sending away to Johnson Smith and Company for a sixty-volt generator and a plate palpitator and a deck of marked cards is bellying up to the bar and naming his own poison. When he hands me the jam jar with the spring snake inside, and I open it and lose two beats of my pulse, he’s holding a gun on me, and he’s two feet taller than I am.
When we got together enough garnets, we were going to buy a motor buckboard, get a really good Galena crystal and million-ohm earphones, get racing tubes and every Motor Boy book published, buy all our clothes at the Army-Navy store, go to visit Dan Beard and Raymond Ditmars and Breitbart the Strong Man and (just me) Luther Burbank; I was going to stop taking Maltine, nobody was going to chivvy me off the window seat where I was in the balloon with Tom Sawyer Detective, and chase me out to get some fresh air; if I wanted a pocket oilstone for my knife, I was going to get it, having passed the age where I thought a flat stone and some spit was really effective; I would have a subscription to The American Boy, and to Boy’s Life, and to The Open Road, and to Popular Science, and to Popular Mechanics—and to Film Fun, and to Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang.
Our parents would be terribly deferent to us, and people would point us out on the streets as the boys who owned the garnet mine. Our pictures would be in the paper. We would be very kind to everybody, and nobody would tell us what to do. Ever. If our parents told us what to do, we wouldn’t give them any more garnets, we would take away our brothers’ and sisters’ Shetland ponies, and put away our fathers’ cigars and brandy, our mothers’ jewelry and silk dresses until they behaved themselves properly.
We chipped away like prisoners on a rockpile, and we stashed our garnets away in matchboxes: we would have made a cache out of them, but we didn’t know whether to pronounce it cash or cashay, and we didn’t trust each other so much any more. We carried the matchboxes in our pockets and from time to time—say, at intervals of fifteen seconds—we opened the matchboxes and bathed in our loot like the Count of Monte Cristo in the movies. I had little twinges every now and then, and I’m sure the other kids did, but we never talked to each other about it, when we found that the garnets sometimes broke apart when the knife blade
hit them instead of the surrounding sandstone. I believe I even had a theory that they dried out, hardened, when exposed to air, because how could they be jewels in a brooch or a pin or a ring if they broke. Jewels were things that were very hard. But I didn’t worry about it long. There was some man on the block, not a parent, maybe a furnace man or a yard man or a handy man or a chauffeur, who was the court of last resort. He was a grownup, but he leveled with kids. The day we had found some bullets on the vacant lot, we brought them to him and he put them in a vise and rigged a pin and string up some way and they were real bullets all right. He was not the furnace man, I know that; the furnace man came on a racing bike, without brakes, and we daily cut ourselves into two complete halves riding it, the saddle thin and unpadded and sharp as any knife.
We took the garnets to this man who was on our side: he pronounced them garnets. We went back and split more tons of sandstone. I don’t know who it was who finally told us—maybe this same man. They were the kind of garnets used to make that rough sandpaper called garnet paper. They were not jewels at all.
We gave up the magic lantern and the hunting knife with scabbard and hip boots; we waved goodby to the order, no futzing around now, of the entire contents of the Johnson Smith catalog, all in one swoop; we knew we would never have the complete works of Tom Swift. We went back to taking cod-liver oil and being hunted off to bed.
As I write this now, I wonder, is it possible they were real garnets? Would it be worth tearing down the house that sits on that corner and making it into a vacant lot again? Were the rocks hauled off somewhere, and do they sit now on a vacant lot? Anyone for a garnet mine?
The chestnuts are still around. These were horse chestnuts, and next to clothesline, the most useful thing in the world.
When I started my love affair with horse chestnuts, just the way there was only The Reservoir, just one in the world, so there was only one Horse Chestnut Tree.
Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. Page 7