THE TROUBLE WITH THE TREEHOUSE WAS THAT, little though we were, we could not for long convince ourselves that it was a house. It wasn’t, and we knew it after what may have been days or weeks or months—time is a very flexible thing with kids. I know today that I could not possibly have stared at my first cricket for more than minutes, and yet today in that length of time I could write a whole first act. The treehouse after a certain length of time was only a couple of boards and a piece of awning loosely attached to a tree.

But the hut; well, that was a place where we could live. I have been trying hard to remember just how we started to build it. Certainly there was no foundation. I seem to remember building the first wall in one piece, boards and tarpaper hammered onto a couple of two-by-fours, and the two-by-fours extending below, the whole structure raised and the extensions going into holes, and rocks being jammed around. I imagine we got the second wall up the same way, and ran roof beams across the top so that it stood up. The roof, if memory serves, and I am getting pretty dubious about that, was something that was lying around the lot. An abandoned cellar door, perhaps.

I am lying a little now—hell, I am lying a lot. I don’t really remember building the hut. I remember repairing it, and expanding it, and putting a better door in it, a hasp and a lock. I remember packing rocks from the rockpile around the perimeter, to strengthen the hut—it was by then a fortress—against any attack. I remember tamping down the dirt floor, and finding a piece of linoleum and a gunny sack to brighten the corner which was mine.

I suppose, when I come right down to it, none of us could stand upright in the hut, and I have a kind of notion that when there were more than two of us in it, no one of us could move.

This is a hell of a note, on an August afternoon in my declining years to realize that really, that hut, that shining palace, that home away from home, that most secure of all habitations, was not much bigger than a big doghouse, and could have been pushed over by an angered Shetland pony. (Which any of us were going to get any moment, or a magic lantern, as soon as we had sold thirty-four million packages of blueing.)

No matter. It was ours. It belonged to us. And if you were not one of us, you could not come in. We had rules, oh Lord, how we had rules. We had passwords. We had oaths. We had conclaves.

It was a pitiful wreck of a tarpaper hut, and in it I learned the difference between boys and girls, I learned that all fathers did that, I learned to swear, to play with myself, to sleep in the afternoon, I learned that some people were Catholics and some people were Protestants and some people were Jews, that people came from different places. I learned that other kids wondered, too, who they would have been if their fathers had not married their mothers, wondered if you could dig a hole right to the center of the earth, wondered if you could kill yourself by holding your breath. (None of us could.)

I learned that with three people assembled, it was only for the briefest interludes that all three liked each other. Mitch and I were leagued against Simon. And then Simon and I against Mitch. And then—but you remember. I didn’t know then just how to handle that situation. I still don’t. It is my coldly comforting feeling that nobody still does, including nations, and that’s what the trouble with the world is. That’s what the trouble with the world was then—when Mitch and Simon were the two and I was the one.

What else did I learn in the hut? That if two nails will not hold a board in place, three will probably not either, but the third nail will split the board. I think kids still do that. I think objects made of wood by children, left to their own devices, if such there be, will assay ten percent wood, ninety percent nails.

I learned that I could lift things, rocks mostly, that my mother would have thought too heavy for me.

I learned to smoke, first, cornsilk wrapped in newspaper. I can taste it to this day. We never had the patience to let the cornsilk really dry. I don’t imagine kids do that very much any more, mostly because they’ve never heard of it. What you do is take the cornsilk, spread it out in the sun until it is brown, like the little beard you find in the husk. Wrap it in a spill of newspaper—it’ll look more like a very small ice-cream cone than anything else—set fire to the end, being careful not to torch off your eyebrows. My recollection is that it bore no relationship to tobacco, but it wasn’t bad at all. It had one big virtue. When caught, you had not committed a sin, as you did later when you smoked real cigarettes. Real cigarettes stunted your growth, we knew that. What that meant to us was that your growth stopped, right there. It was not impeded. You just plain stopped growing, as if you were frozen. You would be three feet tall when you were sixty years old. It was in no way contradictory that we never saw a grownup three feet tall. They had never smoked as children, and certainly the ones who had were not going to walk around in the daylight letting everybody know what they had done.

And to make this intellectual adjustment absolutely complete, we were able to hold this certain knowledge, this fact, intact and at the same time, as soon as possible, start smoking cigarettes.

Before that we smoked scribblage, like cigars. That was pretty bad.

Getting cigarettes was quite a problem. Most of the fathers on our block smoked cigars or pipes, and so far as we knew, no woman smoked. There were no vending machines. Getting cigarettes involved suborning some kid between childhood and adulthood, and the blackmail he thereafter commanded was too expensive. You could then buy cigarettes in little cardboard boxes of ten. You could theoretically, but the man in the store would not sell them to us, no matter how earnestly we told him a father, an uncle, some man on the corner, had asked, nay, commanded us to purchase them. Kids on the wrong side of the tracks could buy them, one at a time, from an open box that storekeepers used to keep on their counters. Three for a penny, was it, or a penny apiece?

It didn’t matter. We were on the right side of the tracks. We could not buy, borrow, or beg them. So we stole them.

We did, as a matter of course, considerable stealing.

There were two kinds of stealing: there was the kind of stealing that we had to do continually for survival; we knew it was stealing, and we had been told it was wrong, but we could see no way of obtaining certain necessities without stealing, so we called it something else. Hooking, pinching, borrowing—which last we occasionally called loaning, just to complicate the situation. I guess that was an even finer distinction, now that I come to think of it; occasionally, of course, we did really borrow things. Therefore, the kind of stealing we would have liked to soften by calling “borrowing” we had to call “loaning.”

We pinched food: potatoes to roast on a scribblage-and-wood fire at the hut. They were not exactly roasted: they were put in the fire until black on the outside, when they were called mickies. They were then broken open and seasoned with stolen salt. At home, we were accustomed to put butter on potatoes, but for some reason it never occurred to us to hook butter for the mickies. They were totally carbonized on the outside, quite raw on the inside. I remember them as being nasty and wonderful at one and the same time, and perhaps the best part of it was that often there were little worms of red fire still running around the skin, while we ate the barely cooked, terribly hot inside. We hooked apples to cook the same way, but they were not very good. We hooked sugar lumps, which we had been told would give us worms. Candy was not so much stolen as taken as a birthright.

We stole medicine: it was the days of great, epic, and constant purging, and there were many medicines which came in powders. They lay in a little cardboard box, little carefully folded stiff tissue-paper enclosures, like odd and unique handmade envelopes, half of the packets red, half blue. I suppose they were Seidlitz powders, I heard them talked about then, I think they were cathartic, but I have not heard of them since I was a kid, and I do not really know. What we did know was that if you put first one colored envelope, then the other, into a bottle of water, there was considerable action. We dared each other to drink them, but I don’t recall that any of us took the dare. My kids display the same sort of interest in Alka-Seltzer, and they put a thumb over an opened bottle of Coke and shake, as we did with pop. Pop came much later in my years: Mother had a great belief in natural things; honey was better than sugar, fresh fruit was better than candy, figs and nuts were better than cookies. Outside of milk, the only thing us kids got that came in bottles—with the single horrible exception of citrate of magnesia—was grape juice. Citrate of magnesia was the children’s purge: I would gladly have been strung up by my thumbs for two days rather than endure the horrible, jawclenching torture of magnesia, and when my grandfather brightly announced that to him it was just like lemon soda, I could have strung him up by the thumbs. However, there was no escape, and sooner or later, you emptied the bottle, which I recall as containing a bathtubful.

One other thing in the more or less medicinal line we always planned to steal was a seltzer siphon: it was a stomach-centered world in those days, and physicking was that time’s constant preoccupation as ours is tranquilizing drugs. The seltzer bottle stood on many tables, and was sovereign incitement to what was then not called burping, because indeed it was belching. Our purpose in stealing it was to spray one another with it. Now, in this halcyon age, my children can tune in television and watch one expensive wit doing it to another. Us kids never, as I recall it, ever got away with the theft of a seltzer bottle. We had to content ourselves as well as we could with spitting on one another.

But back to larceny: we loaned chalk from the school, money from our mothers, golf balls from smaller children, clothesline from anywhere. Truly, I will get to clothesline pretty soon.

That was the loaning, the hooking, the pinching. The money we took from our mothers was not stealing, because it was money that was laying around. On kitchen tables, bureaus, mantelpieces. That was, like at the new house, not nailed down and it was not stealing.

The other kind of stealing was honest-to-God stealing, and we did that in a different way, knowing that we were committing criminal acts, scared, awaiting the arrival of the police, and pretty damn proud of ourselves. Money that was not laying around came in that category. If a pocketbook was laying around, but it was closed, taking money out of it was stealing, and we did that only on extreme provocation. Extreme provocation was when (And do you remember your schoolteacher forbidding you to ever start a sentence that way—or split an infinitive to boot—or use dashes as punctuation?) we had been denied our birthright, to wit, a lethal weapon. This was, most often, a bee-bee gun, next most often a hunting knife, next most often, fireworks. I never got a gun or a knife. In Mexico, at age twenty-eight, I bought the goddamnedest folding machete you ever saw, last month in an Army-Navy store I got me an air pistol that shoots bee-bees, slugs and darts, and if anybody knows where you can buy those little Chinese firecrackers in red paper, the ones about the size of a little finger, the wicks all braided together, ready for unbraiding to make them last longer, for bending to make into sizzlers, communications to my publisher will be greatly appreciated. I know where you can still buy realies.

The obtuseness of parents is incredible (and I can hear my own kids saying, “But of course”), but I never got a bee-bee gun or a hunting knife when I was a kid, because my parents said they were too dangerous. And well they are. But how, then, was it allowable that we had a dart board and darts, and I tell you I ground those points on the front steps to better than a needle point, and any time we wanted we could go borrow—and I mean really borrow—the ice pick? The ice pick was usually so sharp it could not be honed any better. It was the universal handy-dandy all-combination tool, for making holes in anything, and after you had used it for boring a hole in a belt to strap a kid to a tree to play Indians burning settlers, it was good for an hour of throwing into the garage wall, thunk. About darts: we used to get a kitchen match, loan ourselves a needle, force the needle into one end of the match and bind it with loaned black thread. The other end was split, and two little wings of paper folded in. This was a dart that stuck to anything, including other children’s clothes, and occasionally other children. I shudder to think of it.

So we stole for our arsenal, like the Irish rebels, and we got nowhere.

We stole for lust, too: this dodge I remember with pride. The days I look at the typewriter and curse my misguided career, I think of the cigar-store caper and dream I had followed it up. Today I could have been a successful gangster, with personal barbers and beautiful disposable broads appearing and disappearing one after the other like tissues in a Kleenex box, a permanent table at some fancy night club, an assistant hood to drive and park my car, pack my bags—oh, well.

I don’t know what age I was when I discovered naked ladies, but I remember where. At the barber shop, and in the Police Gazette. When I go to the barber shop today, I have to burrow down through Bugs Bunny and Little Lulu, Mumsy Moose and Addle the Aardvark and Truly Bestial Horror Comics to find the newspaper, but in those days, a little boy walked into the barber shop and sat down and kept his mouth shut, and there was no equity about your turn: if there were men around, you waited until they were through. And you didn’t run around saying, “Yang yang,” the way kids do in a barber shop now, and having fond fathers smile at you. Open your kisser, and you were melted down to a small puddle by the assembled glares.

So I kept my mouth shut and looked at the naked ladies in the Police Gazette. Then I sat in the barber chair and looked at the naked lady—she was usually an Indian lady, and not completely naked—on the calendar.

That’s where I found out about naked ladies, and so did the other kids, and after a while it occurred to us that if the barber, Lou Kahler the Square-Deal man (and that was no political slogan) could get these magazines, we could too.

There was a candy, cigar, stationery, toy, newspaper, rubber band, rubber ball, chewing gum, poker and pinochle card, library-paste store which we honored with our patronage. In the back was a large rack of magazines. We entered the store, and one of our outposts dickered with Mr. Cantor over some licorice whips, and chocolate sponge. The rest of us proceeded to the magazine rack. One of us got down the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine in which we had absolutely no interest, except that it cost a nickel and was large. In that magazine, every few pages, we introduced other reading matter. Film Fun, College Life (not College Humor—that had jokes, this had girls) Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Physical Culture (don’t be silly, it had naked ladies, too), and whatever other instructive and edifying reading matter we could find. I took this lustful sandwich under my arm, and even more debonair than Jimmy Valentine, I strolled in a cosmopolitan way down the aisle of the store, past the petty playthings of children, gave Mr. Cantor a nickel, and then, boy did we run for that hut. I don’t suppose I have the nervous system now to do this once, and some tiresome hanger-on of my youth will claim that I didn’t do it even then, but you know how people will knock down a successful criminal. I know I did it half a dozen times, and the last time was not even worried about Mr. Cantor. It was foolproof. Of course, a year or so ago I passed his store and I don’t believe I went in. Just didn’t feel like it, that’s all.

However.

In the hut we looked and we learned. And drooled. I remember a picture of Clara Bow with one shoulder strap—and then there was Toby Wing—and look at Lily Damita—she’s bending way over.

Allow me to assure you that I will never lust after anything in my life as I did in the hut after the girl who played in the Wheeler and Woolsey pictures. I tell you, she didn’t wear practically anything. Did she, Mitch?

I don’t believe my kids will have to hook those magazines: first, because I don’t believe any of them exists any more; and second because the last time I looked at the Saturday Evening Post, a lady was deploring brilliantly and quite rightly, I thought, the depravity of the Cannes Film Festival, and in case anyone wondered what depravity she was talking about, there was a profusion of photographic bosom that would have made Film Fun look like St. Nicholas.

Now the old man is really snarling: when I was a kid, there was a difference between respectable and disrespectable, even a distinction between good and bad, and that seems to have gone by the board along with Concord grapes and sickle pears (don’t give me that Seckel pear jazz) and Country Gentleman corn and blackberries with grit and taste in them, pullet eggs and stiff farmer cheese. There were two kinds of magazines: one with pictures of naked ladies in it, therefore bad, therefore enjoyable. There was another kind of magazine with stories about dogs that everybody thought were chicken-killers but were not, about young men who invented new kinds of carburetors and married the boss’s daughter with freckles on her nose, with editorials that were in praise of America, all America, every bit of it, both sides and top and bottom, to and fro and hither and yon and upwards and onwards; where the illustrations were drawn so that you could count every hair in Grandma’s head as she threw her hands up and said, “Laws!”; where the good guys were clean-shaven and the pure girls were blonde: therefore these magazines were good; therefore intermittently tolerable, only occasionally enjoyable.

Before that, there had been John Martin’s Big Book, which was so wonderful I cannot begin to tell you about it, and St. Nicholas, which my sisters liked.

But at this age, when we lived in the hut and smoked cigarettes and honed after Renée Adorée (pronounced, of course, Reenee A-door-ee) we were Sinn Feiners and Revisionists and Bolsheviks in our souls, we wanted big muscles and big guns and big knives, we were, and I am not making fun, enemies of society and we needed things that were bad more than we needed cod-liver oil. And let me tell you, we had opponents worthy of our steel; the day came when I was walking to school and somebody said I would not smoke out there on the street, so of course I did, and you know that the lady who lived at the top of the hill on Primrose Avenue called my old lady, and I caught several kinds of hell. The lady on Primrose had not even the slightest quaver of doubt at calling my mother; I was a child, I had, every day on my way to school, played the game with the other kids of standing up in front of her hedge with my back to it, putting my arms out wide, and falling back like a felled tree. She had hollered at us for doing it, we had run to avoid identification, she knew I was her and her hedge’s enemy, and first chance she got to get even, she did.

But here’s the point: that left me free to ruin her hedge and smoke cigarettes, both delightful occupations. My kids can’t break any grown-up statutes, and hear the delightful noise of shackles breaking, because they can’t find out what laws there are to break. Let me settle the problem of juvenile delinquency once and for all, because I happen to know: the reason these kids are getting in trouble with cops is because cops are the first people they meet who say, and mean it, “You can’t do that.”

If there’s anything in the world kids need, it’s rules. When I was a kid, we honest-to-God did the business of drawing a line on the ground and if a kid wanted to fight, he had a choice, to step over the line or not. There it was. No more argle-bargle, step over the line, and pow. Or, stay on your side of the line. Keep the knife in your pocket in school and keep it. Take it out and lose it. Come in the house this minute, or straight to bed when I catch you.

When my kids were smaller, their mother and I had been washed in the blood of, God save the mark, permissive upbringing. We privately, or at least I privately, thought it was a crock, particularly when I observed that my first-born had permission to take his bottles at any time, provided those times were two, four, six, two—or whatever the hell hours they were. And his nap was entirely at his discretion as long as it was when his parents were totally exhausted.

He soon learned that he could do anything he wanted as long as what he wanted was what we wanted. Which is a fact of life, between parents and kids. But when their little heads first deal with problems of more complicated decisions, when parents begin to wonder if they have the right to make decisions for them, when those same parents know they have an obligation to, it gets a little harder. But not as hard as all that.

I can no longer remember the crisis which involved my son: but in essence, it had reached the point, the point of all arguments, when he was saying the hell he would and I was saying the hell he wouldn’t. I don’t know—go to bed, or get out of bed, or come in from the garden or get the hell out into the garden.

He was two or three. His mother rushed in to say that I must Gesell him a little, or at least Spock him or treat him with a little Ilg, and I went away. To bed, or out of bed, into the garden or out of the garden. She then left him to his own devices.

I found him later, ready to renew hostilities, but on his face and in his manner was much weariness, much fatigue, and a kind of desperation. I had a moment of pure illumination: I stood there and saw inside his head as clearly as if there had been a pane of glass let in his forehead. What he was saying was, “Please, please, for Heaven’s sake, somebody come and take this decision out of my hands, it’s too big for me.”

I grabbed him and picked him up and carried him to wherever it was I thought he was supposed to go. He was little then, he hit me and bit me and wet me, he hollered bloody murder and did his level best to kill me. I remember now, it was to his bed he was supposed to go. I got him there, and dumped him in, put the crib side up. He was in his cage, and he had been put there by his keeper, and he went to sleep as happy as ever I saw him. There were rules. Nobody was going to leave him out in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, when he was too young to know what to do.

The lady at the top of Primrose tipped off the domestic cops, and there was a rule established. The rule was, don’t smoke on your way to school when you are eleven years old and people on Primrose Avenue know who you are.

So we stole Film Fun, and read it in the hut, and absorbed from each other the most intoxicating misinformation about ladies, naked and otherwise.

Among the other things that were clearly and demonstrably good and bad were books. Good books were books that came from the library. Bad books were books that came from other kids. We always liked bad books, and only sometimes liked good books.

This had nothing at all to do with naked ladies, and oddly enough, it had nothing to do with the contents of the books. Henty came from the library. Certainly, The Cat of Bubastes was as good a book as anybody had ever written. The title alone was one of the best things ever written. Washington Irving was a stinker, from the library or from home.

Good books were either library books or birthday presents. Bad books were fifty cents apiece, new, and were tradeable. Bad books were The Boy Allies, The Motor Boys, Tom Swift, Sax Rohmer. They were not read so much as devoured. There was an established rate of exchange, and it took at least three Rover Boys—they were, for some reason, held in much scorn in my literary circle—for even not the latest Tom Swift. The newest Tom Swift was read by three people at once, one holding the book and two saying, “Not so fast,” or “Come on, fa Crise sake, turn the page.”

This lasted only until we found Jules Verne. What a surprise that was, finding out that there was somebody better than Victor Appleton—and in the library, honest, I swear, I’ll show ya!

Then an uncle of mine gave me a complete set of Mark Twain, and I was, and am, equipped for life. I started in at Volume One, and read through to the end of Volume Twenty. I concluded that there was very little else of value written down, and I went back to Volume One and started all over again. I have never stopped doing this. I was told the other evening that someone, either Thurber or Mencken, or both, looked forward to old age as sitting on a screened porch reading Huckleberry Finn. With, for me, maybe Louis Armstrong playing “Beale Street Blues” in a handy grape arbor, and a jug of Paddy’s Irish whiskey like it used to be, close at hand.

However.

I found Mark Twain, and my education as an adult began.

As a kid, I read Dan Beard, Tanglewood Tales, The Tennessee Shad Stories, Stalky and Company, and all the rest of Kipling—it is odd, but I cannot remember reading any children’s books at all. Not Grimm, or Andersen, or the Blue, Green, Yellow or Puce Fairy Stories. The only book I can remember having read to me was some crud called Bobby and the Big Road, which I strongly suspect was the natural ancestor of all those woolly-bear books the kids get now. It was read to me on the supposition, I have no doubt, that since I was called Bobby, I would identify with the presumed hero of the book. This was an oaf, who, by all that’s holy, tripped over shadows. A fat chance of letting myself get mixed up with a schlemiel like that.

We did have a set of books for children: it was called “The Boys’ and Girls’ Bookshelf” and that I read from Volume One to Volume Whatever it was, and I remember only one thing from it.

There was a photograph of some square in some foreign city: there was a fenced-off grass park, and on the road at the right, otherwise deserted, was a hansom cab coming down the street. I used to stare and stare at this picture, why I cannot tell you, and one day I saw the horse and carriage move. I reported this information to a sister—I was very small—and she informed me that this was not possible. I then concluded that it was unwise to tell important things to sisters.

There was another book, of which all I remember is that there was a frontispiece illustration, in color, called “The Garden of the Birds.” Do not ask me what that had to do with the book. Then, it was the book. They were very odd-looking birds, some with tails that would have pulled them ass-over-tea-kettle, some with heads they would have had to trip over (like a bull-terrier pup next door, that, so help me, used to gallop along until its head overbalanced it and then somersaulted), and all the birds stood on little stick legs that, I seem to recall, had no feet, but were just stuck into green grass. This was before I could read, and for reasons that are quite inexplicable to me now, there was enough in this picture to keep me studying it for months.

To find out how the birds were supposed to work, I guess. Or just plain nothing to do.

Because that was the main thing about kids then: we spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. There was an occupation called “just running around.” It was no game. It had no rules. It didn’t start and it didn’t stop. Maybe we were all idiots, but a good deal of the time we just plain ran around.

Many many hours of my childhood were spent in learning how to whistle. In learning how to snap my fingers. In hanging from the branch of a tree. In looking at an ants’ nest. In digging holes. Making piles. Tearing things down. Throwing rocks at things.

Spitting. Breaking sticks in half. Unplugging storm drains, and dropping things down storm drains, and getting dropped things out of storm drains. (Which we called sewers.) So help us, we went and picked wild flowers. This was Hunt’s Woods again. In the spring I went there for violets, and yellow violets, and dogtooth violets, and Jack in the Pulpit, and sometimes Dutchman’s breeches, and Indian pipe, the whitest thing I have ever seen in my life, strange and really ghostlike against the black boggy earth. Later, something we called star grass, tiny, intensely blue flowers and the stem triangular, a real wonder. I was a real goof about these things, and on Sundays, when we went for a ride, my sisters used to groan when we passed a clump of tiger lilies, because I made myself a real pest, a thorough kid brother, until the car was stopped and I could gather a bunch. I was looney about flowers.

All of us, for a long time, spent a long time picking wild flowers. Catching tadpoles. Looking for arrowheads. Getting our feet wet. Playing with mud. And sand. And water. You understand, not doing anything. What there was to do with sand was let it run through your fingers. What there was to do with mud was pat it, and thrust in it, lift it up and throw it down.

When it rained, water ran along the curb and we sailed twigs down the current, built little dams. In the winter, after the snowballs and the snow forts, after the sleds and the toboggans, there was the crusty snow, and there was the (what to call it? Not a game, not a sport, not even a contest)—there was just the thing of seeing if you could walk on the crust without breaking through. There was ice-skating, and a kind of primitive hockey, and we made slides on the sidewalk and damn near broke our necks, and then some grownup came out and spread ashes on it, and we grumbled. But there was also just the thing of standing on a frozen place on land and breaking the ice delicately by teetering, or even better than that, just rocking there and watching the air bubble slide back and forth under the ice.

There was The Reservoir (which is now a swimming pool, I am told). It was where we skated, and we never knew how exactly to say it, so we slurred the last syllable. We knew it wasn’t “voyer,” and “vwah” was way uptown, so we split the difference. But one thing we knew. It was capital T on The and capital R on Reservoir. It was the only one in the world, you see. We played hockey there, we had learned discussions about the various kinds of skates. Double runner, for little kids. Then single runner, that clamped on. Then, for the girls only, figure skates. I had hockey skates, after a while, when I graduated to shoe skates, and ankle supporters, which were shameful and put on so nobody could see. And did no good. What we all wanted was racing tubes, because only the big kids and the men had them, and they went around in a fast and vicious circle in the best part of The Reservoir, crouching, wearing knitted Balaclavas, crossing their feet on the turns and making a wonderful noise. We tried to cross our feet in the rink turn and went upon our behinds many times. But the best thing I remember about The Reservoir had nothing to do with skating: it was one day when there was something called rubber ice, that bent in long waves as you walked on it. That was something. I never saw it but once.

But about this doing nothing: we swung on swings. We went for walks. We lay on our backs in backyards and chewed grass. I can’t number the afternoons my best friend and I took a book apiece, walked to opposite ends of his front porch, sank down on a glider at his end, a wicker couch at mine, and read. We paid absolutely no attention to each other, we never spoke while we were reading, and when we were done, he walked me home to my house, and when we got there I walked him back to his house, and then he—aria da capo.

We watched things: we watched people build houses, we watched men fix cars, we watched each other patch bicycle tires with rubber bands. We watched men dig ditches, climb telephone poles—I can hear the sound now of climbing irons on a pole, this was a race of heroes!—we watched trains at the station, shoe-shine men at the station, Italian men playing boccie, our fathers playing cards, our mothers making jam, our sisters skipping rope, curling their hair.

For at least a month I watched my sisters making beads: they cut paper into long triangular strips, put glue on them, wrapped them around hatpins, and then I think they varnished them. I don’t recall that they ever wore them, but I’m here to tell you they made them. They also did something called tie-dying: it was a rage, and it produced handkerchiefs of unbelievable ugliness.

We strung beads on strings: we strung spools on strings; we tied each other up with string, and belts and clothesline.

We sat in boxes; we sat under porches; we sat on roofs; we sat on limbs of trees.

We stood on boards over excavations; we stood on tops of piles of leaves; we stood under rain dripping from the eaves; we stood up to our ears in snow.

We looked at things like knives and immies and pig nuts and grasshoppers and clouds and dogs and people.

We skipped and hopped and jumped. Not going anywhere—just skipping and hopping and jumping and galloping.

We sang and whistled and hummed and screamed.

What I mean, Jack, we did a lot of nothing. And let’s face it, we still do it, all of us grownups and kids. But now, for some reason, we’re ashamed of it. I’ll leave the grownups out, but take a kid these days, standing or sitting or lying down all by himself, not actively engaged in any recognizable—by grownups—socially acceptable activity. We want to know what’s the matter. That’s because we don’t know how to do nothing any more. Kids have got enough sense to roll with the punch, to give in and be a slack-jawed idiot when boredom is afoot, but we can’t let them alone. It’s the old business of the reformed drunk: we can’t do that any more, so we won’t let them.

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.

To get to it, I went out the back door of my house, across the backyard, to the stone wall. Our house was at the bottom of a hill, and the yard that abutted ours was, say, six feet higher than ours. There were a number of footholds in the stone wall, and the age of which I am writing now, there was one that got me to the top of the wall in one climbing step, my belly on the top of the wall, and a certain amount of minor scrabbling with one suspended foot, a certain amount of wriggling, and I was on all fours in the next backyard. I straightened up slowly, and viewed the terrain. For the moment, I was safe, because this was our own stone wall I was standing on. From there on out it was no man’s land. There was, after a sortie across the backyard on the right, a driveway. There was, after an even longer expedition across the backyard directly ahead, a path that led from their back door along the side of the house to their front door and thence to the street. I didn’t know either of these families. All that meant was that they didn’t have kids my age, and consequently they didn’t exist.

The driveway to the right was safer, except that that backyard had a flower garden in it, and the lady of the house liked her flower garden. On the other hand, the driveway was a little ways away from the house. The path directly ahead was right next to its house, therefore right next to people. More than that, there was an unwritten law about cutting through lots. Short cuts were, basically, against The Law. By usage, anyone who objected to your cutting through a driveway was an old grouch, but people who objected to your strolling along their path had a good deal of sweet reason on their side.

The problem was solved one way or another, usually by one kid going one way, one the other, to halve the odds.

It now occurs to me as curious that we should have all this regard for law and order when what we were going to do next was illegal, both by unwritten law, possibly by statute law, and certainly in most vigorous terms by whoever owned the house that the path led by.

Because on that house’s front lawn was The Horse Chestnut Tree. We visited it for weeks in the Fall before it was time, tried to but could not resist pulling the early green burrs off the lower branches. The prickles on the burrs were not yet hard, but splitting the green burrs was mostly a matter of hitting them with stones on the curb, and splitting the nuts along with the burrs.

A little later on, the prickles on the burrs were harder, and sometimes there was a fingernail hold by which you could split the burrs open without hammering them. Then the horse chestnuts were white, or only partially marbled.

All this debris we left on the front lawn of this house.

Later still, one day there would be burrs on the ground. This was the day. The burrs were less green, the prickles pricked, enough to hurt, not enough to draw blood. You split the green burr and you saw the brown, marbled, wonderfully shaped nut, glossy but not shiny, made to rub your thumb over. On the other side, the dry woody button. The dullness of this irregular slightly rough patch was perfection. It made the smooth part smoother. All this wonder was cradled in the green burr lined with dead, soft white.

It is hopeless to try to describe perfection. I will try no longer. I will simply state that to me the noblest work of nature is a horse chestnut.

We wore knickerbockers then, and we filled our pockets with horse chestnuts, and when they were full, dumped them into our pants. There was a simple limit to the number of horse chestnuts a kid could want: As many as there were.

We did this collecting, in plain defiance of the law that stated you could not stand on anyone’s front yard unless you knew the people on whose front yard you were standing. When it was a stranger’s yard, the moment anyone in the house came to a window or door and hollered, you were in duty bound to go away. Until the person disappeared. If crept up on by such an enemy, you were obliged to listen to the jawing, but you were not compelled to allow yourself to be hit.

I guess now I know that the people who lived in the house either liked kids or knew that kids were one of the occupational hazards of owning a horse chestnut tree.

The only time they ever hollered, and then not until driven past endurance, was when we, a few days later, would case the tree and find there were no burrs on the ground, but some still on the tree.

We shook the branches, we climbed, but mostly we took sticks and threw them up in the tree to knock the chestnuts loose. We got hit on the head by falling sticks, chestnuts, and each other. They were getting rare now, and we stepped on each other’s hands and wrestled some.

All this time, we were sorting out. At that time, I betrayed a character trait which has served me in bad stead all my life. To this day I can walk into a store where they have something I have never bought before: “I should like to see a Sicilian nutmeg soother, if you please.” “Why certainly, sir, will you step over here?” There is a tray of Sicilian nutmeg soothers. I look and eventually say, “I think I would like that one in the second row, please.” It is a modest enough object. It doesn’t have rhinestones, or four-ply driving wheels, like some of the others. The clerk dimples with sheer joy and bridled cupidity. “Oh, you do have good taste, sir. That is our very best, made by Toynbee of Old Franistan Road.” All the rest cost three zlotys. This one goes for seventeen hundred cruzeiros.

The same with the chestnuts. The perfect chestnuts were so perfect, I had to get rid of the ones that had an interrupted marbling here, a pale spot there. Those that were squirrel- or worm-bitten were immediately out.

Now what did we do with them? Well, first, we just got them. Then we piled them in piles and were pleased that we had gotten more than, or better than, our friends. Then we carried them around in our pockets and showed them, and traded them, and polished them against the sides of our noses. We tried to eat them, but could not.

After several weeks of that, we started to use them. They could be made into pipes, the same as acorns, with straws for stems. That was for little kids. They could be pierced with the mumbly-peg blade of a scout knife, strung one at each end of a string, whirled around the head and caught on telephone wires. Unlike kites and handkerchief parachutes and model airplanes, this was intentional. This was the function of this arrangement. I mean, man, these were made to be caught on telephone wires.

But first, foremost, forever, and I pledge I will teach the kids on my block this very year, they were meant for the game of killers.

You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.

In any of these events, the next thing to do is to take the loan of a shoelace. The best kind is the kind that are in your sister’s high shoes, and the best way to get it is—well, you know how. If you can’t get a shoe lace, heavy brown twine, the kind without the splinters woven in, is okay. A knot in one end, the chestnut strung on, then everybody outside.

You have one. I have one. We choose, odds or evens with fingers. Whoever loses—let’s say it’s you, for literary ease; you hold up your string with the chestnut dangling. In my right hand I take the end of my string, in my left, the chestnut. I hold the chestnut almost, but not quite, directly above the left hand with string tight and bring it down in a whipping movement. The object, first, is for my chestnut to hit yours, the secondary object is to hit it and break it. This ordinarily does not happen the first time. Now you get a crack at mine.

There is a subsidiary object to this game: if you don’t break the other guy’s chestnut, but hit it a good one, the string will wrap itself around his fist and with any luck, his chestnut will crack him a good one on the knuckles. It is, however, entirely possible, nay, likely, that if you miss, your chestnut will do that to you.

Sooner or later, a crack will show up in one or both chestnuts. Now an even more delicate frisson comes into play: it is possible that you, striking with a cracked chestnut, will bust yours while hitting at mine. There is a kind of marvelous irony about this that we recognized even then.

We called the chestnuts killers. You had a one-, two-, or forty-killer if you had broken that many chestnuts. However, if a one-killer broke a forty-killer, my memory is that the one-killer became a forty-one-killer, but I am not sure about this.

Other elements of the game were the size of the chestnut: a big one was heavier, obviously, which at first seemed an advantage. But consider: a heavy one hung there, like a dumb beast, and absorbed all punishment. A small one bounced away the moment it was hit. Conversely, when it was time to hit with the small one, you weren’t bringing a hell of a lot of weight to bear. It was a toss-up. I owned a small one once, and according to sworn testimony, it was a forty-killer. I liked small ones better.

Skill was of the essence. If you hit it from on top, so that it did not swing like a pendulum, but took the blow, it was odds-on you were going to crack it, but it was also odds-on that if you missed it, you were in for a pretty good knuckle, and you didn’t have much chance of getting his knuckle.

As the season went on, the nut itself shrank inside the shell, and the shell was easily cracked, and at the end of the season we were playing not with lovely glossy brown beauties, but with little, gnarled cheesy insides.

Of the folklore of the care and treatment of killers, there was no end. Roast them like mickies, soak them in Three-in-One oil, store them in the cellar, bury them in talcum powder—but one I remember best. My father, as I have said, was sick. Now we knew, as kids, if a man was very sick, he took very strong medicine. “Jeez, if it’s strong medicine for a man, think what it would do to a killer.” I took a pinch of this, a wet of that from the medicine chest and dumped it into a milk bottle. I soaked a couple of killers in it.

It was magic. That’s how I got my forty-killer. Would that it had been magic for my father.

Well, it’s getting on for Fall. I will show the kids about the horse chestnuts.

I keep thinking that they don’t know about any of these things, and maybe they don’t. But then, grownups when I was a kid didn’t know—did they?—any of the world I lived in.

Maybe my kids have got a whole world of their own, with different objects, and I am not admitted to their councils. I devoutly hope so.

My world, as a kid, was full of things that grownups didn’t care about. My fear now is that all of us grownups have become so childish that we don’t leave the kids much room to move around in, that we foolishly believe that we understand them so well because we share things with them.

This is not only folly, it is not fair. At somebody’s house one night, a harassed father who was trying to talk to grownups with his brood around, finally spoke a simple sentence of despair, “For Gossakes, go upstairs or downstairs!”

He was, I believe, asking for privacy. He was, I believe, entitled to it.

I think kids are, too.

Let them moon, let them babble, let them be scared.

I guess what I am saying is that people who don’t have nightmares don’t have dreams.

If you will excuse me, I have an appointment with myself to sit on the front steps and watch some grass growing.