Looking back...

This story updated to 2022

It gets harder to remember my childhood days.

I'm an old timer at 77 with grey hair, unruly eyebrows, and plenty of arthritis in all my joints. Yet, I still play baseball, trying to glove the ball, turn, and throw the ball across the diamond. It's like riding a bike. The basic skills for playing the game of baseball are still the same as it was six decades ago, and it comes naturally to me...an action...a reaction that I'll never forget.

I can't say I'll remember much else as the years fly by. Sometimes I play a game within myself, and I try to remember my childhood days. Just how far back can I go? I remember driving my grandparents crazy when I was three years old...maybe four. I was about the same height as my grandfather's boots, and I'll never know how I urinated in them. Of course, that was long before instant replay, and I doubt if there were too many cameras available to get a shot of that particular crime.

I remember the old farmhouse my grandparents owned in Midwest Arkansas.

It was cold in the bedrooms, but it wouldn't take long for one of my grandmother's handwoven quilts to warm me up. I remember my first hunt and my first and only kill -- a squirrel. I shot the poor thing with a 28-gauge shotgun, the gun was nickel-plated, and I'm sure the squirrel saw me coming from a mile away. I thought I'd missed him. It took five minutes for the squirrel to fall out of the tree. I put him in my coat pocket and ran back to the farmhouse.

It was the last animal I would ever shoot.

At the age of six, I walked -- with my mother -- from the farmhouse up the railroad track to the small town of Jacksonville, a friendly burg about 10 miles north of Little Rock. Of course, I would get tired from time to time, and one particular Sunday, I just had to sit down on the track. Unfortunately, I sat smack dab on an ant hill. I, of course, made it to town in record time. Once in town, my mother would treat me to some sugar cookies at the local hardware store, and then I'd sit on a bench outside the store with some older men who smoked cigars and discussed the price of soybeans.

I was fascinated by them. Even back then, a part of me wanted to know more about the two men puffing on some smelly thing that made my nose twitch. I love the older generation. Suddenly, I’m now one of them.