Summer of '85

I don't have a picture of the Barbie
bike here at home, but here's a pic
of Sissy and me in Mayme's driveway,
both of us on skates, with me pushing the
same thing Freddie is pushing
in the photos below.

Some of my most vivid, visceral memories of childhood are of playing in my Mayme's driveway. My sister, our cousins, and I would do laps around the cracked concrete - riding on roller sakes, a Power Puff Hot Wheel, or, later, a Barbie bicycle with a banana seat as big as the gigantic plastic basket fastened to the handlebars. Mayme'd bought me that bike on what I've always assumed was a random visit to JT Lawson's Hardware Store in downtown Greenup, KY, and when I went home with that thing, I thought I was the luckiest girl alive with the richest grandmother who'd ever lived.

I miss that bike. If my memories of it are correct, the seat would still be big enough to hold me all these thirty years later.

On this day, Jones kept riding up to
me and saying, "Ka-CHOW, Mama!"
like he's heard Lightnin' McQueen say.

While we rode on those summer nites, the adults would sit in folding chairs, smoking cigarettes and drinking bottle Cokes. I remember those nites so clearly - Mayme's cousins Jim and Hazel stopping by with their children, Karen and Phil, we kids, waterlogged from a day spent at the Riverside Drive Pool,  riding and riding until time to collapse in front of "The Carol Burnett Show."

The sounds of those nites are plastic wheels on pavement, crickets chirping across the Ohio River bank, and a bug whacker with an electric glow that no neon sign can rival.

"Zzzzzzzzzzzzip."

See what I mean visceral?

I can still feel that exhaustion, the kind that only kids can know, because only kids have enough energy to play that hard for that long. There are Pudding Pops in the freezer; there are chips and cheese on the floor in the family room, and there's Brad with a giant blue bowl full of cereal. There's the rough tweed of Mayme's couch. I'd curl up on her lap when I couldn't support myself any longer; she'd rub my back, sitting with her right leg tucked up under her left, coughing her cough, calling me, "Dollbaby."


Then there's a whistle sounding from the downtown fire department. It lets the good people of Greenup know that it's 9 o'clock, time to be gettin' on home - or, if you're a little girl who's lucky enough to be at her Mayme's house for several weeks in the summer, goin' on to bed.

To borrow from Bryan Adams, "Those were the best days of my life."

That's why I love so much that my boys are starting to love riding bikes in the driveways of both sets of their grandparents. Now, I'M the one sitting in the folding chairs, watching them play, and hoping Jones and Freddie remember these times as fondly as I remember mine.

____________

In this first video, Jones runs into my "beeg car," and when I ask what we should do to fix it, Jones says, "We need a Mouseketool!"

In this video, you can hear Jones say, "Excuse me!" when he runs into Freddie. You can also see that Freddie is still struggling with the concept of doing what his mama says. But we're workin' on it!



In this video, you can hear Jones call the rainwater dirty. Felix and Oscar and all that.