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Childhood

I entered the world back when people wore bell-bottoms and smoked a lot of weed. That’s 1975. My parents met while separately traveling the country and bumped into each other in Florida. I guess it was a pretty good bump, cause here I am — existing and stuff. They moved all of us back to Minnesota to be around my Mom’s family up in Stearns County.

When I was a toddler I enjoyed wearing nothing but my Mom’s oversize shirts and running around. (There’s plenty of photographic evidence despite my objections, so there’s no use fighting it anymore.) Mom and Dad ran a re-upholstery business and I learned how to hold a hammer when I was very young.

4 years later, my brother, Adam, was born. The school house we lived in burnt down that year and Dad kept busy building us a new house and shop on it’s foundations. I passed along the hammer to Adam and focused my attention on screwdrivers and other fine implements. Dad brought many objects home from garage sales for the two of us to dismantle. Adam used his hammer and smashed. I meticulously and carefully took apart each piece and organized them into piles.

And it was like that — childhood. I spent most of it observing and watching from the sidelines — organizing it all in my head. I was a wallflower. We grew up in a small town [read tribe] of barely 100 people. So the only other kids to play with ranged from my own age to 10 years older. We all hung out together in some fashion regardless. But while those other kids engrossed themselves with baseball and kickball. I spent the time wandering alone through the woods and fields exploring.

I’ve lots of great memories from back then, though:

• Constructing wigwams from bent branches and weeds in the fall. Seems every kid did this and we had two or three “camps” that then warred by throwing sticker oat needles at each other.
• Building massive snow forts that involved everyone under the age of 13. One time, I set out in our gigantic back yard rolling as big of a snowball as possible. Soon word got around and each kid in the neighborhood turned up to help. By the time we were done, we’d piled up a pyramid higher than the roof of the nearby shed.
• Sledding was king and we all had our favorite hills and became masters at going over jumps without breaking bones.
• Staying up all night in blanket forts constructed on the clotheslines. Once Mike Schmitz’s mother called the police because we were out in the yard in our sleeping bags staring at the stars looking for satellites and she thought they were body bags.
• Endless hours pedaling every trail and road in town on our BMX bikes. And big-wheels before that.
• Letting all the pigs out of Al’s hog yard on the hill with Joey Winter. Half were never found as they all ran down into town after that. A year later, there were still wild hogs in the town dump. (Yes, we did get into a lot of trouble over that one.)
• I was deemed artistic and “gifted”. Although my parents were proud, it only served to alienate me amongst my peers. An already difficult childhood as a wallflower was made worse by being labeled a geek.
• One of the bullies that picked on me the most was John Ludwig. One day he literally cut most of his fingers off with a hacksaw. Mom forced me to bring a box of his favorite candy bars (Twix) over and we became fast best friends from that point forward. Starting with attaching 9 volt batteries to the back of track cars and sending them across the kitchen floor.
• John, who was 4 years older, and I engaged in many activities from that point forward that our parents wouldn’t have approved of. From experiments with explosives to homemade go-karts. This ranged from hunting rabbits (John taught me how to skin my first one) and swimming in the creek to all kinds of contraptions and “inventions” that usually involved welding or at least something flammable.
• Spending entire weeks at one cousin’s farm or another. I learned about raising pigs and chickens, milking cows — and picking rocks unfortunately.

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