Dougie sallies forth to save a maiden in distress. Well, not actually a maiden, more a sheep. But not exactly a sheep either, more a poor dog in a sticker patch. Then a painful turn of events.
Was it waving at the two children, or making clawing gestures? That is beside the point, because a warm safe house in the middle of the day is no place for a big furry red hand.
Little Papa meets the nicest sheep of all, and a whole bunch of extended-family relatives get a cheap slapstick comedy to set them all laughing (we can hear them laughing still).
It began as play-acting, but small objects have a way of deciding for themselves which direction they want to go. A quick big sister and a ready-with-whack Dada can make all the difference.
...or the Ice Cream Sandwich that ate Monkey Wards. The miraculous ice cream treat that disappears too fast for adults, but can melt and spread over the entire world for a child.
What more could a kid in the sixties ask for than popcorn and cotton candy and candy apples, spinning teacups, gigantic cartoon characters come to life, and greedy, selfish robot ducks...?
Who'd ever believe a four-year-old boy could pull such a dirty, low-down trick, and upon such a sweet, innocent, trusting and hopeful little sister? Kids can be mean, even Dougie!
“Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”
- Plato
Memories of a Hungarian Grandpa, the most spiritual man Dougie ever knew. Happy, golden, loud laughing and loud yelling, rough and gentle, fierce, and sweet. Grandpa.
When Grandma chased Dougie round and around the table they laughed and laughed. And then, the picture of pure innocence, Dougie said something terrible to Grandma!
Dougie was familiar with the words of Jesus who said the Golden Rule, but Dougie was angry, and felt that he needed to do to the big bully the same kind of thing the big bully had done to him.
Another practical joke, Dougie releases his strange-looking pet into a poor little girl's hair, a joke which earned Dougie more than a few bumps and bruises.
His favorite place to go, in his favorite homes, was deep in the cupboards where the biggest pots were stored. Funnels and pots, pans and best of all: the colander!
He stood over her, and her eyes were wide. He knew the world was about to end, that he should run, that he should flee, and then she did something terrible, worse than he could ever believe.
The little boy felt very grown up as he leaned into the bushes to turn off the water, because he was a man of responsibility. His blind grandma never had a clue when she slammed the door.
“A boy is a magical creature - you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart.”
- Allan Beck
He loves them now but when he was a little boy at Rosie the babysitter's house, he dreaded her gooey, sticky, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Dougie's physics at work.
Although he had been told plenty of times NOT to touch the butterflies, when he spotted the most amazing butterfly of all he just had to capture the prize, and take it to church!
Grandma knew Dougie through and through, and provided the most decadent breakfast a boy could ever hope to imagine. The richest cocoa and the thickest cinnamon-sugar toast.
It was tough being a big brother to a baby sister, because they never listened when you told them anything. It is especially rough when you are out on an adventure and your sister follows!
Grandma fixed all manner of delicacies, both carnivorous and vegetarian, and her pies were the absolute best. But what Dougie loved more than anything was her simple cooking.
The Little Papa seemed quite proficient at crashing things, crashing about everything you can imagine, including, believe it or not, a lawnmower (with Mama's help).
Cultivated mayhem when a large family gathers about its paragon, its patriarch; yelling, laughing, arguments, loud yelling, a few screams, and the kids made noise too. Lots of loving food.
“Boys are beyond the range of anybody's understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.”
- James Thurber
Oh what a time of year was Christmas, family and presents and singing Christmas songs and gifts and good cheer and presents and Christmas movies and presents. And presents.
Like two little monkeys jumping on the bed, it was inevitable that one would fall off and bump his head. Every child loves jumping on the bed, no matter how many times you say knock it off.
Like a football field on wheels, the big camper carried them up the length of California, through Oregon and Washington into Canada. Despite the onboard 32 beds, the trip was exhausting.
It was rare that snow fell in Quartz Hill, but one year proved a doozy of over two feet, which called for nine-year-old Dougie's most daring and intrepid feat, a trek to Grandma's house.
At the drive-in movies, and on the little screen, monsters lurked everywhere, scary, bumping in the dark. A preparatory tool to prepare little Dougie for what really goes on in the world.
Call it discipline or punishment or torture, Dougie received a lot of it, from his earliest days, all the way up until fourteen years of age! Did it make him a better person, or a rage-filled ogre?
Get out of the way! Look out! What is it? It's gigantic! Amazing! What's wrong with that kid's head? Can a skull be THAT big? But he's so short! That monstrous head on that little, little body!
“What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.”
- James Matthew Barrie
A child wandering in the night, talking to phantoms. Was he viewing into another world? Or was it all merely just an over-active imagination manifesting in very lucid dreams?
It is a vivid memory, looking at the letters, running them through his mind, connecting the letters, words forming, and the words stack up, and suddenly there is real magic happening.
Some things just seem funny. Especially to boys. And Dougie loved to delight his sisters with awfully funny objects appearing from his very nose. Some magician, Dougie, and his magical bean.
Most of the family agreed, church was no place for dinosaurs, but this sad fact only broke poor Dougie's heart, because God made the dinosaurs too, didn't he? Didn't they deserve to learn about Jesus?
If in a lifetime you meet an actual soul mate (and that is never promised), consider yourself fortunate, even if that soul is of an entirely distinct species from your own, and you are a child.
The men are brave, resolute, and they know they are sacrificing much, because this is the gravest danger the world has ever faced, and they mean to defeat it, this big lizard, this Godzilla.
Dougie, throughout his boyhood, considered himself quite the cowboy. Or, at the very least, a very proficient fall guy, getting thrown from anything with four hooves.
“The boy is father to the man.”
- Ancient Wisdom Proverb
A lot of people, women, men included, flee the other way when a deadly scorpion raises the deadly pirate's flag of its tail. Not so Grandma, as she'd faced The Woman and lived to tell about it.
Boom! Boom!! BOOM!!! What could that infernal knocking be? A dream about a shark banging into the bottom of the boat? Or was it more likely the Catalina Giant, more reclusive than Bigfoot?
Sometimes enough was enough, and a boy had to make a stand, even if that meant running far, far and far away from home. But such an action took careful planning and preparation.
Horrors of horrors, the grinding institution of public school. The wisdom preached from the front of the room rarely impinged upon the flashing images in Dougie's head.
Three dentists lugged a stainless steel syringe into the room, with a deadly 3-foot needle jutting from the tip. "This won't hurt a bit," the dentist said. Dougie went all Kung Fu on the room.
It's true, clowns are creepy, but what is even creepier to a kid than a perpetually grinning ventriloquist dummy? Danny O'Day was Donna's Christmas present, but Dougie had other ideas.
A boy's life is full of disappointing things like x-ray specs, scampering skeletal fingers and giant floating ghosts, but one thing that did not disappoint: invisible thread.
“You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it.”
- Groucho Marx
Grandpa studying his Bible at the table, Grandma bustling in the kitchen. If there was one walk he could make today, it would be up that long driveway, if only it could be Grandma that opened the door.
Dougie convinced his baby sister to finally make the gloriously terrifying ride down Avenue M Hill, pedaling all the way. She was past the age of primly walking down the hill, wasn't she? Great, great idea.
Eight-year-old Dougie had never heard the word déjà vu before, but when he felt it the first time he knew exactly what it was, and suddenly he realized that terrible events can erupt from insignificant things.
Missing Mama
Drive-In Movies
Uncle Julius and the Monster Man
Kung Fu Indian Tribe Training
Grandma's Big Fingers
Pammy's Crocodile
Shrieking with Scissors
The Fort
John 3:16 & The Lord's Prayer
Playing with Fire
Motorcycle Crash
_*___*_______***___---___---___***_______*___*_
WARNING: NIGHTMARES AHEAD
_*___*_______***___---___---___***_______*___*_
This is a separate section, devoted to a few recollected nightmares that the Little Papa experienced in his early life. The thing about nightmares, and dreams, is that they are recorded the very same way that experiences are recorded, and are just as real as if they really, really happened. Our dreams, and nightmares, color our waking thoughts, our recollections, our planning strategies, and the way we look at the world.
Grandma Larsen loved fruit, and she constantly demanded that her grandchildren eat whatever fruit she happened to be eating, dates, apples, pears, peaches, nectarines ... and, gulp, light bulbs?
A child's greatest fear is that when Mama goes away, that she might not come back. Fairy tales, Disney, and an instinctive knowledge that the world is not safe can lead to a doozy of a nightmare.
For some reason, a cute, cartoon bird that makes a little boy laugh and laugh when he sees it on television is just not quite so funny when he finds it standing in the hall late at night.
Dougie knew the difference between a nightmare and being awake, didn't he? At least it felt like he was awake. Tap, tap, someone at the window, and Dougie is frozen, he literally cannot move.
_______ *** _______ *** _______
“It is never too late to have a happy childhood.”
- Tom Robbins
All Stories © Douglas Christian Larsen 2009
“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
- Elizabeth Lawrence
“A boy's story is the best that is ever told.”
- Charles Dickens
“Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”
- Ben Okri
“The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart.”
- George Edward Woodberry
“Having a child ends forever a man’s boyhood, if not his boyishness. Having a child means that the son has, in a real sense, become his father. Sons are for fathers the twice-told tale.”
- Victoria Secunda
“Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned in schools.”
- John Greenleaf Whittier
“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
- Marcel Proust
“Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools.”
- John Greenleaf Whittier
“Do not train boys to learning by force and harshness, but lead them by what amuses them, so that they may better discover the bent of their minds.”
- Plato
“The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remaining over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves.”
- Kahlil Gibran
“The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.”
- Bill Cosby
“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.”
- Sigmund Freud
“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”
- Stephen King
“The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.”
- John Milton
“Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.”
- Ned Rorem
“It's the merry-hearted boys that make the best men!”
- Irish Proverb
