Rock Writers’ Guild

    I gather that “Bobby” (see the next post) is Ed in a former life… It’s hard for me to imagine someone growing up in NYC, though intellecutually I know that lots of people do.
     I grew up about as far from New York as you can get without living in a mud hut in Patagonia.  My parents weren’t part of a church, a lodge, a club, a team, a country club, or even a gym.  For a few years they bowled on a league with people they never met otherwise.  We lived out in the country in upstate South Carolina in a little place called Roebuck that was, I think, forgotten by God and man.
     Outside of school, we rarely went anywhere.  Play dates hadn’t, apparently, been invented yet.  Our home was in a tiny isolated subdivision of houses people slept in.  They were gone all day, gone most of the evening, and if they were home, they didn’t have kids.  All around us, on every side, were acres and acres of forest.
     I had two brothers and a sister.  We picked cicada shells off the trees and decorated our shirts with them.  We braided longleaf pine needles and tried to weave them into baskets.  We collected moss, caught quart jars full of frogs,  and dared each other to handle snakes.   We made kites and picked blackberries.  We swatted the heads off of thistles, dug pits, and fell out of trees.  We prospected for fool’s gold in a shallow muddy cave, pretended we were the Swiss Family Robinson, rolled down hills, built rafts,  caught minnows and got lost.
     We knew where everything was.  We knew where there was a secret lake.  We knew where trails led, where the swamp mud would suck off your shoes, where copperheads dropped from the trees into green, sunless waterholes.  There were places of great beauty where the water bent around ancient holly trees and magnolias leaned over the pebbled streams in living bridges.  There were places of destruction and death, too, like the broken house covered by kudzoo, and the secret graveyard where the graves were marked with chalk in secret symbols and decorated with chicken parts.
     There were sacred places, where the pines stood like cathedral columns, or where the last, nearly extinct wild Lady’s Slipper bloomed in peach seclusion.  And there were forbidden places where we went anyway. 
     We sewed doll’s clothing out of tulip poplar leaves and pine needles.  We ate Carolina Beauty Berries and bitter wild blackberries and the nectar of red clover and honeysuckle.  We waded in icy streams, skipped pebbles, built bowers of dogwood blossoms, and made crude pottery out of red clay.
     We told ourselves legends and stories, acted out jousts with Pampass grass tufts, made bows and arrows and became Robin Hood, spied on our parents and neighbors, burnt tent catapillars and conducted strange experiments with dyes and minerals we found.
     Sometimes I would sit up in the notch of a sweetgum tree and listen to the wind sing.  It was a strange, secret way to grow up.  I don’t know if a childhood like that is even possible now.
     It certainly isn’t in New York City.