Back in Time (Part 3) 1959

Hackberry trees and memories 

Again tonight I travel back to some of my earliest memories, pleasant ones, indeed, of childhood in the most innocent and simple of times, or so we like to think looking back.   I had that kind of innocent childhood, for a while at least.    Since infancy, my father and I never got along, so I had to create my own worlds without the role model of the kind of father most of us yearn to have.  I did this all through my early life until I left home.   In later years we may occasionally think back and wonder why it wasn’t better or different — that parental relationship.   The whole matter is still not resolved completely for me, although I want to forgive and forget the bad things, and I do with that increasing steadiness and resolve that only come with age. 

When I was a child of 8 in 1959 in New Orleans, our back yard seemed long and deep, a special little universe all our own.   One of the reasons for this, definitely, was the fact that none of our neighbors had fenced yards on the side.  We lived on a block of duplex, wood-frame apartments built right after World War II.     I have many memories of those years, some of which I have recorded here at OD in past entries, but which I now want to go back to more often to try to recall and write about in as much detail as possible.

The large, common back yard seemed to stretch for miles, and we kids would play football, croquet and other games in that commons area.  A fence ran along the back of the property, and where our particular portion of back yard was, a cluster of hackberry trees grew, tall and green and beautiful.  This particular tree has tiny berries with its leaves, and a most unusual bark with rough proturberances that cover the surface.  We used to like to pull these pieces of bark off the tree.   

At the base of this cluster of hackberry trees was an opening between the fence and the trunks of the trees, and we would fit a plank of wood along and in-between the tree trunks to form a kind of counter.   We watched the popular Westerns of the day such a Bonanza and Gunsmoke, and had our own pretend "saloon" back there in the trees.   We constructed little "houses" out of sheets of plywood and fashioned a make-believe Western town back there.   A red wagon doubled as a stagecoach.   We let our imaginations take it from there.

This was in an age of no computers or video games, just black-and-white TV on which we’d watch Mighty Mouse cartoons on Saturday mornings, the Mouseketeer Club show in the afternoons, and Leave it to Beaver at night.   As I said, in many respects, these were rather simple and innocent times.  In summer when the days were long we’d rush out the back door after supper to our play Western town in the back yard and engage in various games of chase, cowboys and Indians, and the like.  My younger brother would sometimes climb up in those hackberry trees.   Sitting inside in front of a computer —  that was not even comprehensible in those pre-Windows/Apple days, except maybe in science fiction novels.

So today when I walk to Colonial Lake in Charleston, I always feel the tug of the past come over me when I pass a little grove of hackberry trees at one end of the lake.   They aren’t as tall as the ones in our childhood back yard, but they are green and beautiful now, and the leaves and berries  have just recently appeared in the miraculous season of rebirth that is Spring.  Sometimes I go over and feel the rough bark and pull off a little chunk of it as I once did as a child.    I am transported back in time.

A set of photos of the hackberry trees at Colonial Lake:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157626487286204/