Walk Softly Live Gently

Little Engineers

At the apartment at 157 Crescent Place where we lived as a young family the area just outside our entrance was a porch made of concrete and cinder block with two or three stairs leading down to the driveway and parking area. It was not paved in the early 50’s and thus made for ideal conditions for little boys to exercise their creative imaginations.
Thus the following scene which I wrote a few years ago when I first started to think about writing these remembrances. As I recall I decided that my childhood memories would be good material for poetic expression especially when I was experiencing the dreaded ‘writers block’. Myself and some other playmates spent many hours on our knees in the dry dirt just thinking up stuff.

And so we constructed the roads in the dirt we would drive our little toy cars around, with a small metal shovel about three or four inches wide that we also used with our pails at the beach. The cars and trucks were also usually metal, plastics not being as ubiquitous in those days. We would pile up the dirt and sand to make hills and valleys. Sometimes we would even connect two earthen mounds with a small board to make a bridge over a pretend river. We would race around the roadways with our little cars and for a while be utterly lost in our make-believe world.

We frequently crashed into each others vehicles or one of the bigger kids would walk through and kick our roadways and bridges with their big feet and in the process destroy our creation and then we would argue about who did what to whom and end up yelling and perhaps even hitting each other unless our mother heard the ruckus and intervened and then would force us to apologize and make up (against our will, of course). Sometimes she would entice us into the kitchen for snacks and a drink. This tended to calm any war-like thoughts we may have had.

Destroying each others toys seemed to be the prevailing sport when we were so young. Just as it seems to be today (metaphorically), when we are not so young. Globally. the difference being that we tend to hurt a great deal more than each others feelings.

Where is Mother when you need her?

Want to read the original poem on which this writing was based? GO HERE