I was part of a gang when I was younger.
Wait…that’s not
what it sounds like. You have to
understand that I was a kid in a small town in northern Maine in the
1970s. In that context, a “gang” could
be defined as “a bunch of kids in roughly the same age group from the same
general part of town, playing together spontaneously because they had all been
thrown outside by mothers or sitters to get them out of their hair”. That’s the
kind of gang of which I was a part. At
any given time, there were usually five or six of us in my neighborhood gang,
the core being me and my friends Andy and Rick (names changed for privacy, of
course). There was also a rotating cast
of other characters of both genders that included siblings, other kids who
lived nearby, and kids who often visited the neighborhood because they had
relatives or friends there.
Almost the entire
neighborhood was our playground. There
were always one or two of the “you dang kids stay off my lawn” types around,
but for the most part it was a less suspicious and litigious time, and people
were not as hung up on kids playing on their property as they are now. It was not out of the ordinary, nor particularly
worrisome, for one of our neighbors to look out the back window and see upwards
of a dozen kids gathered at their picnic table devising plans for a game of
Whiffleball or British Bulldog. The
neighbors knew us and our families, and we knew well what the limits were for
our activities on certain properties, having been warned numerous times by our
parents to be respectful of them. The
main rules were pretty simple: Don’t play too close to the house or cars. Stay
out of gardens and flowers. Don’t play with outside “stuff” (e.g.-hoses, decorations,
tools, etc). Leave no sign you were
there when you were gone.
There was a
notable exception to that last one, however, and it typically came up at this
time of year. Everybody’s fallen leaves
were fair game for us kids, and no one in the neighborhood minded a bit if we
gathered theirs up and hauled them off.
Our usual home
base was Rick’s house, mainly because it was centrally-located and had a large,
flat backyard that was perfect for many activities. Rick’s yard, and most others around, had
numerous large maple trees in or around it.
As the leaves first began to fall, we’d ignore them in favor of touch
football, a favorite autumn pastime.
They became harder to ignore when they became a carpet several inches
thick. At that point, Rick’s father
would break out a couple of rakes while the gang was playing nearby, and leave
them strategically placed against his garage while he raked up a small pile of
leaves and let Rick’s younger brothers jump and play in it. Obviously taking a page from Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Rick’s father was trying to
make a mundane chore seem like a barrel of monkeys for his unsuspecting son and
his friends. And it worked.
For a span of
about three years, my friends and I were old enough to do a good job at
cleaning up the leaves, and young enough not to care that we were not being
paid to do it. Rick’s yard alone yielded
a massive pile, which we would then jump into in the most outrageous manner
possible, emulating our two heroes of that time, Evel Knievel
and the Six Billion Dollar Man. We’d
jump from the deck or tree low tree branches, we’d bail off our bicycles, or
we’d catapult each other in. I will not
confirm or deny that we may have even found ways to jump off a garage roof into
a particularly large pile one year.
There were no limits to the number of ridiculous things we would do to
ourselves and each other in the name of taking a cool dive into a gigantic pile
of leaves. It’s amazing that none of us
ended up in wheelchairs.
There was more to
it than jumping in, however. Hiding in
the leaves and leaping out to scare some unsuspecting person was also great
sport. One member of our gang was a
pretty blond girl named Darcy who lived in the house next to Rick’s and was
very cool. The problem was, Darcy had
the most sour and irritating older sister in the world. The sister’s name was Karen, and all she ever
did was complain, look down her nose at us, and tattle on every little thing
that she didn't like, which was most everything we did. We loved nothing more than teasing our
neighborhood party-pooper. I wouldn't be
surprised if Karen works for the I.R.S. now.
Late one
afternoon when it was nearly dark, Darcy told us that Karen would be coming
home any minute from some after-school activity she had been attending. She thought we ought to do something to scare
her. (You can probably see why we liked
Darcy so much.) My friends and I
hurriedly relocated our large pile of leaves to the edge of the lawn near the
sidewalk, where Karen would have to pass on her way home. Darcy, Andy and I buried ourselves under the
pile, while the other kids acted as lookouts, milling around the yard, tossing
a football and looking as innocent as possible.
We didn't time things out terribly well though, and the three of us were
sweating under the pile for what seemed like forever. It was probably more like 10 minutes, but
that’s a long time to hold still and be quiet at that age. Eventually, we heard stage whispers from the
others that Karen was coming down the street.
A low whistle by Rick was the agreed-upon signal to act. The three of us who had been hiding under the
leaves in great anticipation immediately jumped up, waving our arms, screaming
and lunging at Karen. Her reaction was absolutely
electric. She screamed louder than
anyone I had ever heard in my life and reflexively swung her full bookbag at us,
missing by a mile, before running at top speed down the sidewalk to her
house. It was priceless, especially the
look on her face. Did I mention that the
three of us were also wearing gruesome Halloween masks when we popped up? If we’d only had a video camera in those
days, I know we would have become YouTube sensations.
After a while,
however, our large pile of leaves was not nearly as large. All of our jumping in them and moving them
around eventually shredded the leaves into pieces the size of a quarter. Undaunted, we would just go collect more
leaves from nearby yards. Not
surprisingly, none of the neighbors had a problem with a group of rake-wielding
kids descending upon their yards to clean up all their leaves for free and
carry them away on a large borrowed tarp.
Little old ladies who normally shooed us away from anywhere near their
homes would step out onto their porches and summon us over. “You can have all these leaves if you want
them,” they’d tell us, feigning great benevolence and generosity. “Just take them back to the pile you already
have.” The rest of the year, these
ladies only gave us dark looks and occasional threats, but for a few days in
the late fall, they acted like they were our best friends.
Now while my
friends and I were just kids, we were not stupid. We knew full well that collecting all those
leaves was providing a handy and apparently free service for the adults in the
neighborhood. However, we were young,
full of boundless energy, and there were quite a few of us in our group. The actual amount of work done by any one
individual kid was not that great really.
And, the payoff we got from the things we could do with such a huge pile
of leaves was plenty of recompense at the time.
There was nothing more satisfying than having a pile of leaves so large
that your could stand upright in the middle and still be covered. Granted, we were not that tall, but still, it
was a lot of leaves.
There was one
linchpin to this whole endeavor that made it feasible: the willingness of
Rick’s dad to allow us to cart all the neighbor’s leaves onto his lawn. Why would he allow such a thing, you might
ask? Two words: avid gardener. Rick’s dad had the largest and most
prosperous vegetable garden in that part of town. He spent hours and hours working in it during
the growing season, and even after everything had been harvested he was testing
soil composition, adding fertilizer, planting cover crops and generally fussing
with it. By the time we kids had grown
tired of the leaves we had collected, they had been chopped into a fine mulch
from the beating we put on them. The
pile that had once been as tall as we were was now just a few inches high. Before the ground froze for the winter,
Rick’s dad would back his pickup truck onto the lawn, shovel the shredded
leaves into the back, and then take them out back to his garden, where he would
spread them around and till them under.
It was very much a mutually beneficial arrangement between Rick’s dad
and his son’s gang of friends.
At this time of
year, as I am raking up the leaves in my yard, I like to think back to those
days when piling up leaves was a game and not a chore. Even now in middle-age, when I've accumulated
a particularly large pile, there is a temptation, deep down inside, for me to
take a running leap into it. Of course
the temptation not to break a hip is even greater, so I don’t do it, but that doesn't mean the thought hasn't crossed my mind. Like most things in life, it’s our
perspective that makes a crucial difference in the things we undertake. I believe we’d all be better off sometimes if
we could only see things through the eyes we had when we were at the age when
we could stand upright and yet hidden in a large pile of fallen leaves.
Hear, hear! You know what though? Next time, even if a running leap is out of the question, forget about ticks, bugs, allergies, etc., and just flop down in that pile. It's awesome.
ReplyDeleteI can still recall the up-close smell of those leaves to this day. One of the best of my childhood.
DeleteIf you ever lose out to temptation and jump in the pile please be sure someone is there with a camera. ;)
ReplyDeleteWhen we were in junior high, a classmate donned a Superman cape, jumped off the garage roof, into the pile, and broke both ankles. It wasn't funny when it happened but I still smile about it nearly 40 years later.
"A classmate", hmm? Okay, sure. Is that why you walk with a limp on damp days? ;)
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