April 25, 1958...North Texas...Tornado Warnings and Severe Thunderstorm warnings throughout the entire Dallas-Ft.Worth Metroplex, (although, I don't believe it was anywhere near big enough to be called "The Metroplex" yet.)...I was born...breech. Ha, I came into the world backwards and have been accused of being that ever since. Well, maybe not backwards, but definitely hard headed and opinionated. But, truly, I came by that honestly, and now at age 50 wear it proudly. I have earned it, by golly. My parents, seeing that Irving, Texas was about to explode, decided to move to the sleepy little lake town of Lewisville. I believe the population was around 900 then. I was 3, and they bought a cute house by the lake. The neighborhood is still there, and even a few of the good people that resided there in 1961 are still living there on that much slower paced part of Lewisville.
I went to a very small Elementary School not far from home, and now my grandson Logan is going there, and his brothers Luke and Laden will go there also. Even when I walk into this school, it still smells the same and looks the same, and although it has been somewhat remodeled over the years, I can shut my eyes and go back in time, and remember such sweet, innocent times. My brother was three years younger than me, and it was a time when not only parents, but neighbors, friends, and teachers were not afraid to set the kiddo's straight if they needed it. My brother and I did not want for a thing. We had everything! It really was a bit like Leave It To Beaver. Although, I do not ever remember my father wearing a suit to the dinner table, or my mother cooking and cleaning in pearls and stockings.
We had a crawdad hole in our neighborhood, and we would get up very early and (after watching a few cartoons) steal the bacon from the fridge, take it to the crawdad hole and go fishing. Someone always had kite string, because that is what we tied the bacon to, and on good days, we could get as many as 6 or 7 crawdad on one line. We would plop them into a #2 washtub that had a little of the pond water in it, and just keep going till we grew tired of it. Of course then we would have to have a crawdad fight. If you picked them up just right, you could use the pincher's to chase down and pinch each other. We would laugh, and laugh, till someone would get pinched really hard, and of course not be a sissy a cry about it. No one wanted to be called a sissy or a baby. After the washtub was full to our satisfaction, we would hoist it up together and walk to bait store down the street. The old man that owned it was named Shorty, and he would pay us a Penny for each crawdad. What a deal! We would divide up the pennies between us. Usually it was four of us. My brother and I and our very best friends from the other street over. Then we would go over to where Shorty kept the candy. We would spend every penny we had and would come out of there with a lot of candy. Of course, my best friend Lea, would always get one of those giant pickles. To this day, I know she would pick a pickle over candy every time.
Then we would walk home, happy, eating our candy that we had earned. Poor old crawdads didn't know the sacrifice they had to make.
More on my childhood days later.
