After we had lived on Wabash Avenue in Eureka, California, for a couple of years, we moved about a mile south to the south end of Summer Street, just across the bend in the street from the oddly christened 20-30 Park.
The enclosed backyard had been the domain of a tree-climbing German Shepherd. The former owner had nailed outsized steps/small platforms in a zigzag pattern up the tree, each one a few feet above the last, and taught his dog to defy his natural instincts and launch himself from one to the next—up, up, up, up, up; smile in that self-satisfied way Shepherds have; then down, down, down, down, down again to resume his normal doggy life. No reason was given for the Shepherd’s acquisition of this acrobatic skill, but it was impressive enough that it didn’t require explanation—the accomplishment was enough in and of itself. Its raison dêtre was incorporated within the performance.
As entertaining as tree-climbing dogs are, tragedy-preventing mothers are more important. I already wrote about the time my mom saved my brother and me from being incinerated. A warning she gave me some while after that was another case of almost miraculously good timing:
When I was in second grade, I used to walk to school and back. My mother cautioned me one day—I don’t know what prompted it, but she was quite insistent that I take heed of what she was telling me—to never take candy from strangers.
The timing of the warning was significant. If it had been provided a month prior, or even a week prior, I may have already relegated it to the cobwebby corners of my mind by the time it came in handy. Her urgent injunction quite likely prevented a nightmarish event, and was possibly even lifesaving.
The very next day, I was walking home from school when a man—who was sitting sideways in the open front passenger seat of his car, facing the sidewalk—asked me a question as I walked by.
“Hey, kid, want some candy?”
He was holding out a paper bag full of the tempting confectionery.
Of course I did. I was about to answer, ‘Yes’ when my mom’s warning flashed into my mind. I didn’t know exactly what the danger was—she hadn’t told me that—but I recalled the seriousness of her tone and the look in her eyes, and my innate instinct for self-preservation kicked in. But I still wanted the candy. Could a compromise be struck, I wondered.
“If you throw it to me,” I replied. I wasn’t even considering the possibility that the candy could be tainted. I was worried about the stranger, not the candy. I kept several steps away from the clean-cut man, trusting in my legs to carry me away from danger if he suddenly leaped out of his car and rushed toward me.
The man almost imperceptibly grinned at my cagey response to his offer, but was apparently not in a mood to compromise.
“No, you have to come and get it,” he told me, holding out the bag of delectables.
I quickly calculated the risk. It’s probably fine, I told myself. But then I again remembered the tone of my mom’s voice and the worried look in her eyes, and said, “No, thanks.” I continued homewards, turning around every few steps to make sure he wasn’t chasing me.
Other than that, the high points of the portion of my life which I spent there on Summer Street in Eureka in the early-to-mid 1960s consisted of the relatively mundane experiences of:
My dad teaching me to ride a bike (it was a red-letter day when the training wheels came off)
Experiencing the incomprehensible magic of flinging boomerangs on 20-30 field
Bringing home my hand-picked dog, rescued from the pound; he was a brown wire-haired terrier I too-predictably named Brownie
Getting into the occasional scrape at school (I was not averse to a little pugilism when a classmate tried to play the big shot)
Playing dodgeball at recess, daring the other kids to hit me with the big balooney ball and almost always ducking or Elvising out of the way just in the nick of time
Sitting next to a pretty girl named Kathy in class. Her proximity alone was enough to give school a sheen it didn’t otherwise have. All I had to do was turn my head ninety degrees to the right to receive the simultaneously stimulating and soothing sight of her face. It was the kid equivalent of a cup of coffee.
Trudging off to a concert in the big music room with my classmates when a pianist was engaged to grace us with his presence and edify us with “serious” music. We thought it would be boring, and plopped down in our seats desultorily, crossed our arms, and waited for the borture to be over. But when the ivory-tickler apparently read well our body English, pulled out all the stops, and gave us a raucous rendition of the theme song to “Batman,” the crowd went wild.
When I lived in Fortuna (many years after this story), I use to love going to Fort Humboldt. I was impressed with how small it was, the fact that Ulysses S Grant had been stationed there (prior to the Civil Way), and the tragedy of how the peaceful natives were treated. I was also impressed that their methods of cutting down a Redwood were very similar to how the early Lumberjacks did it, except they did it with sharpened stones.