Back here I spoke of some of the perils of childhood. Specifically in relation to frogs.

Now, if you are a kid and you want to ride a bike, you have to have elbow pads, knee pads, a helmet, a pair of gloves, and an operating permit to sling your leg over the seat.

Back in the day, however, there were times when my alleged bicycle had pieces of plywood taped to c-clamps as a seat. Often, when sitting heavily back on this contraption, I wondered if impaling one of my buttocks on the bare metal tube would be less painful.

More to the point, there were a lot of circumstances where I made do with what was at hand, plaything wise. Oh, i had the normal contingency of refrigerator boxes, metal barrel hoops, and a quarter would buy you a solid pound of green army men, plastic so cheap and waxy you only had to sit them in the sun to bend them into innumerable (and often immoral) poses. I loved green army men, and at one point our driveway was paved with a combination of green army men and shingletab.

Long before the Shingletab went down, though, we had a gravel drive. Well, there was some gravel in it, anyway, though it still required regular mowing.

Dad finally managed to scrape together the scratch to lay down some gravel, and the guy came out with a bigass bomberfull, which turned out to be, rather than the crush&run we originally wanted, a bomberload of river gravel.

As a driveway, it was a dismal failure; as a source of entertainment for a 7 year old, it was pure heaven.

The river gravel was perfect slingshot fodder. I would search for specific flat stones and save them for skipping at the lake. And then, one day I saw the stones wet for the first time. We’d come home from mass in a late summer rain, and those stones, wet for the first time, were magically transformed- agates, quartzes, several different types of granite, the colors and the patterns were awesome.

Mom wasn’t by any means a neglectful parent, but I had a lot of freedom, for the day, I was just not allowed out in the rain. I also tended to get myself in trouble anytime I used the garden hose.

So on any given summer afternoon, sun blazing down on the indiana countryside, I could be found sitting cross-legged on the edge of the driveway, next to dad’s 1960 Ford Comet,

Licking rocks.

You see, you had to moisten them to make sure you were getting the really cool looking ones. I’d put them in a big pile and then sit them on the ledge outside my bedroom window so I could sit and stare at the cool colors on rainy summer afternoons.

I did this for more than a year, as I remember, then dad brought in a bomber of shingletab and changed the game forever.

I think it probably explains a few things.