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Childhood...what a wonderful, magical time in our lives. Even when things weren't great at home between mom and dad, kids somehow managed to live out our fantasies elsewhere.

We'd gather in someone's basement and put on plays or hold church services, complete with altar calls for our parents. We'd run among the wild flowers in the open fields, gather the prettiest of the weeds and deliver them to each house on May Day.

I was a child in the late fifties and sixties. It was a time when there were still more trees than houses, although the houses were spreading like a slow, all-consuming cancer. A split level home with 2,300 sq feet sold for around forty thousand dollars. (Heck, I paid more than that for my F350 4x4.)

We had a huge area across from our neighborhood that we called the dark forest. This title no doubt, came from a parent wanting to intimidate kids and keep them from entering the woods..."the dark forest." Oooooh. We believed what the parents and the older kids told us about the monsters with yellow eyes that lived in the trees. These monsters would chase us, catch us and chew us up if we were caught in the "dark forest" after the sun went down. As we grew older, we realized that the dreaded "dark forest" was the hangout for the area teenagers where they'd listen to rock n' roll on their transistor radios while they got "high" on aspirin and Coca Cola. The real rebels smoked cigarettes.

I remember getting my first bike. It was an ugly brown thing but it had three speeds, so I considered that I was almost cool. Since there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood around my age, we'd all jump on our bikes and ride to the local store and buy candy with our meager allowances or savings. We gave the candy store man fits as we picked up then put down different items, or dropping them, like big wax lips or the wax tubes that held a smidgen of colored sugar water. Everything was under a dime, so those with a whole dollar could buy enough sugary treats to spoil their appetites for a week.

The rule was that we all had to be back on our own street and preferably in our own yards by the time the street lights came on. I got in trouble on more than one occasion for violating that rule. Sometimes, I'd be sent to bed without dinner if I was really tardy. Or I'd have to miss my favorite show the next time it came on the big console television.

Television was different back then. The same shows came on at the same time each day or each week. My folks always

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