proteanme

I wrote this several years ago and I keep thinking I can user some of it for a poem. It’s about summer when I was a kid.

We spent the rest of the summer in my backyard or Tim’s and when we weren’t there, we were riding our bikes up and down the street with one of the George’s (pet snake) wrapped around our handle bars. We passed rainy days jumping up and down on my bed, singing to Jesus Christ Superstar and the Jackson Five. We found the Playboy magazines our parents had hidden under their mattresses and we swung on the trapeze my father hung in the garage. We wrote a play about saving a tree and staged it on my front porch and charged every kid in the neighborhood a nickel to come see it. We ate Oreo cookies and Space Sticks and cut the crusts off the ham sandwiches we made. We drank Koolaid sitting on the wall of my porch, legs dangling over the side, dropping half melted ice cubes down into the patches of dirt beneath our feet. On muggy evenings my mother took us to Lindners Ice Cream shop. She stayed in the car while we waited in line, waiting our turn to order milkshakes and sundaes with lids on them so we could take back home. On days it was so hot that the pavement burnt our feet, we’d ride over to Butler college a couple blocks away from where we lived. We’d throw our bikes in the grass and chase each other under the rows of sprinklers that rained down on the big lawn in front of the library. The water arced in the sun and cast off halos wherever we looked.