Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay diary podcast on youtube: https://youtu.be/dScUzM5qHu8
or read his transcript below:
LIFE, ACTUALLY
FIELD OF DREAMS
Across the street from our house, when I was a small boy, there was an enormous vacant lot.
On the lot sprang up golden grass, as high as the waist of a small boy. The soft grass was thick, so that if you lay down, no-one could see you from the road or from the houses across the street.
It was a wonderful playground, a battlefield, a guerilla warfare heaven. We boys and girls of the neighborhood could spend hours crawling on our bellies, hidden from the world and often from each other.
Somewhere along the way, we got the idea that battlegrounds such as ours should look like those battlefields in John Wayne and James Whitmore war movies, complete with foxholes and two-way communications. So we dug holes here and there, and staffed our outposts with the equipment of childhood.
One main foxhole, the headquarters, even had a makeshift roof. But only imaginary rains could stay away from us while we hid and met and planned there. Between the foxholes across the golden field we laid old remnants of hosepipes. Through these, we communicated in muffled faraway tones translatable only to us.
We were the Tab Nam Club (no parent could ever have guessed that Tab Nam spelled backwards was Bat Man, defender of good and fighter of evil men and wicked but sexy women), and we had leaders and followers.
Since I was the oldest boy, I was the pretend leader, and because my younger brother Ronny was the youngest kid in the group, he was usually the bad guy. He would always have to get killed first, or go to jail first or be punished first, just because he was too small to defend himself and because he wanted to be part of the group too much to mind the abuse.
When my tomboy sister, Barbara, came out to play with us, she was the leader and I was relegated to invisible follower. She was tougher and older than us, and no-one dared challenge her authority in the field.
Because I was no longer the leader at these times, I could only choose to be a rebel and a loner. That was more heroic to me than being a follower. Once you’ve tasted leadership, there is nothing satisfying about following and being ordered about.
There were various objects strewn across the field, and I’ll never forget them.
One particularly fascinating one was a Z-shaped iron bar about eight inches long. A number of them were used to terrorize the enemy. Two could be put together to form a swastika, the ultimate symbol of badness in those late-1940′s days. The bad guys had to carry these. Or, the Z’s could be thrown dangerously close to the enemy foxhole to keep them in their place.
There were long flexible sticks that became deadly bows for our even more deadly and unreliable homemade arrows. There were trees to climb and fall from, and we frequently did both. There were small pebbles to use in case of attack. And there were the wonderful long golden weeds.
The weeds could be hidden behind, carefully parted to spy on the enemy or the parents (somewhat interchangeable roles), pulled and gnawed on like the cowboys did in Saturday matinees, used as pitchforks, switches, wands, and the like. Very few real toys made it across the street into our field. There was no room for reality there.
Toys were left inside the home and on the front yard, symbols of parents’ desire to give us something joyful to play with, something they didn’t have when they were kids. But our toys were: the field itself and its natural components.
One day, the field disappeared.
We learned that a house was going to be built on our battleground. In place of our military movements a wooden skeleton emerged and our troops retreated across the street into their front yards, and our world got smaller.
The backyard became our field. But the backyard was different. Short grass took the place of golden grain. No foxholes could be dug except to plant Mother’s bushes and flowers. Our dogs could no longer bury their bones in wide open spaces and had to resort to corners of the yard where grass was higher or where people seldom stood.
But the backyard had some advantages the field did not. Advantages, that is, for Mother. She could keep her eye on us better, and we couldn’t hide because the back windows were high up. The only hiding places we had were behind a few bushes and under the house. Under the house was forbidden to us, so we went there a lot, crawling through spider webs and getting smelly with dust, cut with rusted nails, and generally excited by our newfound hiding place.
But ever so often, we would play in the front yard and start across the street at a crisis point in our games, only to look up at the completed house and be reminded that our field was forever gone.
Developers had not asked us kids permission to take away our childhood fields. They hadn’t thought to inquire.
But many decades later, when I am re-visiting home sitting in the swing of my parents’ front porch, I look across the street at what was once the Livingston family’s home and the Crutchfields’ home and see what was once there: a wide, long field salted with little human critters and one overgrown tomboy laughing and getting dirty and rolling in redbugs and passing secret messages to one another in the hosepipe trenches.
And I imagine one retired developer sitting in his Woodland Hills air-conditioned home and living off the interest generated by selling little kids’ hearts to families who had every right to want a piece of land, but who had no right at all to take over our particular golden-grained field of dreamy dreams
© 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed