I’ll admit they got away from me. They’re little but oh so fast. Around our house if you say, “Let’s go outside and play,” you better have water bottles filled, snacks packed, and be standing at the door. That or Little One and Sweet Caroline, our granddaughters, will just about run you over to get outside.
Such was the case yesterday as they bolted out the garage door. Scrambling after them, I shouted, “Stay on the driveway! Don’t go into the street!” With the sound of my warning still echoing through the garage, I paused just for a second and thought, Wow, how things have changed since I was a kid!
Catching up to them moments later, I handed each a box of multicolored sidewalk chalk. I watched for the next hour as the girls delighted in drawing ghosts, mummies, and something else on the driveway. Made me remember another group of kids who also enjoyed drawing but used a very different medium. They lived on that old familiar and colorful street not so far away called Flamingo.
As a kid growing up, it was easy to know what day it was. Monday through Friday belonged to teachers, so we all went to school. Sunday belonged to God and Preacher Jim, so we all went to church. But Saturday belonged to us kids. It didn’t matter what the weather was like; if it was Saturday, my three brothers, The Sister, and me were outside all day playing.
Living on a street ending in a cul-de-sac, our parents gave us only two warnings. The first was, “Come home when you hear the bell.” The bell was an old cast iron school bell Dad had bought over at the old salvage store across town. Coming in only for lunch and dinner, we certainly left our mark on Flamingo Street – literally.
The second warning we were given, “If you play in the street, watch out for cars,” addressed something we rarely had to worry about. Except for Bubba Hanks’ mom’s daily trip to the grocery store, there was only a car or two traveling up or down Flamingo on any given Saturday.
That gave us plenty of time for drawing. Using hand-sized rocks, we scratched outlines of dinosaurs, birds, and animals of every size into the pavement. We also sketched each one of us. To color in our sketches, we used brown bark from pine trees, red dirt clods, and the dry white clay chalk from the banks of Cripple Creek.
Going to bed that night, we thought our art would last forever or until the first good rain, whichever came first. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
It took all day for us to create the street art. That night, in less than an hour, Down the Street Bully Brad destroyed it. Using yellow and orange sandstone, he scribbled over all of our drawings. He added horns and tails to the self-portraits of my brothers, The Sister, and me. The disgusting words he scribbled over all of our artwork aren’t fit to be printed.
After any Saturday we drew on the street, Bully Brad would deface it all later that night. We thought one day he would change and see the value of what we had done. But some folks never change, and neither did he.
So, Dear Reader, in looking back down the street of your life, what will you see? A person who has colored this world with their imagination or someone who has spent his life destroying the work of others?
And if you’re still wondering about the “something else” the girls drew on our driveway, it is an entire family of zombie bugs. They all had either red or blond hair, blue or green eyes, five or seven legs, and were all different sizes.
There were also five additional drawings that day not done by the girls. Drawings that had made their way to our driveway from an old familiar street not so far away, and now drawn by a 60-year-old man who is still a bit of a child on the inside.
With outlines sketched using a rock that fits into a now much larger hand, the portraits of children — four brothers and a sister — were colored in with brown bark from pine trees, a red dirt clod, and the dry white clay chalk from the banks of Line Creek just down from our house.
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
