Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

“Unclimb that tree!”

That’s what my friend’s older sister yelled at us.

She was trying to hijack our hijinks. She could just as well have been sewing buttons on ice cream.

She was a yeller and we were dedicated climbers of trees and enthusiastic ignorers of yelling sisters.

She got it from her mother, who complained to her young son, “I spend half my life hollering at you to come here,” just as Harper Lee wrote in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “I wonder how much of the day I spend just callin’ after you.”

We climbed trees because, even we knew that each day came only once. We stayed busier than a cat covering you know what on a marble floor. We prepared for the next day by having as much fun as possible today.

But why climb trees? You might as well ask why the wind blows or the sun shines. We climbed them because they were there.

Climbing trees was good because we didn’t have to listen to a chorus of mothers warning, “You’ll put an eye out!”

Of course, when we hung upside down from a branch, a mother said, “If you fall out of that tree and break your neck, don’t come crying to me.”

Even as kids who took things said by adults as gospel, it made us say, “Huh?”

The problem with hanging upside down from a tree is that things fall out of your pocket. Shiny rocks, unfit jackknife and coins tumble to the ground.

I never had much money. What I had fit easily into my pockets. My father said that the only change he liked was in his pocket.

We were clean climbers because we were forced to take baths. Real baths. We’d have been happy taking a birdbath — splashing a bit of water on the important parts and calling them clean.

It may have looked as if we were running around in circles, but we weren’t acting crazy. We were orbiting. We climbed trees as part of the process in determining what matters the most. A friend told me that she didn’t join her husband when he bungee jumped. She stood nearby holding his life insurance policies. Tree climbers don’t think of such things.

I recalled my tree-climbing exploits after I’d rubbed the sleep from my eyes, thus eliminating the morning stars, and looked for my pillow. I once dreamed of eating a giant marshmallow and woke up to discover my pillow was missing.

I was able to remember it because I keep paper and pen on my bedside stand. The pen is a nifty contraption given to me by a friend named Mark Heinemann. In the interest of full disclosure, it was a free pen that he’d received from a company in which he’d done business. It was still mighty nice of him.

What makes the pen special is that it has a light on it. How cool is that! My grandparents grew up without electric lights, and I have a pen that lights up.

I use the pen to write down bits of dreams (a dream might be a prayer) and flashes of ideas that come to me in that murky corridor between awake and asleep. I’m a chronic note taker even when nearly unconscious. My notes written in that state often make no sense or I’m unable to read them. That’s a shame. Those scribbled words might have changed the world for better or worse. Things don’t always work according to plan. It’s Murphy’s Law that states that things will go much worse than Murphy ever dreamed. The flawed notes are likely a combination of a clouded mind and poor penmanship. I did my homework during long rides over washboard graveled roads on a school bus equipped with bad shock absorbers. It’s difficult to develop good penmanship under such conditions.

My father went to country school. It offered eight grades. He finished the 8th grade and went to work. That’s the way things were often done back then.

On a day that I was preparing to leave for college, I felt uneasy because I knew that Dad had wanted to further his education, but circumstances hadn’t permitted it.

“It doesn’t seem right,” I said in an effort to be kind and considerate. “I have 12 years of schooling and I’m going for more. And you had only eight.”

My father replied, “That’s OK. Some of us learn faster than others.”

Dad did well in life.

I wonder how much better he’d have done with a lighted pen?

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.