I spent my entire childhood climbing up mountainsides, and, when not up to that daunting challenge [for whatever reason], I would settle for climbing a tree. What little boy doesn't love to climb? To see what lies beyond his tiny province? Perhaps a tall ship's sails looming on the distant horizon promise escape to that faraway land where Peter and Wendy and Jonathan and Michael now live. A kid's got to have adventure in his heart, if not in his own neighborhood, otherwise he'll shrivel up and blow away.
Well, my dad was a salesman and it seemed everyone in his district already had a Fuller brush of some sort as well as a stock of J.R. Watkins Natural Vegetable Oil Soap. His regular customers liked him for his friendly and honest manner and bought freely from his traveling store. The time came, however, to pull up stakes. Since my parents never had the capital to buy a home of their own, it was no big deal vacating a rental and locating a new one. Of course, the little apartment or house we bid adieu was left sparkling, all spic-and-span. That was Mom's and Dad's way. It spoke well, too, of the products my dad hawked.
When I said no big deal leaving behind a dwelling, I was not talking about the pain of being uprooted from the neighborhood and its beloved denizens, whether two-footed or four-footed. It seemed that just when I had made my nest in the crook of a favorite tree or discovered a poison-oak-infested mountain trail leading to hidden treasure twenty paces to the north of hangman's tree, I was admonished by my firm but not totally unsympathetic father that there were new hills and dales and seas to discover ... in a new town.
I didn't realize at the time of my agonized, perpetually uprooted youth that Dad had ever been a kid. How could I? He was an adult the entire time I knew him. Now that I think back on it, when he was out watering our sparse patch of green at my most-favorite-ever cottage, he always had this huge ear-to-ear grin on his face when I hooted and hollered and scrambled up the old Maple in our front yard.
Dad never told me so, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when he was a kid he loved to climb trees and mountains too.
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