When I was young, one of my good friends lived down the street from me. His parents and my parents were and still are best friends. He was four years older than I was which meant he knew pretty much everything, or so it seemed to me. We had our own friends sets, but we played together from time to time, especially if our parents were getting together for dinner or other social event.
Throughout my childhood, I don’t remember ever having sidewalk chalk. I don’t think it had been invented yet (or envisioned and subsequently marketed). The only chalk I’d ever seen were the white or yellow sticks at my school or in the college classrooms in which my mother taught math courses. Back then, unlike today, there was no such thing as rainbow-colored jumbo-sized chalk, sold in 96 quantity boxes at a price point such that the entire driveway could be colored without eliciting money-wasting comments from parents.
It was different when I was a child. We did have something that was in plentiful supply and had a price point of “free” though. That is, provided you had pine trees close at hand, which we did. All you needed to do was break off a reasonably thick section of bark. You could then hold it in your hand so that the edge of the bark was pointing down towards the concrete and by pressing down and dragging, you could leave a solid, rust brown line with ease.
Thicker pieces of bark left thicker marks, whereas a thin section of bark could do detail work. You could quickly shade in things with the flat side of a large chunk prised from an unsuspecting tree. I remember using bark for everything we ever drew on the driveway as a child. We made hopscotch grids which over time became more complex to the point they took up the entire length of the driveway, save for the cars parked towards the house. There was the game Four Square, one of my favorites, which inevitably involved accusing someone of unfair play tactics thus ending the game in favor of another activity with rules less prone to interpretation.
We also used the driveway as a canvas, on to which we would draw pictures. I have never been good at two-dimensional art. I suppose I lack both the skill or the interest in improving said skill and as such, to this day I have only one thing I draw well in two-dimensions: an elephant from behind squirting water from its trunk. And while this might sound complex, trust me, it is neither complex nor impressive.
It was this artwork feature of out bark usage that had me thinking about a day from my childhood the other morning as I emptied Froot Loops into a bowl for one of the children’s breakfast. My good friend from childhood, Richard, had been over at my house that day. We had been doing something or other, I’m not sure what, possibly jumping on the pogo stick seeing who could get the most hops before falling off. Or maybe that’s what I was doing because Richard was at work with some bark drawing something so large it was nearly as large as the footprint of my mother’s car.
It wasn’t clear what he was doing until he got to the head, and then it was unmistakeable. He had drawn what you’d call, if you’re from the South, “a spitting image” of Toucan Sam. I’m not joking here. I had no idea Richard could draw so well but this Toucan Sam was exceptional. It stayed on the driveway for days. I would look at it from the front porch in the morning and check to see if it was still there when I got home form school. It had a long life but was eventually lost to rain.
I’m not in contact with many of my friends from childhood, but Richard and I are still friends. In just over a month’s time we’re going with him and his family on an ocean sailing adventure. They all know how to sail. Our family has a total of zero sailing experience among us. They're a brave bunch, no?
The Big Boy Update: To see if I could get my son interested in audio books I casually put on The Wizard of Oz two weeks ago on the ride to school. He is now completely hooked. Every time he gets into the car he asks me to put the book back on. It’s not just one book; there are over seventy hours in the entire book collection, which was available from Audible for ninety-nine cents. Right now, since his screen time window hasn’t started for the evening, he’s sitting in the kitchen having Alexa play the audio book for him. Dorothy just got back to Kansas, ending the story that parallels the movie. He’s an hour into the next book already, balancing coins on their sides while he listens.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Even though my daughter can’t see much at all anymore, she still enjoys writing things. It’s very, very hard to tell what she’s written and it makes her a little sad I think when she excitedly gives you something she’s written, asks you to read it and you can’t even pick out a single word because she doesn’t have a good sense of letter spacing and writes her letters on top of each other both vertically and horizontally. So I gave her a tip. I taught her how to grid fold a piece of paper. She liked making fans so she already had part of the skill. I’m trying to set her up for accurate folding so we can do some origami, which I think she would enjoy very much. For writing though, I showed her how to make a grid on the paper and then told her to write one letter in each block of the grid, leaving a block blank to indicate spaces between words. This was in her backpack yesterday. I can tell it says “I love Madison”. This is the best spacing I’ve seen in her writing in a long while.
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