YOUTH CAMP: LOUISIANA, 1966

by Randy Reynolds

She was easily the most radiant thing in that dusty quadrangle defined by the canteen, two bunkhouses and the tabernacle, she with her form sculpted from my fantasies and erected there in my path. She drew me on with her eyes, which even at some distance I could tell twinkled with joy, (or was it mockery?)

She looked at me over the shoulder of her friend Gayla, listening to Gayla, talking to Gayla, but looking at me, her lips upturned slightly, her dimples barely visible, possibly smiling at me (or, just as possibly,) trying to conceal laughter: laughter at the ease with which she manipulated my movement.

I knew her name. I knew her parents. I knew the boys she had dated. But I had never spoken directly to her before that day, that day she stood there, glowing, in the middle of the yard, with that hair just the color of the hair I always dreamed about whenever I dreamed of girls, and her clothing, modest though it was here at church camp, still not modest enough to obscure her allure. I was drawn to her like interstellar debris sucked into the orbit of an irresistible cosmic body.

I was not usually afraid to speak. I had performed onstage in crowded church and school auditoriums. I had been on debate teams, made speeches at school and for two years now had hosted my own weekend show on the truly lousy local radio station. No, I had never been afraid to speak; never, until now.

And I, whose ambition it was to be a writer, I who wrote poems and stories and read them to my unresponsive brother far into the night after we were supposed to be asleep, I who waged constant verbal combat in history class with my tirades against evolution (because I believed everything my preacher said about it at the time,) I... was unaccountably out of words.

When I couldn't take another step without meshing our three bodies into one, I stopped, speechless, rigid. Gayla turned my way and giggled. Sherry dropped her head, then glanced slyly upward through long lashes, smile widening, dimples deepening.
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She bathed me with her eyes, bemused, as if I were some harmless alien creature with whose care she had just been entrusted. Her demeanor empowered me, and a torrent of unplanned words spurted suddenly from my mouth. I heard myself ask if I might sit beside her that evening in the worship service. She gave me a soft "yes" and we made arrangements to meet by the solitary pine that towered near the tabernacle.

And now--so many years later!--some of my beliefs have changed, but not the most important one: I still believe in love at first sight.

LAND OF INNOCENCE

by Randy Reynolds

The dime bags I sold on the streets of Bainbridge, Georgia, in my youth were different from the dime bags of today. These days, a dime bag means ten dollars worth of marijuana. (I looked it up.) The dime bags I peddled back then were bags of boiled peanuts that really cost a dime.

I wandered the town, barefoot, pushing my dime bags to a wide variety of otherwise respectable citizens. Some were furtive about the transaction, looking one way then the other before giving me their dimes and stashing the little sack in their handbags or pockets and hurrying away.

I brazenly took my product into secret city council sessions (there were a lot of those back then, just as there are today.) Proceedings came to a standstill as the mayor and councilmen fished around in their pockets for their dimes. (At least they fed their habits out of their own funds and not at taxpayer expense.)

I got two cents profit from every bag I sold and didn't have to pay taxes on it nor have a social security number. My school didn't have any rules about how long I could work, nor did the city require me to have a permit.

One of the biggest differences between then and now was the lack of air conditioning, which forced people to sit on their front porches and get to know the folks on the porches next door and across the street. Everybody had a dog and all the dogs ran loose. As did the children. Everybody knew not only their neighbors, but their neighbors' children and the names of the neighbors' children's dogs.

Nobody had a cell phone. When Mother wanted me to come home, she went to the front door and yelled my name. Down the block, some kid on a bicycle heard it and told another kid leaning out of a car window at a filling station, who told another kid riding toward the park, who saw me playing ball and said my mom was calling. I boogied for home as fast as I could on a chrome-laden bike with wide tires, fenders, luggage rack, basket, headlight and push-button horn. (Riding a bike was slower--and much better exercise--in those days.)

There was no arguing over menus. Mother decided what to fix and it never occurred to us to demand something different. Co-colas were a treat then, not an everyday thing. (We called all soft drinks Co-cola.) They were smaller, too--six ounces in a thick bottle. (And no matter what they say, Co-cola tasted better from those bottles!)

Toys were a whole lot simpler, too. Electricity and toys didn't mix (except when our baby sisters stuck some toy into a wall socket.) High-tech to us was Mr. Potato Head (the first toy ever advertised on TV.) We amused ourselves for hours with a plastic ring called a Hula-hoop, a coil of wire called Slinky, and lots of items made of wood and string, including yo-yos, tops and stick horses. Most kids had six-guns and cowboy suits. I got my first bee-bee gun in second grade, and promptly shot my sister in the rear. She carried on like it actually hurt and didn't stop crying till I had been spanked.

In fifth grade, my grandpa bought me a Barlow knife. I took it to school and played mumblety-peg at recess with other boys who had knives--a game in which we threw the knives at each other's feet to see who was brave enough not to move. Most boys brought knives to school, but the only time I ever got stabbed, the weapon wasn't a knife. Another boy asked if I thought he would stick me with his pencil. I said he was too chicken, but I was wrong. I can still see the lead beneath my skin--only it isn't lead; it's graphite. (The only way to get lead from a pencil is by chewing off the yellow paint from the outside of it, which we all used to do.)

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day, and (starting in 1954, added the words "under God"--President Eisenhower's idea, because the Communist countries that used the exact same pledge wouldn't copy that.) I don't remember our class praying together, though a lot of praying undoubtedly went on, then as now, during test days.

Whites and blacks didn't go to school together back then in South Georgia, but we sometimes got together to play baseball on the sandlot. We also dared and double-dog dared each other to do dangerous things, such as walk the rafters of an abandoned warehouse; and jump off a shed into bamboo canes that bent beneath our weight and set us aground--often without injury.

There was no Internet then and no dirty magazines at the convenience stores. (Come to think of it, there was no such thing as a "convenience" store.) We fifth-graders who were curious about women's bodies could pay a quarter to a girl our age to take off her clothes and turn around in front of us. But a quarter would buy a comic book, a Three Musketeers bar, some bubble-gum and a Co-cola, so the girl didn't make much money.

Back then, the government didn't have a yellow, orange and red Terror Alert Level to keep us on edge before and during elections. Nor did they need one. Every day was equally terrifying when polio was on the loose, communism was on the march, H-bombs were being tested, and rock'n'roll was "corrupting the young people."

BLOWING UP THE BOARDWALK: HOW NOT TO MAKE A BOMB

by Randy Reynolds

If the "war on terrorism" had existed back when my brother and I made our bomb and set it off in the swamp, we might have been classified as terrorists: we'd be "Breaking News" on CNN, a "major terrorist plot" on FOX, and the President would mention us in speeches designed to scare naive voters. Our homemade bomb resulted in nothing more than a black spot on a rickety boardwalk near Covington, Louisiana, but there are terrorists in custody today who have done even less. Ricky and I were lucky that terrorism back then meant nothing more than the way we treated our younger sisters.

We got our bomb-making materials soon after our house burned down. (For the record, he and I had nothing to do with that particular fire.) The next house we moved into had been occupied by a World War II veteran who had brought home some souvenirs, one of which was an army-issue ammo box that he buried behind a shed in the back yard. He undoubtedly thought it would stay hidden there for all time. But Ricky and I went digging one day and found it.

Why we were digging behind the shed, I don't recall. Motives were forgotten in the excitement of discovering a dark green metal box filled with hundreds of beautiful brass bullets. A box of gold bullion could not have excited us more.

We did with the bullets what anyone would do. We used a hammer and pliers to break them apart, poured the gunpowder from each casing into a jar and went looking for something to blow up.

We settled on the boardwalk, a narrow footbridge in the swamp beside our house.We had no particular ill feeling toward the boardwalk. In fact, we needed it as a passage to neighboring farms where we surreptitiously fished in private ponds, had watermelon fights or lay among bales of hay in a giant barn reading Huckleberry Finn and (later) Playboy. The only thing in our minds was that we had gunpowder and a match and the boardwalk seemed like it needed blowing up.

We piled the powder in the middle of the tiny bridge and trailed some to the edge to serve as a fuse. As the older brother, I claimed the privilege of striking the match. When I threw it onto the line of powder we squatted, wincing and holding our ears in anticipation of a very big boom like hundreds of firecrackers going off at once. But there was only a sizzle as the powder burned itself out in the open air. And it left only a small black smudge on the weathered old boardwalk. What a disappointment!

We shrugged and went about our business for the day, whatever it may have been--pickling water moccasins (in vinegar, because we didn't have any alcohol,) skinny-dipping in the pond where we caught the water moccasins, racing our horses on the highway, setting booby-traps for our sisters...all in all, a normal day except for the unsuccessful bombing attempt.