Waning Crescent
The Struggle Between Memory and the Stories We Are Told.
Image (c) CK Brestman
As the story has been told and retold, while my mother entertained a neighbor at the kitchen table over tea and Pall Malls and 1970s housewife gossip, my rambunctious four-year-old former self was playing tag on the side porch with a neighbor boy, Langley Norris.
Boys being boys, we had also been playing ball and jacks and blocks and trucks and the porch looked like a late summer hurricane had blown through.
In the course of that championship round of tag, employing cat-like reflexes to deftly evade the deadly “it,” I craftily dodged and weaved and fled down the length of the porch, all the while looking over my shoulder at my pursuer and most certainly not ahead at the Mighty Steel Tonka Dump Truck resting in my path.
As legend has it, my foot landed squarely in the bed of that Mighty Steel Truck, sending me sailing recklessly down the porch like a one-legged, Tonka-footed figure skater.
An important detail to note is that our side porch, the main thoroughfare between carport and kitchen, was an enclosed porch, not open air. Five large double-hung windows down the side with a sturdy but reliable old American Steel framed storm door at each end. In the summer my Dad would slide up the glass windows and slide down the…
