The Bridge

The Bridge

I look back at my eleventh year with awe and wonder. It was 1968. The world around us was changing at an amazing pace. It was an election year and there was quite a ruckus at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago...remember the Chicago Seven? That was current events when I was eleven. The evening news was full of rioting in the streets and body counts from Viet Nam. A family down the street from us was keeping their Christmas lights up until their son came home from Viet Nam…and the lights were still up when we moved from the neighborhood. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a month before my birthday and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated two weeks after my birthday. The world was a dangerous place.

Nonetheless,in my town the kids who lived on Masters Drive (and there were about 50 of us) roamed the streets, rode our bikes, played ‘murder in the dark’, had dirt clod fights, and had wonderful times sledding. There was a park down the street from the school yard, Dennis Scivally Park, and a creek ran through it. I spent hours and hours playing on the bridge that crossed the creek. I spent hours and hours playing on the bank of the creek, and even though I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to, I’ll confess here and now that I spent hours and hours IN the creek. Unsupervised. Unattended. With a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in wax paper in my pocket and the awareness that I had better be home by supper time.

We built dams in the creek, we skipped rocks, we went ‘stomping’ up the creek. I made boats and sailed them. We caught frogs and turtles and watched as minnows followed our bare feet. Days were long and lazy, just as childhood days ought to be. It really was the last year of childhood in that sense for me.

Fast forward a bunch of years. One of my elementary school friends is now an artist of some acclaim. She works in watercolor and several years ago, my parents made contact with her again. Mother sent me a web address and told me to look her up. I was so excited as I typed in the web address and found her site of beautiful paintings. My Rocket Man came home from work and found me in front of the computer…weeping. Brenda had painted a picture of the bridge. We were, as fortune would have it, headed to see my parents in just a few weeks. Rocket Man said that we were going to find Brenda and he was going to purchase a print of that watercolor for me.

We went on our trip and drove to Hannibal to meet my brother and go see Brenda. We got to her gallery and I was so excited. I was not only going to reconnect with a friend after so many years, but I was also going to get a lovely print of one of the most treasured places of my childhood. Rocket Man didn’t beat around the bush. After introductions were made, he told Brenda that he needed to purchase a print of the bridge. She had to tell us that it was sold out. But, she said that she would be happy to do another.

Within a year, I had not a print, but an original watercolor of the bridge, painted by my childhood friend. It hangs in my bedroom and makes me smile every time I look at it. It takes me back to a time when children could play…just play… without a referee, trophies, supervision or uniforms. Every child was not a star, and a lot of things weren’t fair. We could, on occasion, be happy playing with just a stick and a string.

Lots of other things happened that year. Some of them were amazing. Some were sad. Some were life changing. But the thing that I love to remember about my eleventh year is the time I spent at Scivally Park playing on and around that bridge.

Here is a copy of the watercolor by Brenda Beck Fisher that hangs in my bedroom