RECOLLECTIONS

Today I had some thoughts of my childhood and how things were done where I grew up. Sunday morning we all got up early and went to an early morning meeting, had a 30 minute break and went back to Sunday School. We (all of us) always went to a cafe downtown and had a sweet roll and hot chocolate between these two meetings. Every one of did it - and all the kids from the other part of town that went to the other church did it too. Then we had a break until late afternoon...I think we went back to Church at 7:00 p.m. but it could have been 6:00 p.m.

We went home from Sunday School ate lunch and then everyone came to our house to play baseball. Our neighbor had a huge yard with a baseball field layed out on it. Left field was pretty short because there was an electrical sub-station adhacent to his property - so the fence of the sub-station had to be the left field home run fence (unless the ball was hit fowl - then it went into the sub-station too). We played four or five hours every single Sunday.

Every time someone got a home run by hitting the ball inside the sub-station I climbed the fence (8 foot chain link with three strands of razor wire to prevent access) and threw the ball back into play. This process generally took about five minutes because when you are squeezing between razor wires you had to be very careful that you didn't get hung up in or cut by it. I never worried that I might be killed by the electricity because I knew exactly where you could safely go and when you had to use a wooden handle to get the ball from where it was located (yeah right). Any way there was always a baseball game going on Sunday - unless of course - there was a fight between a couple of the players (which happened every single Sunday too).

Regardless our house was the place to be on Sunday afternoon. When it was time to go home and get ready for Church we would all run to get cleaned up and get to the chapel. Everyone went to the early meetings at church, everyone played baseball, and everyone went to Church at night. We also all sat together in church on the back two rows in the chappel. Maybe that is where I learned to sit on the back row on the closest seat to the door. I still sit there - every meeting.

Anyway when I worked in Logan I stopped at second dam and the City was doing some work across the dam along the trail. The headworks at the dam was fenced kind of like the fence I climbed many times every Sunday (except it didn't have razor wire on the top) so I just climbed over the gate walked across the head works area and climbed out of the fence to the other side. I was met there by an irate City employee who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I introduced myself as the person they should have dealt with before they started their work which kind of shut him down a little. I can remember him looking back at the fence and saying fences don't seem to mean much to you. I responded I always thought any kind of fence was built to be climbed. He laughed and we went over and I approved the job they were doing on the water line.

I wonder how that experience would have been different had I not learned how to climb chain link fences playing baseball!!!