Things we did and people we knew

Being a Navy family, we naturally lived in Navy housing. It was a two story duplex with a carport and our address was 17 Burningtree Drive. It was right off of Gungywamp Road. Yes. There is a Gungywamp Road. I used to sit on the rock wall next to it and wave at cars passing by. I saw my future drive by one day. It was a candy apple red '67 Mustang and I remember saying to myself that I was going to have one of those when I could drive (sadly the '67 is STILL in my future, I did have a '78 though). Here... I made a map!

Google doesn't lie... there it is, Gungywamp Road and our house pinned with an "A". I've labeled a bunch of other locations on this map that will be written about here if they aren't already. You can see the snow sledding hill and my school (which, surprisingly is still there and still a school).

The Freidman's lived in the other half of the duplex. They had a son, Scotty. He was our BEST friend. This post will be mostly about Scotty Freidman and why he probably regretted being our best friend.

The Navy people decided that they wanted to put a playground in our backyard. Naturally, all the kids thought this was a great idea, but the parents who lived along this stretch of housing did not. I guess they thought that we were quite noisy enough without adding more kids from nearby streets. As a parent, I can see the logic in this now, but at the time it made no sense at all. The parents complained and won, so the big machines that were digging the field up went away after filling in the holes they made. Luckily, they were unable to get three good sized boulders back into the ground so they just left them. Sitting on top of the dirt begging for us to play on them, which we did. They were our new playground.

One of the boulders was flat on top with a little piece that poked out and we decided that this little piece looked like the floorboard of a car and this boulder was dubbed "The Batmobile" after our current favorite show starring Adam West. We would pretend we were Batman and Robin and an assortment of bad guys and that rock was our crime fighting vehicle. The boulders were a lot more fun than a playground would have been I guess. We had to use our imaginations and that is always more fun cause crazy things happen! There was much running and screaming taking place. Daily.

We didn't play Batman every day. Sometimes we went over to the trees and just goofed around. It was on one of these goofing around days that Scotty and I decided playing catch with some big rocks was a good idea. They were probably 4-5 pound rocks and he would toss one to me and I would toss it back. Sadly for Scotty, he got distracted just as I let loose of a rock and he failed to catch it. The rock landed squarely on the top of his foot and, well... he screamed and started crying.

We took him home and his mom ended up taking him to the hospital where they pronounced his foot broken. He got a nifty cast and my parents became famous. This is how they were introduced at cocktail parties. "This is Don and his wife, Yuki" "Oh! You're the parents of the girl that broke Scotty Freidman's foot!"  It amuses me to no end, even now. Come on. I didn't do it on purpose. He was supposed to catch the rock!

My brother and Scotty used to play war a lot and they each had an assortment of toy weapons. Back in the day, toy rifles were made out of real wood and metal. They were heavy, no lightweight plastic to be found. Sometime after Scotty had his cast removed they were out in the carport playing war again and my brother accidentally bashed him upside the head with a wooden rifle which resulted in stitches. Shortly after that the Freidman's got orders and moved. I've often wondered if they somehow 'pushed' their orders through in order to get away from us. Given another year, we might have killed him.

Mom and dad decided to sign us up for Sunday school. I'm not sure why because we never went to church. I remember going to church exactly ONE time in my whole life (other than for weddings of course). Anyhow, we went to Sunday school, which was held at Charles Barnum Elementary School. Yep. Church in the public school, the law hadn't passed yet.  It was okay I guess. We had this nifty workbook with pictures to cut out and stick on pages that made them 'interactive'. I remember the page with a picture of a cave and I cut out a boulder which fit into a little slot so you could roll the 'boulder' in front of the cave and roll it back away. Apparently Jesus was buried in this cave. This is the ONLY thing I remember from Sunday school.

They stopped making us go to Sunday school when they figured out that we weren't really going every Sunday. Occasionally (and after a few weeks, every Sunday) we would stop at the woods on the way and climb trees and goof around and when we saw people walking home we would know it was time to go home. On this day the people we normally saw walking home had stayed for a special program and were really late. We got busted for cutting Sunday school. This could be why I only remember the one page from the workbook....