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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (33434)	3/28/1999 9:54:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

Thanks Rambi for the nice words, I think most boys could slop out pigpens in their own rooms, unless some one relieves them of the burden. Fortunately, when I was a kid I roomed with my brother in a men's college dormitory at Georgia Tech, while the rest of my family lived in a tiny faculty adviser's apartment below -- connected only by a secret passage inpenetrable to women. My mother could not come up and clean up our room (naked men were on duty 24 hours a day, wandering in an out of the one-per-floor sanitary facilities -- no one had money for pajamas, and the bathrobe had not been invented yet), and my father didn't have the stomach even to enter our room. The dormitory maids refused to touch it. We would send a messenger to the Varsity (5 cent hotdogs), or Carter's Lunch for food, and dogless, leave the scraps to fester on the floor. There on my radio, I heard the flash of the Pearl Harbor attack, rushing down to explain the strategic situation to my mom, who wondered what our ships were doing in Hawaii. We lived a happy life of primal crud for seven years until the overcrowding of WWII forced us into sleeping in closets and on bathroom floors in the black hole of Atlanta down below. When we had to move, most of our things were taken out, soaked with rationed gasoline, and burned. Fortunately, Ed and I were just stripped, hosed off, and disinfected and mostly survived with minor burns. It still remains part of a dream-like, woman-free, perfect boyhood to me. I was a river of dirty words and sexual knowledge to my school class-mates. I could curse like a teenager when I was 9. We were never baby-sat. For boys (in a sort of protected, privileged status) to grow up with intelligent young men, to have older friends who taught us wonderful things -- to fix a car, shoot pistols, the calculus, grind and mount a reflecting telescope, photograph the stars, and to identify and handle scorpions and tarantulas, rats, snakes, and falcons -- was a privilege not easily forgotten. Nor was forgotten the privilege of knowing young men who went off to War, for almost every man I knew was ROTC or NROTC and became an officer, not all of whom survived.