We grew up in the same development. A kind of faze-one-model-home-on-the-corner–still-under-constructions-going–to-be-a-neighborhood –someday, kind of place. We’d ride our bikes through half built homes and fly off mounds of dirt left by powerful hydraulic earthmovers. We’d crash, all the time, just smash into shit with our bodies; trees, hills, and each other. Every night we’d head home bloody and scratched, home to our folks, who were fuming mad about the carnage we’d drag into their new house just before supper. Muddy footprints on the new kitchen floors, earth and dirt fell from our clothes as we were stripped naked and stampeded to the shower. They’d soak us in stinging peroxide, twisting and turning the cotton as if that pain was a punishment, like we weren’t just throwing rocks at each other, as hard as we could; or playing Star Wars with metal rods and two by fours. They’d yell and scream and try to talk sense into us, but it was no use. We bonded as a family of our own, crazy as hell, afraid of nothing.
Timmy Waldron
http://servinghousejournal.com/KennedyPoughkeepsie.aspx
Poughkeepsie, 1962
Thomas E. Kennedy