Groundhogs, Dogs and Fog

By Al Horn

This past Monday was Groundhog's Day. It was also an old friends birthday. For many years of my youth he was my best friend. As kids, we ran with a small neighborhood crowd. Three or four of us would always make a 'trip' into town everyday except when the weather advised us to do otherwise. By weather I mean when it was over one hundred degrees or below twenty degrees. Those extremes didn't always stop us but for the most part they were a hard and fast rule.

Not that we paid that much attention to rules. Let me clarify that statement. When it came to rules of common sense, we occasionally turned a blind eye. Such is youth and the environment we grew up in.

At the age of ten, Wentzville, MO was a small town of just under a thousand people. Before the subdivision I lived in was built, I'm certain the population was less than half that number. A developer had taken a piece of land on the outskirts of town and dropped in over one hundred cracker box houses on very small lots that were affordable to the masses wanting to get out of the big city. We moved there in 1964 shortly after the last house had been built. Every house had a family with two or three kids. Do the math and you see that in five years the population more than doubled. We even had our own grocery store at the edge of the community. We had it all.

Well, not everything. The schools and the ball fields were toward the center of town. So was the only soda shop that sold comics and 45RPM records. The only two burger joints were in town but on opposite ends. They served as the turn-around points for the older kids that cruised back and forth through town in their parent's cars. And what small town didn't have a four way stop. Ours was almost exactly in the middle of the main drag.

By the time I was thirteen years old, it was a pretty common sight for half a dozen of us 'Heights' boys to descend upon the four-way on our bicycles once, sometimes twice a day. We were like a pack of dogs; yipping and yapping as we rode. Everyone knew us. In those days you waved at everybody and you didn't give any adults any problems because they knew your parents and weren't afraid to call up to let them know you had been acting out. At the same time, you had to be pretty obnoxious before they would pick up the phone.

That's not to say we never got into any trouble. Boys will be boys. The difference was that our idea of trouble was to leave a grocery sack or two in the middle of the street full of grass clippings. When a car would hit one, the grass would go flying and tires would screech. Nobody was hurt and we learned many an adult word from a safe distance.

All of these memories came back as I thought about my old friend. I chuckled to myself thinking of the incidents and mischief we caused. As I thought of the 'old gang' I remembered one particular event.

It was a cool evening in late September. We had just walked back from the high school football game and were joking around. A fog had rolled in thick as pea soup. We had traveled our route so many times that we could probably have made it home with blindfolds on. We all took turns drifting from the main group and wandering back in from a different direction to surprise everybody.

One of the loudest in our group broke off out of turn and we were all hollering for him to come back. We could hear him running around us, grunting like a pig. Right after one such grunt we heard a loud thud followed by an equally large groan. We stopped to get a bearing on the moaning and groaning. We carefully walked to our friend and found him on the ground next to a car that someone had left parked on the side of the road sometime during our trip to the game. He had run into the driver's door. A quick check showed that the only thing hurt was his pride.

The thought of seeing him on the ground made me burst out laughing. I had been plunking on my computer when all this had happened. My granddaughter walked into the study to see what was going on. I told her to ask again in ten more years. I'm not sure she would have understood no matter how hard I explained.