A Starting Point

Deep in the backwoods of northern Minnesota lies the small town of Cass Lake. This would be the ancestral home of my branch of Allens. The reality is that I was born the illegitimate son of a young nurse in Bemidji, a small town several miles from Cass Lake. The whole place sits pretty much within the confines of the Chippewa National Forrest. In short, a really beautiful corner of Hell.
I made my escape at the tender age of 1 and was sent to California to live with friends of my mother. These lovely people accepted me into their lives and treated me as theirs. I remember the old man chopping 2 trees down and making an airplane for me to play on. That's about all I have for a while. Strange how the brain works. At any rate, This is where I became a Californian.
My mother moved us into a small apartment on Mt. View Rd. in Pomona. We lived here in some crazy poverty stricken bliss until I was 4 years old. Down the street lived a little old lady named Righty (spelling a wild guess). I would incessantly ride my tricycle down the sidewalk from our house to hers, go around an enormous concrete vase Righty had in her front yard and return home. I was liable to do this any time of day from sunrise to bedtime. More than once my mother would have to come looking for me because I would sneak out of the house to start my riding. Across the street we had a beautiful neighborhood park. Because it was across the street I couldn't go there without a grownup. To expedite acquiring an adult, I sat on the curb, staring forlornly into the park until either my mother or Righty took pity on me and let me cross the street.
The park was a marvelous place. A playground with a big, steel merry-go-round and swings. My favorite place was a little covered bridge with benches that crossed a tiny stream full of goldfish. I climbed up on the bench, kneeling on the seat and looking over the back, watching the fish. I could do this for hours. When not enraptured by the fish, the merry-go-round with my insane screams of "faster, faster" going to my mother.
During my fourth year my mom got married. We moved out of the apartment into a house on S. Hamilton Blvd. At the time it was a new development. I was convinced we had the most beautiful house in the world. Cork floors, open beam ceilings and huge windows facing the east. I know all that now. Then it was just beautiful.
Being a new development, nobody had grass, I had ventured into the front yard and was playing around when I looked up and saw another boy staring at me from the next yard. After an eternity of staring he said, "My name's Mike, you wanna be friends?" Thus began the friendship of 2 kids who were lucky to survive each other.
To say that Mike and I became good friends is a horrible understatement. We had a can phone set up between our bedrooms. It never worked but it was always there. When one of us wanted to talk to the other, he would pop the screen out of the window, climb out and go beat on the others window.
Keeping us apart was impossible. When one got sick, the parents would tell us "he's sick and can't play today." Time to plot. One of our favorite ploys was to grab a bunch of dirty clothes and do a Ferris Bueller. What's amazing is how rarely we got caught.
We built a little cart to ride down "church hill". Neither of us had any carpentry skills so this thing actually ended looking more like a Roman war sled with ropes and nails hanging out all over. We hauled it up to the top of the hill and rode it down. I got a spike driven through my foot and he in the hand. It was common for my mother to have to patch us back together. Blood flowed like pee on the rock under a cow. No tears. Rather, laughing and giggling combined with fear of being yelled at by our mothers. Our fathers, who also became best friends, adopted more of a "I can make another" attitude.
I think it was his dad that originated the phrase "Go play on the freeway." So we did. We went collecting bottles for their deposit value along the edge and then to the neighborhood store and trade them in for Superman comics. We stayed friends until I joined the army.