LITTLE RASCALS

This is my favorite picture, circa mid-1950s, of two of my favorite childhood playmates. Brothers Pat and Jan are the two bookends here; Pat, the cat lover, is a year younger than I am, Jan, the cowboy, a year older. They lived two houses from me on 9th Street, where we played softball games, rode bikes, played hide-n-seek--partners in grime of the third degree.

I most enjoyed climbing trees with them. They had a fun silver maple in their front yard, and out back was a mulberry tree. It provided fat, juicy ammunition for mulberry wars with other neighbor kids. The more red stains on the body, the better. We once declared revenge on an older boy who was visiting his grandfather across the alley. This evil kid had shot and killed a robin with his b-b gun, and then after Pat, Jan, and I had buried the bird and given it the appropriate send-off to heaven, he had the nasty nerve to dig it up! Well, the mulberries were put into service, and that b-b-toting grave robber got his comeuppance. After his pummeling, he never bothered the birds on our turf again! Don't mess with us--or our critters!

I still hear from Pat and Jan periodically. Jan is a lawyer and Pat is, quite ironically, a maker of gravestones--inspired, no doubt, from those days of calamity once upon a time on 9th Street. A little girl couldn't have asked for two better buddies.