The Moment

The latest thing I am working on will need to be cleared with Sweet Pea. This Indian Lake story of my early teenage years is one of youthful exuberance.

Background:
Dad and mom would rent a three-bedroom cabin at Turkeyfoot Landing nearly every summer I can remember. With five children and Grandma Nora, friends from dads job coming up one or two days with their children, there could be twenty or twenty-five people sleeping in that cabin on any given night.

Detail:
On one of our two-week summer vacations, I woke up on another bright sunny morning with nothing better to do than have breakfast and think about when we would be allowed to go to the Walnut Islands and swim. Like most other days we had to wait until we had eaten dinner and rested [because you cannot go swimming on a full stomach]. I have decided that this rest was more important to the adults than to my digestive track.

This day we piled into the boat and took the long trip up the channel and then across the lake to anchor just off the beach as usual. The water was only about chest high and the bottom was hard pack sand and easy on the feet. Now here is where it gets a little fuzzy, either, I jumped out of the boat onto someone, or someone jumped out of another boat onto me. In that instant I was face to face with a girl!!

HOW IT BEGAN

How many of you remember citizen band radios? In the year of our Lord 1975 or there about, I entered the world of cb’s.My first one was a Robyn mobile, 23 channels, and it had a blue face. If you know what that is, congratulations.I remember buying that radio from a local shop there in Xenia, Ohio. I knew the owner as Spender. That was his cb handle. That little hole in the wall is also where I met people with names [handles] like Bugs Bunny, Gerty, Roofer, and Tar Baby, Clifton Curley, Lawman, Nova Nine, Blue Bird, Pepsi, and in my family there was Wildfire, Frosty, and Windjammer. What a crazy life we lived in those days. You meet someone on the radio and the next thing you know you are friends for life.After having that radio for a couple of months, my EGO decided that I needed one of those chrome power microphones that I would see in peoples home. You know the tall one that looked like a lollipop. On a desk in front of a base radio they looked impressive. But on the dash of my Chevrolet it looked completely COOL!!!!!Time goes on and technology changes. With the little I know about things like “my space”, things aren’t that different. The only difference between "then and now” might be that with cb’s you could use you imagination to determine what someone might look like.

11/20/08
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