[First Draft]
My twelfth summer, I rode the Raleigh to Sharon Woods. Just up the road from where my father worked, our family had visited frequently during the languid southern Ohio summers. Nearly eight miles from our home, the route there was simple: just one right turn from Ridge Road to Reading. From my perspective 60 years on, my parents would be called cavalier at best, more likely neglectful to the point of child abuse. They had grown up in quieter places, quieter times, and assumed the best of drivers on the route we’d travel.
I convinced Robin Suskind to accompany me, and we brought along two neighborhood friends, Peter Horton, age 14 and his younger brother Joey, age 10. Robin lived in Clifton, an upscale neighborhood at the center of Cincinnati, where his father worked as a professor at the University of Cincinnati Medical School.
Robin had an even loftier sense of his self-worth and decision-making prowess than I did. We parted as friends during the next school year, when he arrived at an 8th-grade school dance accompanied with a blonde girl in tow. I waved as he entered, and walked over to say hi. Before I got a word out, he put his arm around the girl’s waist, and said, “Get out of her, Truscott. You don’t have a date!”
The mortification must not have been complete, as the next summer, he moved to Portland, Oregon. I rode a train by myself to Seattle to stay with my Aunt for a month and visit the World’s Fair. My mother, realizing the I’d need to change trains in Portland, called up his family and arranged for me to spend a night with them in their new home. Though I was still dateless, Robin was nonetheless eager to show me all around his new environs, acting even more self-assured than he had in Ohio. We talked about our futures, as were now 13, and expected to know “what we wanted to be when we grew up.” Robin was preparing for his bar mitzvah, and asserted his goal was to become a “chemist”.
“What kind?” I asked, trying to appear as if I knew the varieties of chemical studies.
“A biochemist,” he answered, without further explanation. It sounded like a cutting edge career for sure. “You?”
Trying to one-up him, and knowing his mother would approve, I blurted out, “I’m going to be a doctor.” So I blame it all on Robin…
Peter lived behind us. We could easily visit their home by walking past the massive oak tree at the corner of our lot, then squeezing through the fence my father had built to be code-compliant when our swimming pool went in. Peter Horton was the coolest kid I knew; my sister was in love with him, and I adored him. Everything came easy to Peter, and a bike ride to Sharon Woods would be as easy for him as a trip down to the end of his cul-de-sac and back.
Could a 12-year-old kid ride 8 miles and back on a sunny day? We took our bikes everywhere those summers, leveraging the boundless energy of the young into a fitness we were of aware of. We did realise it was an all-day adventure, meaning we’d need lunch and water. We dug out Boy Scout canteens from our closets, snagged a block of cheese from the refrigerator, and stuffed a few sleeves of saltines into canvas knapsacks (kids did not take backpacks to school with them in those Jurassic days).
It was the height of the Baby Boom, 1961, and drivers treated us with deference as we wheeled our way up Reading. Once in the park, we three our bikes on the grass next to the parking lot, and raced across the field to the narrow lake. After a round of rock-skipping (Peter naturally won with effortless tosses of seven skips), we sank back and absorbed the sun. Robin opened up his saltines, popped a few into his mouth, then tried to whistle in satisfaction. Unable to overcome the cracker-induced oral dryness, he tried to hide it by pointing to the woods, and naming trees.
“That’s an oak. There’s an elm, some chestnut, a couple of walnuts over there. Oh, and that’s a buckeye!”
Peter looked at him out of one eye, and said, You can’t whistle when your mouth is dry! Besides, don’t you know how to whistle like this?” He curled his thumb and index finger into a circle, placed the resulting junction on the tip of his tongue, brought his lips around the middle of the circle, and blew the loudest, shrillest whistle I had ever hear. Dogs started barking, Robin covered his ears, and Joey laughed in adoration of his older brother.I asked, “Show me that again! How do you do that?” For the next half hour or so Peter patiently watched and advised while I tried to get just the right position for each of the key elements. The tongue had to be curled just so, and pushed with not too little and not too much force against the thumb and finger. Lips needed to be pursed with the care of a trumpeter. I didn’t quit until I had produced a loud enough blast to wake the man sleeping on a bench behind us. Peter smiled, clapped me on the back, and said, “Now you’re ready!”