Happy Birthday to Linda

The house I grew up in before we painted it brown, and before the trees grew large enough to hide in.

Well, since Tuesday the 10th was Kitty Quigley's birthday, then that means today must be Linda Armstrong's birthday. I remember that piece of relatively useless information because even though Linda and I were two grades ahead of Kitty in school, we were only one year ahead in age, and for two days in October, Kitty and Linda were the same age. It caused contention, age often being the source of pride and fuel for dominance in children.

Linda moved next door to us when I was seven, just before our second grade. Her father had taken a job as a social studies teacher at our high school--he had been a principal in another town, which meant he approached education with discipline and a military haircut. From my frightened young perspective, he was truly an imposing figure in front of that chalkboard and overhead projector.

One day in the fifth grade, after we had come home from school, Linda invited me to her house to play army, a game we had devised where the players crawled on their bellies behind sofas and recliners, taunting the other soldiers and launching grenades made of rolled up socks. I pulled on my rubber boots and went next door, ready for battle and annihilation. Linda met me at the door with a bowl of orange Jello, because soldiers need their rations, and we headed down to the basement.

Those steps were very steep and covered with carpet, and the heal of my rubber boot caught the edge of one of the steps. With Jello in one hand and fear in the other, I couldn't grab the rail--the Clutz Cannon shot me down the stairs like a low-grade projectile, a rolling bomb without a fuse, one step at a time--thump, thump, thump--I tried to break my fall with the free hand, the one without the Jello, but I hit the cement floor full-force anyway and broke my arm. My right arm. At the growth line. A casualty of war. Orange jello everywhere.

Linda's parents worked like everyone else's, so she called her mother at the school library, who then called my mother at the school administration office, and both women rushed home. I was taken to the local doctor and to the nearest hospital for an x-ray and a cast. I was then branded as the girl to never invite over because she'll break her arm on your property.

I spent the next six weeks, a good part of the winter, with my arm in a sling. My mother made slings to match my dresses which she had also made, so I wasn't forced to go to school in a big white thing, but still--it was a long winter. I had to do my homework with my left hand, and I was not allowed to play in the snow at recess--a very long winter indeed since the Yost Elementary driveway was on a perfect incline for sledding.

Linda and her sister were part of a larger band of ragamuffin children in our neighborhood--we ran wild on our blue-collar street with abandon. We made up games like army, corncob soccer which was only to be played in the middle of the street directly under the street light at night, and hide and seek which involved twelve kids on average and covered a range of eight different yards--nothing off limits. You could crawl under parked cars, you could dig holes in bushes, you could climb trees.

On summer nights, we would build tents over clothes lines and sleep outside on the grass, eating crackers, drinking Pepsi, and belching as loud as we could with no one to reprimand.

Our childhood was a bit like Charlie Brown with very little adult interference, except for the muted trombone voiced teacher, except for Linda's teacher father standing at the head of the class shaking a broken bit of chalk in his hand waiting for someone to recite the ways The New Deal stirred up a dust-covered nation.

I have not seen Linda Armstrong in seventeen years, not since my parents sold my childhood home and retired to Georgia. These days there is plenty of adult interference, but I wish her a happy birthday regardless. And I hope her life is full of plenty of orange Jello.