Childhood

  While I was growing up, my two sisters and I weren't together much because of our parents breaking up.    I was bounced around between grandparents and aunts and uncles which had its pros and cons.  Grandparents were great because they had a tendency to spoil.  Aunts and uncles were great because there were cousins to play with.  They were the closest thing I remember to growing up with siblings. Most of my time like that was spent with my dad's brother, Frank and his family.  I had spent many visits and once an entire summer with them in Derry, NH.  Nothing but great memories, even when I got into trouble for taking things apart or swinging kittens around by their legs.  There was something about those hot summer days.  The insects would make their high pitched noise in the tall grass and the stones were too hot to step on in bare feet.  It seemed like summer lasted all year as a kid.

  As I may have indicated before, I always had a tendency to look at things technically and even when I was small, one of the things I was fascinated by were utility poles and all the things that were attached to them.  I use to lie on the back seat  of the car as it traveled and stare up at the wires as they jumped from pole to pole and occasionally hop right over the road.  I liked the smell of new poles that were freshly planted in the ground and still aromatic with creosote.  The old poles would be faded to a dull gray, the wood rough and splintered and filled with many holes made by the side cleats of lineman's boots.  I could never make out the rhyme or reason of the little metal numbers that were nailed to the pole for identification.  I did understand at an early age, however, why birds weren't electrocuted when sitting on the high voltage wires at the top of the pole.  So naturally, when I made my little villages with my building sets, I always included the little toy plastic utility poles and would even hang thread between them to simulate wires.

  Okay, it is psychoanalysis time, perhaps I had this fascination with utility poles because they are symbolic of keeping parts of the world together by connecting them and since my world was a bit shaky at times, that is what I thought I needed.  Okay, so psychology is not my forté!