LITTLE BROTHERS AND OTHER MEMORIES OF AUTUMN

The first time I saw him, he was seven years old, tow-headed shock of hair, pencil in his left fist, laying on his stomach in the foyer of their house that was a converted stable. He was drawing a picture of a horse that rivaled Leonardo's sketches of the bronze stallion that was cast from cannons and turned back into cannons. I was amazed that a child could capture a live creature so vividly.

"Scott. This is my friend Kathy," Leslie spoke loudly to break into his creative reverie.

The towhead looked up and smiled and quietly sais, "Hi," with a grave seriousness before bending his head back down in concentration to continue bringing the steed to paper-life on the drawing pad. He was seven years old.

Then a flash of brown hair and a lithe frame leaped down broad entryway staircase and brushed past us.

"Stop and say 'Hi,' to my friend Kathy, Brian." The 10 year old elfin face with glasses and an impish grin mischievously mimicked his his sister and I laughed.

"Hi, Brian," I giggled as he opened the front door and charged out to his bicycle to ride up and down the asphalt hills around Grassy Lake as his sister called after him, "We are kid-sitting you and Scotty, so be sure you are home when you see the front lantern lit.

The He wind snatched away his, "Sure, sure, sure, Les, I will if I see it," but we hoped he had heard and acquiesced.

My dad had driven me the two and a half miles from our house on the lake to Leslie's house in another small lake community for the first time. Leslie and I had met in our fifth grade classroom several weeks before this sleepover that was also a kid-sitting assignment.

Leslie came closer to me and whispered, "Mike and David and a few other boys rode by on their bikes just as mom and dad were backing out of the driveway. Dad almost hit one of them on a red bike with a white banana seat with streamers and tassles. It might have been Jamie "

"Wow! Realy? What time is everyone else coming over?'

It was 6:30 pm, and Leslie had just finished giving the boys a supper of grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Tomato Soup. Since the fallen autumn oak and elm and other leaves from deciduous trees were raked into small hills neatly spaced around the front, back and side yards. You couldn't say "lawns" because they lived on the edge of a wood.

The boys' rewards for cleaning their plates were caramel apples direct that afternoon from Mosley Bell's Apple Orchard Fruit Stand a mile and a half away down Rte 22 where the road intersected with Rte 12, the conduit between Chicago, Illinois and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Many more towns and cities from the U.S. Canadian border to the far northwest and to the Atlantic Ocean in the far southeast.

Six weeks earlier, the first Tuesday after the first Monday of September that followed the first Sunday in September that was also Labor Day, I had been delighted to walk into my Fifth Grade Classroom in North Barrington Elementary School.

The bid windows all along the eastern wall of the classroom were almost half as tall as the wall itself. Bright morning sunlight streamed into the room and washed out the various shades of green as the scene beyond the school grounds gave way to mossy hills, scattered woods, the white boards of paddock fences and the horizon bathed in light. A red barn alongside a modern single-floored stone house could be seen just this side of the visible horizon.

Since the first day of school a year before this, I had known that the stone house was lived in by Carol and her family and in the red barn and adjoining paddock lived Carol's red Shetland pony, Holly, with white blaze on her fore-face, white main, white tail and white "knee socks" visible above her hooves on each leg.

Carol was my first friend who did not live in Tower Lakes, our community. You had to cross Illinois Rte 59 and go straight east a country mile and a half on Indian Trail until you reached Arrowhead Lane And turned right, going straight south. About a mile and a half up and down the undulating asphalt of the curving Arrowhead Lane was Carol's house.

Then Arrowhead Lane dead-ended into Miller Road and After you had turned left, heading east again, you could turn right into any of five roads that led into the community called "Biltmore" on Grassy Lake.

This was the lake community of families with fathers who for the most part made a lot more money than most of the fathers in Tower Lakes. The Biltmore fathers were airline pilots, lawyers, stock brokers and/or people who had grown up with and continued to have access to trust funds.

As the colors of the sky changed from the deep blue of harvest time to pinks and reds and oranges and the purple dusk began to enfold the woods and Lakes, the grand great orange hunters' moon peaked over the trees in the woods on the western horizon, occluded by each forested hillside.

On that first day of Fifth Grade six weeks before, the kids were taking up their places in a different formation than they had ever seen. Instead of single modern desks and unconnected student chairs, there were tables that three students could comfortbly sit at.

Our bus had been the last one to arrive t the school that morning. Out of it had poured kindergarteners; primary school first, second and third graders; intermediate students for fourth, fifth and six graders; and the junior high-aged seventh and eighth graders, although at the time they were not called that.

We stepped up two long steps into the building, walked through the corridor separating the primary school classrooms. If we were lucky, Dr. Kishkunas, our principal, was not scowling at us from the doorway of the school office at the north end of the Primary Class Hall.

Those of us who no longer belonged in the primary hall classrooms zigged left and then right just before we would have been able to go into the gymnasium that also had folding lunch tables with benches that came out of cabinets along the far wall.

This was taken care of by our janitor and our lunch lady. And it happened about an hour before our lunchtime when the kindergarteners has a snack of graham crackers and that ever-so weak orange juice or a carton of milk with that dairy cow, Daisy, drawn on the sides off the small boxes with lids that looked like roofs.

When empty, those cartons became piggy banks covered with construction paper under the careful instructions and remonstrance of our wonderful but elderly art teacher, Mrs. Palmer. They were used to collect donations for the children still starving in Europe.

And at Halloween they were covered with orange construction paper on which we drew full moons and pumpkins, witches hats and broomsticks and while we eagerly took handfuls of candy from bowls or were given home made very sticky popcorn balls or caramel apples, we said, "Trick or Treat for UNICEF'". And the moms and dads who were our neighbors, or the little children who were too young to go out after dark put pennies, mostly, but also nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars or dollars until the little house-shaped banks were heavier than our paper bags or pillow cases full of candy.

We begged whatever adults stood near the curbs of the streets of our communities to hold the full or nearly full UNICEF receptacles. Or they put them in red wagons or strollers or fancy baby buggies with huge wheels and springs that 17th century stagecoachers would have been proud to boast about while transporting people heading out to the Wild, Wild West. So the UNICEF containers were placed inside wagons and strollers and baby buggies . . . and even in some wheel barrows where infants or toddlers sat or laid down, awake or asleep, silent or wailing because they were too little to go to the doors of our neighbors houses.

And one parent, or grandparent or even an aunt or an uncle, a babysitter or kid sitter or neighbor had to hold the fort at the house they called home so that no mischievous kids would trick the house or the people in the house upon finding no candy or inferior treats.

Seems like I might have lost track of so,thing.

PLease let me get back to you sometime tomorrow, Beloved. It is almost 3:30 am and Dad has on,y been asleep for about twenty-two minutes.

Okay?

Thanks so much. 😊👌🌌🌈🎆🌊🌊🐋🌊🌺❤💕👌😊😎