There are places I remember

Horseshoe Hill was still standing last time I saw it 14 years ago. It actually shocked me to see it there. I was sure it would have been bulldozed flat with all the development going on in my old neighborhood.  

I spent a lot of time as a child at Horseshoe Hill. We played a lot there. We had wars there, fought major battles with other neighborhood kids. We built some incredible forts there.  The biggest fort we ever built was cut into the hillside and finally abandoned forever back in 1968. When I went home to see the old neighborhood back in 1990, the old cut out of our fort was still there, not even 20 some odd years of rain had worn it away completely.   

After it had been abandoned, I still used to go down there to smoke cigarettes. I kept hidden treasures in secret places there at Horseshoe Hill. Old cans of Folgers Coffee, buried beneath planks covered with dirt. Things like bullets and marbles eventually replaced with things like cigarettes and matches as I grew older.  It was a sacred place to me. A place I could be alone and think to myself. A place I felt safe.

I have a picture of me taken in the reservoir next to Horseshoe Hill. I am standing in 18 of water in a forest green Haines pocket tee and a pair of Levi 501s. My hair is cut short, for the first time in my life, almost as short as I wanted it to be. I have on some hippie love beads (where I got them I will never know). Most people I show that picture to think I am a guy in that picture. Folks seldom guess it is me.  I was 14 years old in that picture, looking silly, with a silly grin on my face.  I look gawky and so much the teenager I was morphing into.  

The old neighborhood has changed dramatically over the years. Where once there were vineyards there are now shopping malls and car dealerships. Where once we rode horses, bikes with butterfly handle bars and banana seats, minibikes and finally motorcycles, there is Capitalism abundant and overflowing.    

I don't miss my childhood. I was incredibly unhappy as a child. I do miss the innocence and the pure unfettered joy I could feel then. But I do not miss the pain and anguish of being born a boychild in a girl's body. That I think is a pain you never get over.  

When I am dead, no one will wonder about my youth when they find that picture as they clean out my things and throw them away.  No one will wonder who that boy/girl half child, half grow-up is, nor where it is he/she is standing, nor will they wonder why that stupid grin is on his/her face.  This is not a bad thing, it just is.  I do not look back in the bittersweet way I once did at those days and that young person grinning so stupidly.  I look back and see the indomitable human spirit at work in that child. Because after I am long gone, as with all flesh, that spirit is all that really matters and all that really survives in this world.  

On a final note, as I remember the 60's fondly, I will probably cry when Walter Cronkite dies.  I think Walter Cronkite represents my youth to me more than any other famous person I remember from my youth. He came into my home every night and told us how things were that day.  He cried in front of all of America when John Kennedy died. I will never forget that one thing, that moment when he broke down and shed tears on national television for John Kennedy.  

And that's the way it was.....