My clock radio turned on. Frank Sinatra was singing…

I said that’s life (that’s life)
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Stomping on a dream
But I don’t let it, let it get me down
‘Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin’ around

I hadn’t been awake, but I hadn’t been asleep either, I’d been in that kind of inbetween place. It was Monday morning of the last week of school before the two-week Christmas vacation. I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep since I’d woken up in the middle of the night after this weird dream of being in a giant house where zombies had taken over the bottom floor and I had to go upstairs, and then up into the attic as they kept looking for me. The attic had three regular walls but the fourth one was like a giant glass window with some kid behind it looking at me and looking worried. I asked if he could hear me but he didn’t respond, so I figured he couldn’t. I could hear the zombies downstairs and I kept looking at the staircase afraid they would come up in the attic and find me.

After I woke up from the dream I tried to get back to sleep but I was thinking about all the stuff I was worrying about at school – my French test this Wednesday, writing up my science experiment on plant and animal cell structure, and our test Thursday in Band. Would Myrna keep bugging me to talk to Rose in Homeroom, but I didn’t want to because Lance, Danny and Ben would tease me about it and ask me if Rose was my girlfriend and if we’d made out yet. But mostly and worst of all, we were supposed to swim all week in Phys Ed, which meant swimming NAKED, so that all the other kids could see my tiny penis with no hairs around it.

And then suddenly my clock radio turned on because it was morning. Well not REALLY morning because it was still dark, but light or dark it was 7:15, time to get up and go to school.

I heard the wind blowing hard and a cat loudly meowing just outside my bedroom window. Our cat Midnight went out each night, even in the winter, but would want to come inside in the morning. He would often jump up on the roof part just under my window to try to get me to let him in.

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet
A pawn and a king
I’ve been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing

I swung myself out of bed to a sitting position, but suddenly my head and my whole body felt like it didn’t have any energy, and my stomach hurt too. I could still hear the wind, and Midnight crying.

Each time I find myself
Flat on my face
I pick myself up and get
Back in the race

I managed to raise myself to my feet and kind of staggered over to my desk and cranked open the bedroom casement window. It was still dark outside and I felt the cold blast of the wind against my face and shoulders and I shivered until my whole body was shaking. Midnight leapt up into the window sill and then onto my desk, meowing a thank you, his black fur was all puffed out from being out in the cold. He quickly jumped down to the floor and went to the closed door of my room, meowed loud and looked at me, wanting me to open it, which I did and he was off down the hall down to the basement where any food he had left might be. Sinatra continued…

That’s life (that’s life)
That’s life and I can’t deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out, but my heart won’t buy it
But if there’s nothing shaking, come this here July
I’m gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die

I wondered if he was really talking about killing himself, because life had gotten so bad. I guess people actually did that, but I couldn’t really imagine, and I got worried even thinking about it. Instead, I thought about the dream and especially that kid looking at me through that giant window in the attic, where the fourth wall should be. Why was he worried? Because I was about to be eaten by zombies? Or something else?

Then those so familiar beginning staccato notes began playing on the radio. The DJ talked over them…

That’s The Big 8! CKLW! Jumping right back on the gas pedal. Diana Ross and The Supremes—get ready for the beat, it’s ’You Keep Me Hangin On.’

And like they always did, boom, right into the next song…

Set me free, why don’tcha, baby?
Get out my life, why don’tcha, baby?
‘Cause you don’t really love me
You just keep me hangin’ on

I flopped back on my bed, glad not to try to stand for a moment. Sure I didn’t like getting up on a school morning but this felt different. Mom had been sick with what she said was a flu bug over the weekend. I think I had it too now. The Supremes song didn’t even get to finish on the radio…

CKLW 20/20 News interrupts the Dusty Rhodes show for this news bulletin. Pentagon figures confirm another costly week in Vietnam. 123 U.S. servicemen killed in action, 517 wounded. Defense Secretary McNamara says the attrition strategy is working, with a staggering cost to the enemy, over a thousand confirmed Viet Cong and NVA dead in the same period. Back to the hits!

I wondered what it would be like to get shot or blown up in a war but just get wounded, I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be dead, if you would even know your were. Would being wounded hurt worse than anything else you had ever felt? And what if your arms got blown off. I remembered seeing some show or movie on TV where this soldier guy got his arm blown off but didn’t know it until he woke up in the hospital tent and screamed, “MY ARM! WHERE’S MY ARM!”

Even though I was thinking all that, I still had my arms, my bed still felt warm, and I still felt safe in my room. I closed my eyes.

There was a knock at the door of my room. I opened my eyes. My clock radio said it was fifteen minutes later.

“Coolie, are you up?” said mom’s voice outside the door.

“Uh, kind of”, I groaned, “I don’t feel very good.”

“Oh DAMN!” she said, “Have you got what I’ve got? Can I come in?”

“Okay”, I said. She came into the room in her pajamas and her hair all messed up, and put her hand on my forehead.

“You’re warm, sweety, DAMN!” she said, shaking her head, “You better stay home. I’ll call the school and call Lois to let Abby know you’re sick so she can get your assignments from your teachers.” Abby and I had a lot of the same classes and teachers, even though she had most of hers at different times of the day so we only had Math and Band together. She could tell me my assignments so I could keep up on reading and answering questions in my Unified Studies and Science classes, and problems in my Math class. French wasn’t great, because I sometimes couldn’t figure out how to pronounce all the new words, and we had that test this week. Mom knew some German, but she didn’t know any French.

I mean it wasn’t great being sick, though I didn’t feel too bad, but the great part was that I didn’t have to go to school! I didn’t have to walk all that way on a cold dark windy morning, only to get to a place I didn’t want to be for the next seven hours. Instead, I could do what I wanted to, except for going outside, like over to the park. I still had to do homework, though that didn’t take very long. I mean I LIKED learning stuff, I just didn’t like being packed in with all those other kids my age, all worrying about what I was doing or wasn’t doing.

I thought about my new Avalon Hill “Blitzkrieg” game set up under my bed, which I had really wanted to buy for myself ever since I first played Craig’s at his house back in October. A week ago Friday, mom had given me my one dollar weekly allowance when I got home from school, and with that I FINALLY had saved the eight dollars I needed to buy it, from allowance, raking leaves in the yard, and babysitting the kid that lived next door to us on Wells.

I was so excited about getting it, I didn’t even want to wait until the next day, Saturday, to go to Riders and buy it. So I didn’t tell mom that I was going to do that, since I knew it would be getting dark soon and I might not actually be riding home EXACTLY “when the street lights came on”, which was still mom’s one main rule for when I should head home.

I had also heard on the radio that Friday that there was this big “sit-in” by students at the University Administration Building against the Vietnam War and that President Hatcher, who was in charge of the University, had said he wasn’t going to call in the police to make the students leave. Mike and Frankie had also told me about it at school that day too, and Mike had said he might actually go. There had been a big protest on campus a couple weeks ago and Mike had gone to that one with his dad and mom and told me about it. He said that the University students were really mad that the University was going to give students’ grades to the Draft Board so they could go after students with bad grades and make them join the army and go fight in Vietnam. Students wanted a vote on whether the University got to do that. That made sense. Most college students weren’t 21 yet so they couldn’t do regular voting, but they should at least have a vote about that.

I had ridden my bike through campus, because I wanted to see what was going on. When I rode through the Diag and then down Williams Street by the Administration Building it was surrounded by students. A lot of them were carrying signs that said stuff like “We Won’t Go”, “Participatory Democracy”, and “End Student Rankings”, and they were yelling and cheering, plus yelling altogether stuff like “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Hearing them all yelling together made my whole body shiver with excitement, especially when they said the swear words. We kids, at least the older ones who were college students, were finally taking on the grownups, at least the ones who wanted us to be in the Vietnam War.

By the time I got to Riders the streetlights were already on. I bought the game and in this case actually started home AFTER the streetlights came on, but I figured it was wintertime and they came on really early, so that was okay. I mean mom only had a few rules she wanted me to follow, so I figured if I followed them, mostly, she wouldn’t try to be in charge of me all the time. That was pretty much how things had worked since I was a little kid.

Yeah I had fun playing “Blitzkrieg” with Craig at his house, but it wasn’t the same as having hours at home to play the game by myself. That gave me the chance to figure out the absolute best way to set up each side. I had the game set up under my bed, which was a big enough space to fit the larger board that was bigger than any of my other games. And because I was sick today and staying home, and it was right there under my bed, I could spend hours and hours doing that. If mom wanted to come in, I could quickly climb back into my bed before I told her it was all right. I wasn’t sure she’d get mad at me for playing my game while I was sick, but just in case.

The game was really neat. My other Avalon Hill games had a mapboard with four sections, this game had SIX, so it was a lot bigger, fifty percent bigger actually. It had parachuting and invading beaches like the “D-Day” game.

It was the first Avalon Hill game I had seen that had aircraft units, four different kinds including – Strategic, medium and tactical bombers, plus fighters. Each kind of air unit could do different stuff. The strategic bombers could fly a long way, 20 squares, and could bomb units or cities using a special “Strategic Attack Table”. Tactical bombers could only fly 8 squares, but could add their combat factor to a regular attack by your land units. Medium bombers could fly 10 squares and do both kinds of attacking. Fighters could “escort” your bombers to protect them from enemy fighters, or “intercept” the other side’s bombers during the other player’s turn. Strategic bombers could even do nuclear attacks, with its own special table, one per side per turn.

It had all kinds of tables where you rolled the dice to see what happened. It had this very different looking combat results table where you matched up the battle odds and the dice roll with a box with four numbers in it, and I realized it was just like the “Battle of the Bulge” game table only it was put together differently. It had a “Weather Table” like in “Stalingrad”, where you rolled the dice, and depending what turn it was, you could get good weather or maybe different kinds of bad weather that affected how fast your ground units could move, whether units could go to sea or land if they were already at sea, and whether you your air units could fly. And there were a bunch of other special tables for capturing minor cities, strategic bomber attacks, fighter vs fighter combat, even a nuclear bomb attack table.

It all made for so much more stuff to think about when you were planning where to set up your units at the beginning of the game, which was maybe my most favorite part of all of my Avalon Hill wargames. And the setup in this game took extra thinking, especially for the Red side, because even though the Blue side set up and moved first, the Red side had to set up any units they wanted to start the game at sea, so those units could do invasions on the first turn, BEFORE the Blue side started their setup. I guess that made sense because otherwise, the Blue side would have to set up their invasion defences without any idea what units the red side had at sea and in which areas.

One of the things that made the setting up extra complicated, and so also extra fun, was that there were all these “minor countries” between the Blue country and the Red country, and both sides spent the first couple turns of the game capturing all the cities in those countries so they became friendly to your side. There was a special combat results table for capturing minor cities, and like with regular attacks, the more factors you attacked with the better chance you had of capturing it. To make SURE you captured a city, you had to attack it with at least 20 attack factors, and then you rolled the dice to see how many factors you’d lose capturing it. And if you attacked with 24 attack factors, the number of factors you lost, depending on your roll, would be smaller. So you had to carefully plan out where you set up all your units so you could reach all those minor country cities on turn one and two with enough factors to make sure you captured them. Cities you couldn’t reach with regular land units you could attack with parachute units. And cities you still couldn’t get enough units to attack, you could use your tactical and medium bombers to help.

From having set up and played the first two turns several times now, it seemed the best strategy for the Blue side was to capture all the cities in the big five-city minor country in the north with the “Great Koufax Desert”, because you couldn’t really get to many cities in any of the other minor countries. The best strategy for the Red side on their first turn was then to capture all the seven cities in the two minor countries next to it. Then on the second turn, the Blue side would capture the three cities in the minor country in the middle of the board, plus two of the four cities in the last of the five minor countries, leaving the other two cities in that last minor country to be captured by the Red side in their half of the second turn. And learning from those other times, playing at least the first two turns capturing all the minor countries, small changes in your opening setup would not only help you on turn one, but also on turn two.

So in planning the opening setup for each side, I kept trying to figure out the exact best place to put all of both sides units on land, your units at sea, your parachute units and your aircraft units, to do your first move, AND SECOND MOVE, as best as possible.

I REALLY LIKED all the stuff you had to think about and figure out how best to set up both sides in the game, and I had spent all this past Saturday and Sunday doing that. Now that I was sick and staying home, I could spend all today too, if I wanted to. I mean I really liked setting up my other Avalon Hill wargames, but none of them had as much setting up as “Blitzkrieg” did. “D-Day” and “Battle of the Bulge” had a really fun setup, but just for the Germans. In “Afrika Corps” and “Bismarck” you had to set up both sides in certain places you couldn’t change. In “Waterloo” and “Stalingrad” you had to decide how to set up both sides, but there were way fewer units, so there wasn’t as much thinking involved.

***

My clock radio turned on at 7:15 in the middle of that new Monkees song, “I’m A Believer”…

What’s the use in tryin’? (hey hey hey hey)
All you get is pain (hey hey hey hey)
When I needed sunshine I got rain

Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
I’m in love, I’m a believer
I couldn’t leave her if I tried

I woke up from another weird dream where I was in this house, which I kind of lived in maybe but it had all these hallways and rooms and I kept finding new hallways and new rooms that I’d never been in before. Midnight was meowing really loud outside my window to be let in again. I got out of bed, turned off the radio, and cranked open the window and it was dark, cold and windy again and I cringed at the idea of having to walk to school in that. Midnight, his long fur even puffier than yesterday morning, jumped up onto the windowsill and into my room, then I let him out the door to head downstairs.

It was Wednesday now and I had been just as sick yesterday as I was on Monday. I still felt kind of weak, so I figured maybe I was still sick. I was kind of hoping that I still was, because I didn’t want to go to school. I had had plenty of school already since seventh grade started back in September and I needed that break that was supposed to start this coming Friday.

I could hear the TV on in mom’s room. I could tell it was that “Today” show, because I recognized that Hugh Downs guy’s voice. I got back in bed and figured I’d wait until 7:30 and see if mom came in to check on me again to see if I was still sick. I snuggled under the covers, feeling warm and safe in my room if only I didn’t have to go to school again.

I did THINK about school. About Myrna pestering me in Homeroom to talk to Rose since we had danced at the school Sock Hop several weeks ago. And then Lance or Danny probably teasing me that Rose was my girlfriend and me saying she wasn’t, which was part of the reason I wasn’t talking to her in Homeroom, because everyone would be watching me. About my French test today, I still wasn’t sure about all those verb conjugations, and I really did not want to take it unless I was sure I would do really good. And my Band test tomorrow, we were going to have to play scales and then a part from that “Prelude and Fugue” piece we were working on. And oh man, I’d almost forgotten, swimming today, tomorrow and Friday in Phys Ed, swimming NAKED that is, so all the grownup teachers would be happy that there weren’t any of our wet bathing suits stinking up our lockers. Unlike yesterday and Monday, I didn’t fall back asleep, but just kept thinking about school, but feeling safe from it as long as I was under the covers.

Finally there was a knock at the door.

“Come in”, I said weakly, weaker than I really was. Mom opened the door and peeked around the corner.

“How you feeling?” she asked. It was morning but she looked tired too. “I’m feeling a little better today but I’m not over it yet.”

“A little better”, I said, “But not good.” She pushed her lips together and nodded.

“We should probably just tell your school that you’ll be out for the rest of the week”, she said. YES, I thought, that sounded good. No more tests, no swimming naked, no more Myrna and Lance until next year! “I’ll call Lois and get Abby to get all your assignments. Any other loose ends?” That was funny, “loose ends”, something grownups would say but kids never did.

There actually was one of those. I had finished reading this book I got from the school library called “The Angry Planet”, and it was due back by the end of the week or else I’d have to pay a fine for each day it was late. I gave it to mom to give to Abby or her mom so Abby could return it. Of course that was one extra book Abby would have to carry to school on a cold morning and I wondered if she’d get mad at me.

I had been thinking about the book’s story a lot and had told it to David while I was reading it and he liked it too. We had talked about making our own story about it down in the basement. In the book story this professor guy in Scotland and his friend built a spaceship to go to Mars. When they were about to leave, the professor’s nephew and two other kids snuck on board and hid, and the professor didn’t find them until after the ship took off so he couldn’t take them back to Earth. The professor’s nephew was 11 years old like I was.

So they met these tall friendly plant people on Mars called the “Beautiful People”, who just kind of moved around without having actual feet like an animal and talked using “telepathy”, which was like talking with your mind to the other person’s mind. The Beautiful People took the Earth people to their city, which was made of glass with a giant glass dome over it. But there were also these OTHER Martians, short plant people called “The Terrible Ones”, who looked like giant mushrooms with powerful “tendrils” which I guess were like octopus tentacles.

So in the story the Terrible Ones hated the Beautiful People and wanted to destroy them. They finally attacked the Beautiful People’s city, and because they were stronger at fighting, they finally took it over and either killed or captured all the Beautiful People. The Earth people were able to escape in their spaceship with just one of the Beautiful People, a kid plant person who had made friends with the Earth kids, but it got sick on the spaceship ride back to Earth and died, and as his body began to decay, they had to put it out of the airlock and watch it burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

***

When David got home from school at lunchtime he had come up to my room and knocked on the door. I could tell it was him and not mom by the way he knocked, just kind of banging on the door, while mom always did three quick knocks then stopped. I was lying on the floor looking at my Blitzkrieg game and just told him to come in.

“Are you still sick?” he asked, like I should be well by now and maybe I really wasn’t sick anymore but just pretending so I could stay home.

I looked at him and asked, “What do you think?”, which was something that the cool kids at school said when they didn’t want to answer something. It worked. He looked at me and wrinkled his nose and thought of something else to talk about.

“You know that ‘Angry Planet’ story you were telling me about?” he asked, “I got the book out from our school library and started reading it. We should play that in the basement. I was thinking we can make the Beautiful People and the Terrible Ones out of Tinker Toys.”

It was a good idea, but I didn’t want to tell him that so that he might think that HE was the one with all the good ideas. I just looked at my game, pushed my lips together and nodded and said, “Maybe.”

“Anyway”, he said, not sounding like such a little kid anymore, “Let’s talk about it when I get back home this afternoon. I gotta eat lunch and get back out there for the soccer game before class.”

I recalled the daily soccer games at my old school each school day, before morning and afternoon class, even in the winter or when it rained, but it was always between the sixth graders on one side and the fourth and fifth graders on the other.

“What”, I said, kind of shocked, finally looking at him now, “You’re in third grade and they let you play?”

“Yeah”, he said, “The sixth graders are SO good that the fourth and fifth graders need extra help to not get beaten to smithereens. But the sixth graders don’t know what grade we’re all in. We’re just a bunch of little kids that they beat really bad. But if there enough of us, well… it gets more fair. Games should be fair, right? Not wipeouts.” I liked that he was kind of deferring to my opinion, even though I was sick.

He headed downstairs to eat lunch and I decided to head down too. As we came down the stairs into the living room, mom was at the round table eating a sandwich and drinking a Tab. She was still wearing her pajamas like I was. You got to wear pajamas in the daytime when you were sick.

“You guys can fix your own lunch”, she said, “We’ve got a loaf of bread, ham and bologna, cheese, and Banquet bags if you want to do that. Also a few cans of soup, mostly vegetable, I ate all the chickennoodle, sorry.”

She looked at David and said, “David… maybe Coop can help if you need to heat anything in the saucepan.” David made kind of a grunting noise, because he didn’t like that mom still worried about him boiling water or heating up soup. Like you had to be a big kid, like me, to cook stuff, and she still thought he was a little kid. I mean he had kind of burned up one of our saucepans the first time he tried to heat up soup, but I think he learned his lesson.

The Banquet bags were frozen bags with sauce and either chicken or Salisbury steak. You stuck them in a saucepan with boiling water until they got unfrozen and warmed up. Then you cut off the top of the bag and fished out the meat and put it on one piece of bread, then put another piece on top of that and then poured all the sauce stuff over that second piece of bread and ate it with a fork and maybe a knife too, cutting hunks of gravy-soaked bread off with some meat in between. Mom made them sometimes with just one piece of bread underneath and none on top. She called that “open faced”.

I made the Chicken à la King, putting the two white rectangles of chicken between two pieces of Wonder bread and pouring the white gravy with little peas and mushrooms in it over the top. David, who I think was still mad about mom saying he needed help heating something up in the saucepan, had a ham and cheese sandwich with mustard, because he could make that one without asking me for help.

As David and I ate at the round table in the living room, mom said, “You’re looking better Coolie, looks like you’ve got your appetite back. That’s a good sign. If you feel up to it, you might want to head back to school in the morning.” I thought about that Band test tomorrow and that I’d rather deal with that, do some kind of makeup, in January.

“I don’t know”, I said, shaking my head, “It might get worse again if I went back to school.” That sounded pretty good. Better than “I don’t want to go back to school”.

“Well”, she said, nodding slowly, “It’s your call.” I nodded slowly like her, trying to look thoughtful. I liked that she said it was “my call”. Cool, I thought, no more school til January.

When I finished my lunch, David had already headed back out for the lunchtime soccer game before afternoon class started. I told mom I was going to head back up to my room to “rest”. She said that was probably a good idea and “smart not to push it”. I always liked when people said I was smart, mom especially.

I went back to my room, closed the door, “rested” on the floor and continued to play my Blitzkrieg game. Eventually I heard mom coming upstairs and the TV turned on. It was time for her to watch her favorite soap operas.

I heard that guy’s voice on the TV through the wall between our rooms. “And now for the next 30 minutes… As the World Turns. Brought to you today by Ivory Soap. 99 and 44 one-hundredths percent pure… It floats!” I figured she’d be watching her favorite daytime shows for at least the next hour and a half. After “As the World Turns” was “Days of Our Lives”, when the announcer guy said, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Lives.” And after that that new game show she really liked, “Hollywood Squares”.

***

I had been playing my Blitzkrieg game all morning and eventually got tired of it after lunch. I could hear the “Hollywood Squares” show start on mom’s TV. I put on my bedroom slippers and headed downstairs to the basement. The furnace, which was on, made its usual deep moaning noise and the basement was plenty warm though it was really cold outside. Our cat Midnight was asleep on the washing machine. One of his eyes opened just enough to see it was just me and it closed again.

At the bottom of the stairs I looked around the basement. It wasn’t as nice as our old basement, which I always thought was the best room of our whole old house. That one divided up into four quadrants. To the left of the bottom of the stairs was where all my toys were on the brick and board shelves, and later where the walk-in closet was in the corner. Then on the other half of the left side was where our TV used to be and the white table with the metal legs that mom would fold laundry on, or she’d set up the ironing board to iron while she watched. To the right of the stairs was the furnace, and behind it the laundry room that had the washing machine and the big concrete sinks. The final quadrant, on the other half of the right side was dad’s office, with his desk, brick and board bookshelves, his wood spin-around office chair and the rug that was now rolled up in our attic. Three of the four sides had two narrow windows that looked up and outside, into the yard or driveway. I liked that basement, not only because it had all my and David’s toys, but dad spent a lot of time down there in his office, mom doing laundry and ironing and folding clothes, and also everyone watching TV.

This basement was kind of shaped the same way, but with the front part of the furnace right at the bottom of the stairs, dividing the place into two sides. On the right side were our brick and board toy shelves with our toys and our main play area. Also on that side closer to the stairs was that coal closet where we stored some stuff but rarely went into because it always felt kind of creepy in there. To the left of the furnace was where the washer and the dryer were, with two big concrete “utility” sinks in between. The other corner to the left had that crazy door into our underground garage, which was too small to drive our car down into, but where we kept our bicycles.

David and I spent time down here in the basement playing with our toys, but not as much time as we used to in the old house. At this house we spent more time upstairs in our bedrooms, listening to records, David drawing, me playing my wargames, or us watching the little TV in mom’s room. And mom still went down here to do the laundry, but it just wasn’t the same as in the old house where all four of us were still together and we all spent A LOT of time down in THAT basement.

We had two of the cylinder shaped cans of Tinker Toys, but they had a lot more in each of them because besides the original can mom and dad got me for Christmas when I was three years old, I had gotten three other cans as birthday presents from Molly. One for my fourth birthday and one for my fifth, when she lived across from us on Prescott Street, and we played together all the time and used Tinker Toys for everything, including Martian dinosaurs when we played Jink Island. Then when she came to my tenth birthday party, which was at our new house, she got me a THIRD can of Tinker Toys as a present, and that time she was just being silly, saying “you can never have too many Tinker Toys”.

I REALLY liked that she did that and said that. I mean you wouldn’t think that you’d want to get a present that was kind of a joke, but this was different. She hadn’t invited me to her latest birthday party, and I hadn’t seen her in over a year, so I wasn’t sure she even liked me anymore, even though we had been best friends when we were little and she lived across the street. But the whole thing about saying you can never have too many Tinker Toys was what I remembered she said when she gave the third can for my fifth birthday. She was making a joke about how she always got me Tinker Toys because liked playing with them WITH me. And I mean it was also TRUE… you could never have too many. It was like one of those jokes you have with one person but nobody else gets it.

I dumped one can out on the floor, and all the wooden disks and colored wooden sticks, one color for each size, rattled and rolled on the concrete floor, some of the disks rolling away from the rest of the stuff. I thought about Molly. I hadn’t seen her since we spent that week together at Longnook beach on Cape Cod back in August. She was lucky that she was still in sixth grade and didn’t have to do junior high yet. And she was going to that “University School”, which had elementary, junior high and high school at the same school, so maybe she’d even be lucky next year and not have to go to a big new school with a thousand kids she didn’t know like I had to. I guess I missed her.

I didn’t want to think about that anymore, so I went back to thinking about making Beautiful People and Terrible Ones from “The Angry Planet” book out of Tinker Toys. I figured for the goodguy Martians, the Beautiful People, who were supposed to be tall and slender and didn’t really have arms, I’d just stick a Tinker Toy stick into the middle of one of those connector disks and stand it up with the disk at the bottom. I’d use one of the longer red, green or purple ones.

To test it out, I did one with a purple stick, one with a green, and one with a red, and I got out one of our plastic soldiers, who would be the earth people, to compare it to. The purple ones seemed just too tall, but the green and red ones seemed good – the green ones could be the grownups and red ones the kids.

For the badguy Terrible Ones, I’d use all the short yellow, orange and blue sticks in the side holes of disks to make big flat octopus like creatures. And I could use a bunch of those purple sticks, stuck in the side holes of a disk, to be the leader of the Terrible Ones. That way I could use pretty much all the sticks and regular disks to make as many of the two types of Martians as possible.

I heard the front door open above me and figured that David must be home from school. Then I heard his feet running up the stairs. I figured he probably would go look for me in my room. Then pretty soon I heard him above running back down the stairs, around the living room into the kitchen and then down the stairs into the basement where I was.

“There you are”, he said, “What are you making?”

I looked at him, grinned, and said, “What do you think?”

“Martians?”

“Yep!” I said, nodding, “I figure we can use soldiers to be the Earth people. Maybe ones without guns.”

He looked at the upright red and green sticks on disks and then the flat thing with the shorter sticks coming out of a disk in the center, nodding his head. “Okay”, he said, “But the Beautiful People don’t have arms?”

“Not really”, I said, “They just have tendrils.”

“But how do they carry spears when they’re soldiers during the war at the end?” he asked, like it was really important to figure this part out.

“Hmm”, I said, making a silly face, “I can’t think of EVERYTHING!”

He pushed his lips together while HE was thinking, then he finally had an idea. “What about we use one of those disks with the bigger hole in the middle and then put a red stick in one side and a smaller stick in the other to be the spear. Then put the disk with the big hole down onto the Beautiful Person’s stick?”

That seemed like a pretty good idea. I was a little mad that I didn’t think of that, but I guess it was better if I didn’t figure EVERYTHING out and left some things for him to figure out.

So just like I did with my Avalon Hill games, David and I spent most of our time setting up the whole Martian world in the basement. Our first idea was to make the basement stairs the Beautiful People’s city, but when mom came down into the basement to do laundry she said we couldn’t leave stuff on the stairs because she was likely to step on something, fall, and “break her neck”. David and I joked with her that she and other grownups were always worried about people breaking their necks, but we still had to use something other than the stairs. So we moved a bunch of our toys around on the basement board and brick shelves and emptied one whole set of shelves to be the glass city. The glass part was pretend. We used red chalk to draw Martian canals on the concrete floor all over the basement. It looked pretty cool when we were done. Mom didn’t care because it was the basement, and she only went down there to wash clothes, but she did ask us to leave the laundry basket by the base of the stairs to catch all the clothes we put down the laundry chute.

We set up all our Tinker Toy Terrible Ones in all the places in the basement we didn’t usually go – under the big concrete utility sinks between the dryer and the washer, between the wall and the furnace, under the basement stair case, and in the coal closet.

We still had a toy spaceship to be the “Albatross” one from the book, which was good because we used up almost all the Tinker Toys making as many Beautiful People and Terrible Ones as we could, so there weren’t any left to BUILD a spaceship. We used plastic soldiers as the humans. Between the World War Two German and American ones, and the Civil War Union and Confederate ones, we found five that weren’t carrying guns.

So we played different parts of the story. The humans landing and being met by a bunch of the Beautiful People who take them down the dry canals to their glass city. Different attacks by the Terrible Ones and the Beautiful People soldiers with the spears fighting them off. The human kid, Mike, getting captured by the Terrible Ones and taken to a far corner of the basement. Then him escaping and wandering lost in the canals until he was spotted by Beautiful People on patrol.

We played out the various gatherings around the basement by the Terrible Ones as they decided they were going to attack the Beautiful People’s city. The Beautiful People found out from their scouts what was happening, and they recruited as many of the Tinker Toy people as possible to be soldiers, giving each David’s special Tinker Toy spear. Also trying to fortify their shelf city on their side of the basement. The humans tried to help but they couldn’t do very much. The giant spears were too huge for their small bodies to use. The humans could tell the Beautiful People were worried. There were more of the Terrible Ones than them and their enemies were stronger as well.

Finally the war began. David and I decided that the Beautiful People could move around much faster than the Terrible Ones, so they used the canal system like roads in my board games to move around more quickly and concentrate all their warriors to attack one isolated group of advancing Terrible Ones. This worked pretty well, but the Beautiful People’s warriors took their losses, sticks separated from spools indicating they were dead.

But their enemies were just too strong and too many and the Beautiful People retreated to defend their last refuge, their glass city. They didn’t want to, but the Beautiful People recruited some of their kids to be warriors too. Their other kids and the humans helped build up their defences in the city. And the final attack came and the siege of the city began, after much losses on both sides the Terrible Ones took control of the lowest shelf of the city and started to attack the shelf above.

Up on the top shelf, the leaders of the Beautiful People had a meeting, all their disks with tall green sticks arranged in a circle, and decided that the humans should try to escape to get to their spaceship and return to Earth. But there was one secret canal to take to best avoid the Terrible One patrols, but none of the humans knew the way, so one of the Beautiful People kids, a disk with a smaller red stick, too young to use a spear and be a warrior, volunteered to lead the humans back to their ship. He had already made friends with the human kids.

So that night, expecting the big final Terrible Ones’ attack once it was light, the Humans snuck out the side of the Glass City down the secret canal led by the young Martian. All the Terrible Ones were too busy making their final assault on the city to notice them. So they all made it to the spaceship, off in the corner of the basement between the staircase and the coal room, but from there watched in horror as the Glass City was finally captured by the Terrible Ones. And they took off, not being able to watch any more as the last of the Beautiful People were killed or captured.

Though in the book the young Martian died because he couldn’t survive in the human air on the spaceship, David and I decided to pretend what would’ve happened if he had stayed alive and gotten back to Earth. We figured when they landed, there would be people coming to watch them land and greet them. The humans would have come out of the ship, but left the Martian kid in it until nighttime when all the other people went home and were asleep and then snuck him into the professor’s house.

David wondered what he might EAT, but I said since they were plants maybe they had roots instead of feet that they’d push down in the ground and get nutrients from the dirt or suck water up from a bowl on the ground. Maybe he’d live in the attic of the professor’s house where no visitors to the house would ever go and then he’d sneak out at night to get his “food” from the ground. But we figured other people might eventually find out, and the government would come and take him away to be questioned and studied, or maybe even killed, like that Klatu guy in that movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”.

But he was a NICE alien and just a kid. Maybe the professor and his friend the writer, with the help of the three kids, could keep him safe and teach him stuff about the Earth because even though he might not be able to read, listen to the radio or watch TV, he could read the minds of the professor and the kids who could. Maybe he could even learn to read himself by being next to the humans while they read and hear each word in their mind as they read. Maybe the way mom said she did with me and David when we were little, running her finger under the words as she read them while we watched.

***

When David and I took a break from playing the “Angry Planet”, we set down our tabletop hockey set on the concrete floor of the basement, in the middle of the Tinker Toy Beautiful People and Terrible Ones and played a “regular season” hockey game between my made up Cooperstown Cats team and David’s Davidville Destroyers. I always controlled the blue players and David the red.

I had never played REAL hockey with other kids, because I never figured out how to skate very good, even though both Allmendinger and Burns Park that we lived next to had skating rinks in the winter. Lots of my Burns Park friends COULD skate and DID play, like Mike, Andy, Todd, Teddy and Cal. Even Billy and Gill played hockey, though they weren’t very good. Since I could barely skate, I didn’t go anywhere near the skating rink in winter time, especially when I saw that my school friends were playing. Since I liked to consider myself good at sports, it was embarrassing not to be able to do that one.

But David and I had learned all the stuff about how professional hockey games were played watching “Hockey Night in Canada” last year, I more than David of course, because I was older. That included all the positions, the different lines, goals and assists, the rules about “icing” and when you had a faceoff, plus the different sort of penalties, minors and majors. And I had listened carefully to how the announcers and commentators did the “play-by-play”. The announcer would say something like, “What a GREAT pass from Delvecchio to Howe giving him an open shot for the score.” And then the other commentator guy would say something like, “That’s right, Bill”, using the announcer’s first name, “Though usually for the Red Wings it’s the other way around, since Delvechio leads in goals scored, and Howe in assists.”

So to make our own pretend games more fun, last season I had started trying to be like the announcer guys on Hockey Night in Canada, pretending other people were watching OUR game on TV and I was giving them the play-by-play and commentary. And not only had David and I made up our own teams, we had made up all the players too with their own stories. We even had names for our coaches and the owners of our teams.

My team’s “first line” center was “Steve Scimitar” and the left-winger was “Harry Hendricks”. My right-winger was “Joe Dough”, and my defensemen were, “B.B. Baker” and “Calvin Poindexter”, who was like the super smart guy on my team, like Poindexter in the Felix the Cat cartoons. Finally my goalie was “Marty Wall”, and he had acquired a new nickname since winning the MVP last year, “The Brick”.

David’s first line guys, whose names I had helped him come up with, were “Jerry Richardson” at center, “Bobby Blast” and “Shorty Long” on the wings, “Ronny Way” and “Lester Best” on defence, with “Johnny Johnson” in goal. The Destroyers’ mascot was Godzilla, of course, David’s favorite mythical creature, whose picture was worn proudly on the front of every Destroyers’ jersey.

I even made up a “second line” for my team, with “Sonny Starr” at center, “Jack Black” and “Jason Argo” at the wings and “Dicky Deets” and “Benny Boyd” on defense. “Jason Argo” I had so cleverly named after “Jason and the Argonauts”, one of those Greek mythology stories I got to read in fifth grade that had that really cool movie with the skeleton soldiers I’d seen on TV. And “Benny Boyd” was named after my crazy school former friend Billy Boyd.

And just like the announcers and commentators on Hockey Night, I’d talk about what was going on with the teams’ coaches and owners. The Cats coach was high energy “Kitty Mcbee” and the owner “Manfred J. Sedgwicks III”, the son of “Manfred J. Sedgwicks II” who owned the “Cooperstown Star” newspaper, and grandson of the superrich Manfred J. Sedgwicks, who made his millions selling lumber in the greater Cooperstown area. The Destroyers were led by longtime award-winning coach, “Rodney Zilla”, better known as “Rod Zilla”, of course. The team’s owner was the coach’s dad, “G.D. Zilla”, of course. “G” for “Gunther” though, not “God”.

David loved all the crazy names I’d come up with last year for players, coaches and owners, and this year I’d added names for the announcer and the commentator. At the start of each one of our games I’d announce, “It’s Zeke Speaker, as always, doing your play-by-play, ably assisted, as always, by the ever knowledgeable Les D. Tails.” I thought the commentator’s name was especially funny because his job was to provide MORE details.

So I’d talk away as we played, and David liked how I’d do the different voices for the two, kind of barking out Zeke’s words through my nose, but then Les’ softer, lower voice. Zeke’s play-by-play, “Bobby BLAST’S one into the corner of the Cats’ net despite a lunging attempt at a save by Wall”, followed by Les’ comment, always using the announcer’s first name of course, “That’s right Zeke, no brick wall THIS time.”

And I still had that special thing I could do with that blue leftwinger, where, while he was moving the puck AWAY from David’s goalie, like he was going to pass it to the center, I’d quickly twist his control rod the other way, and the guy’s stick would whirl around and whack the puck for a shot, sometimes catching David’s goalie, Johnnie Johnson, off guard for the goal. Since the announcer called it the “Hendrix Hook”, I only did it when my first line was on the ice, featuring Harry Hendrix at left wing.

“Hendrix fakes a pass to Scimitar at center, but now whirls with his patented HENDRIX HOOK… SCORES! Johnson never saw it!”

Last year, the Cats and the Destroyers had won their divisions and played in the championship series against each other for our version of the Stanley Cup, called the “Silver Domino”, a domino I had painted silver with model paint, glued on the top of an upside-down dixie cup painted blue.

It wasn’t so much like I was playing AGAINST David. It was more like we were each in charge of one side in making an interesting story together, that I would announce for all those pretend fans watching the game on TV, like Hockey Night in Canada, only “Hockey Night in the Basement” or “Hockey Night on Concrete”. So the Cats ended up winning last year’s championship against the Destroyers four games to three in an exciting full seven-game series. We had both agreed this year that we’d play our Silver Domino championship again, once the real Stanley Cup started.

***

So I ended up spending the WHOLE WEEK home from school. I don’t remember having done that since when I got Chicken Pox in second grade. Though I was pretty sick, at least the first couple days, it was actually really nice not going to school all week. Abby brought me my assignments and I got them all done. I really only had to work on school stuff maybe two or three hours a day, not the SEVEN hours a day I spent at school when I went. Of course I didn’t get to do Band, and though Abby told me what piece we were working on, I really didn’t even practice that week. And I didn’t do Phys Ed, but what I missed was swimming, NAKED swimming that is, which I HATED, more than anything else I had to do at school.

Since today had been the last day of school before Christmas break, I didn’t have to go back to school for another TWO MORE WEEKS. Of course, when I finally went back to school in early January, it would probably feel extra worried because I’d been away three whole weeks, and missed my French and Band tests. But for now, still weeks away, I could pretend like that wasn’t going to happen and just enjoy stuff.

Tomorrow, dad was coming over and would take David and I to buy a Christmas tree and help us set it up in the living room by the windows. That was the best place for it because then you could see it from outside, especially at night, since we didn’t have any outside Christmas lights, only the ones we put on the tree. Dad said he would help us do the lights, because he was taller and could reach the top of the tree where we would always have a white bulb by the silver aluminum foil star that mom had made for the top. The other lights were blue, yellow, green, red and purple. David and I would put on all the ornaments, which was our favorite part. And then when we got done, mom would always hang the tinsel, because she liked to do it a special way, one strand at a time, so no strand got tangled with another one.

Most of the time when dad came over, usually to pick us up or bring us home, he didn’t come into the house. He only came in if mom needed him to fix something, like when the leg broke on the kitchen table and dad had to nail it back together, or when she wanted him to take the boxes of his old books that were still in the attic. I guess he didn’t usually come in because they were divorced and mom was still mad at him. She still would yell at him on the phone sometimes at night and then cry after she banged the phone down and hung up. But now that it was Christmastime I guess it was okay if he came inside and even stayed for a while. Mom would even wish him “Merry Christmas, Eric” and not yell at him. That’s one of those things I really liked about Christmas, that it was more important than the things you were always mad about.

I mean Christmas was still one of my favorite times of the year. Before I started going to regular school six-and-a-half years ago, Christmas had been my absolute FAVORITE time of the year, and Christmas day my favorite DAY of the year. I mean the main reason was I liked getting all those presents, mostly interesting new toys that let me do more imagination playing. But it was also just all the stuff that was part of Christmastime. Buying a tree and then decorating it. Listening to or even singing all the Christmas songs, which seemed to make all the grownups happier and less worried about stuff and nicer to kids. There was even that funny satire song by Tom Lehrer that both David and I knew the words to and would sing even to mom when she wanted us to sing…

Christmas time is here, by golly
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don’t say when

Kill the turkeys, ducks, and chickens
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens
Even though the prospect sickens
Brother, here we go again

I even liked that it was cold and all the snow was on the ground.

But now, since I had to go to regular school EVERY YEAR, summer break had become my new absolute favorite time of the year. And that last day of school, when the last bell finally rang and we were finally done, was my new favorite day of the year, even better than Christmas and getting all those neat presents. But even though Christmas was just nine days from now, THAT day, the last day of school, was still SIX MONTHS away, and I really didn’t know how I’d make it that far.