Category Archives: Adventure

Clubius Contained Part 40 – Front Seat (August 1966)

As I walked by her open bedroom door, the TV was on and I could see all the pieces of paper on mom’s bed. I couldn’t quite see her, but I knew she was in there, sitting cross-legged at the head of her bed, trying to pay the bills. It was a thing she had to do each month, but it usually made her worried or even sad. Usually there wasn’t enough money to pay them all, but hopefully all the most important ones.

“Hey coolie”, I heard her say, hearing me out in the hall I guess, “Come in and sit with me while I pay the bills, okay?”

I never really wanted to do that, but I also didn’t want her to get all sad again, and usually when I was in the room with her and she could talk to me about stuff, she felt better.

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Clubius Contained Part 39 – Generals & Admirals (July 1966)

Besides doing stuff with my regular friends like hanging out at their houses, playing in the park, and playing Little League baseball, I had a secret life playing wargames with a different set of secret friends. None of my regular friends knew about my secret life, because I was worried they’d think I was weird like Duncan, and into strange stuff that was complicated and that they didn’t understand. That is except Mike, because he was the only one of my regular friends who I let come over to my house, so he had seen all my wargames, either in their boxes or set up on the table in my room.

And I only let Mike come over to my house because he knew that my mom and dad were divorced, but said he wouldn’t tell ANYONE, and he was the kind of person you could really trust. And when he came over and saw all my wargames, he was interested in them and why I liked to play them, though he didn’t want to play them with me. But again I told him not to tell any of my other friends and again he promised and I trusted him. I guess I didn’t trust any of my other regular friends not to think I was strange and even tell on me to my other friends if THEY came over to my house and saw my wargames or figured out that my dad wasn’t there anymore and he and mom were divorced.

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Clubius Contained Part 38 – Tube Benders (July 1966)

A bunch of us were hanging out at Arthur’s house, including Andy, Stuart, Frankie, Mike and Cal. It was the middle of July, which was the middle of summer, the middle of my favorite time of the year. Sixth grade and mom and dad’s divorce seemed so long ago and next fall and seventh grade still a ways in the future. It felt good, and at least for the moment I felt safe around all my “comrades”, that was the word Mike liked to use.

Arthur had this big house on Packard and an older brother AND sister. His brother was going into ninth grade at Tappan and his sister into eleventh grade at Ann Arbor High. We were down in his big basement, that wasn’t like mine but had rooms with carpets and doors that he and other people called “finished”, listening to music and talking. He had of course already played his still favorite song right now, “Wild Things”, by the British Band the Troggs a bunch of times…

Wild thing, I think I love you
But I wanna know for sure

… until the rest of us got sick of listening to it. I mean it was a really cool song, but not over and over and over again!

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Clubius Contained Part 37 – Last Day (June 1966)

It was Friday morning, the last day of school, and the CK DJ on my clock radio woke me up…

Twenty twenty weather word, “Ahhh”. For many of you out there, boys and girls, it’s the last day of school, the day of liberation. Sunny and low sixties this morning going up to mid seventies with some clouds in the afternoon for your BIG DAY. Oh and keep the faith, brothers and sisters, better times are ahead…

Then he played Stuart’s still favorite song I’d heard so many times now by the Isley Brothers…

This old heart of mine been broke a thousand times
Each time you break away, I fear you’ve gone to stay
Lonely nights that come, memories that flow, bringing you back again
Hurting me more and more

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Clubius Contained Part 36 – Pencils (May 1966)

It was May and it was spring, and there was less than a month left of school. I could feel summer wanting to start, I could feel other kids wanted it too. I SO wanted it to start, I was SO sick of school.

I mean Mrs Herman was all right as teachers go. She talked to us like we were regular people, not like we were grownups OR little kids. Like we were older kids, which we were. But even though she was definitely in charge of what we were learning every day, she didn’t try to make us like it or be quiet in class all the time. It was like it was her job to teach and our job to learn, so we all just had to do our jobs. Some of what we learned was interesting and some wasn’t, but we just had to learn it all.

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Clubius Contained Part 35 – Thunderball (March 1966)

It was Saturday, and it was cold and gray and windy and wet outside. We were all still waiting for that first day of spring. You knew it when it came. All of a sudden the day would be a little warmer, the sun would shine, and there would be that energy in the air, that you could even feel in your body, like everything was suddenly coming back alive around you, and you could smell it in all the plants. Mom’s new friend Maryjane said that Mother Nature would flip a switch and it would suddenly be spring.

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Clubius Contained Part 34 – Cats & Satire (January 1966)

My legs were tired. We’d been moving all day along the side of these mountains. My pack felt heavy on my back, and my rifle, hung by its strap on my shoulder, banged against my body with each step. The regular army was after us and our commander said we couldn’t stop moving until we made it to the secret mountain sanctuary where we might be safe from the government soldiers, at least for a while.

One of the other guys whispered, “Commander, are you sure this is the right path?”

Then I heard strange people singing. I couldn’t tell where their voices were coming from. I woke up. They were coming from the clock radio…

Stay on the right track
To Nine Mile and Mack
And get the best deals around
‘Cause Roy O’Brien has the best deals in town

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Clubius Contained Part 33 – Divorce (November 1965)

School was school, and there were still six weeks of it until Christmas vacation. Mrs Herman had us doing more homework and more writing to “get us ready for junior high”, which was that Tappan place that you could see on the hill as we drove by it on Stadium. It always looked to me more like a factory without any smokestacks than a school. Mike said it looked like a prison.

The story problems and algebra stuff in math were kind of neat, but we just kept doing them until they got boring. I liked learning more about the ancient history stuff that mom had read to us in the “Child’s History of the World”, all those “empires” and “civilizations” in the “fertile crescent” between those two rivers. But it wasn’t like all us kids talked about it at recess, like my friends and I used to talk about the Civil War in second and third grade. We didn’t buy “Ancient World” trading cards like the Civil War cards we had, or that I even made. And for science, the experiments, like looking in microscopes at “cells”, were always neat, but we didn’t do those very much.

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Clubius Contained Part 32 – Sixth Grade (September 1965)

I was in the attic of that giant house again, but there was still a stairway over in the corner going up to what was another attic above the one I was in. As I climbed the stairs and looked around this new attic above the one I’d been in, there was yet another wood staircase going up, but how could that be because from the outside the house didn’t look tall enough to have so many attics above each other. What if there was no top? Could that be possible? Should I stop trying to see what was at the top of every new staircase?

I decided to go up this one more staircase. As I walked up the bare wood steps and my head got high enough to look around, I couldn’t see another staircase, but I saw dad crouched in a corner crying. He looked like he was my age, but I knew it was dad somehow. He didn’t look at me but spoke.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. I woke up, and I was shocked to see dad, regular grownup dad, looking at me in bed from the doorway of my room with a worried look on his face.

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Clubius Contained Part 31 – Cape Cod (August 1965)

I was in this giant house where I kept going up in the attic but there was still another attic above it, so I went up there too. In each new attic I found a different stairway that went up to ANOTHER attic above the one I was on. As I walked up the creaky stairs I felt something wiggling my big toe. Wait… I was under a blanket. Where was I?

A grownup man’s voice that sounded familiar said, “Wake up sleepyheads. It’s four in the morning. Time to go”, and I suddenly remembered. We were going to drive to Cape Cod.

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