David's Dead!

What I hate is when I’m telling a good long story and as soon as I’m done the person I told it to starts telling a similar but slightly different story. That’s what I’m gonna do right here.

We grew up at 669 Wimbush Road in Macon. I attended Rosa Taylor Elementary School, a half mile walk on two-lane neighborhood roads. I would make that walk to school every day. Not a terrible walk, even for a little first grader. After 5th grade my family moved out to Kathryn Drive. A modern new school air-conditioned school was being built a mile away from our new house. Until it opened in mid-year I would be able to stay in class with my longtime friends.

On the first school day after we moved I guess my mom drove me to Rosa Taylor. As a little 5th-grader I wasn’t clear about how I would get home. I didn’t like the idea of riding the bus and wanted my mom to pick me up. After school I waited for my mom as one by one all the buses drove away. Eventually I was the last one left at the school. Finally I started my solidary walk home, a distance of over 3-1/2 miles. As a kid a didn’t walk purposely, instead strolling along at a meandering pace. The distance seemed more like one hundred miles. The walk seemed to take forever. In my head I had been wronged and forgotten. When I finally got home I thought my parents would be happy to see me and apologize for the misunderstanding. Instead they were mad at me for not taking the bus. While I don’t carry a grudge about the long-ago incident, it is an event that I sometimes remember.

One other walking to school story. One afternoon in first grade I was walking home from school with my pal Doye Green. In those days before backpacks became de rigueure  we carried bulky booksatchels. On this day Doye and I were swinging our booksatchels at each other in sort of a mid-sixties elementary school version of a swordfight – Doye’s idea. I quickly tired of the violent game and decided to cross over to the other side of the narrow street. We were nearing the end of Crestline Drive, where Doye right and I went left on Woodridge Drive.

As a first-grader, I did the first-grade thing and step out into the street to my left without checking for oncoming traffic. The last thing I remember is the image of a burgundy station wagon to my left out of the corner of my eye. The driver who hit me happened to be the mother of a girl in my sister’s Girl Scout troop. She had scraped my unconscious body off the pavement, loaded me into her car, and carried me home. Doye ran home, bolted inside, and told his mother “David’s dead! David’s dead!”

The next thing I remember was waking up on my sofa at home. Out the big front window I could see the burgundy station wagon driving away. My mom took me to the hospital to get checked. No broken bones.