Flashback Friday

Housekeeping Chores: 

1.  Welcome to new BFE reader Kandi, a buddy from way back who somehow found this blog.  Glad to have you and thanks for the comments. 

2.  Two big snowfalls up North in two weeks has me squirming with envy.  

3.  Nice seeing Wombie down here this week. Headline next week about rising sea levels should focus on lost golf balls instead of global warming.

    

Flashback Friday

This is simply a nod to childhood friends.  You have seen the double lot all-purpose field at our home growing up.  It served as a baseball and football field and the giant tree in the yard as well.  It served as a magnet for neighbors to climb.  If you go back to the February 8th post of Flashback Friday you'll see the Seaton home that in one picture was painted yellow, and the second was white.  Bill was one of the neighbors and took full advantage of the big tree to climb, hide from the parents, and yell strange calls to anyone in their homes the East End.

Bill is in the middle here between Mark (L) and I.  It looks like we are perusing comic books.  Bill was an aggressively mischievous kid who was great fun and seemed to not really care about potential consequences.  He would be up for almost anything.  A couple years older than Mark and I , Bill, like I said was the model for misbehavior growing up.  

He would climb the tree and yell "SKKKKIIIIBBBBOOOOOOO!" as loud as he could.  This would be followed by "BBBBBBBBBBBBKKKKKKKKKKEEEEEE."  Bill had his own thing going on in his head, but it was fun to be there with him.  He also would respond with a bellowed "NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOO." whenever his mother, Doris would call for him to come home for supper.     

The Seatons, Doris and John, and their kids, Terry, Bill and Barb, were East Enders like us.  John ran the bank in Seaton that he got from his father, and his father's father started way back in 1891.  It is no longer the State Bank of Seaton, however, as it was sold and is now called Freedom bank.     

Here are the Blythe boys with terry Seaton a long time ago.  I'm the one on the right picking his nose.  Wombie is at the far left with Phil standing next to Terry.

Here is Bill, again, going against type playing the Minister, while we get hitched.  The short blond with Wombie is another neighbor, Jennifer Kingry and that's another Seaton, Barb with me.  Neither one of us looks too thrilled to be on this float in the parade except Mark who is probably thinking of the Honeymoon.  It's hard now to even imagine Seaton having a parade with floats.  Jennifer would go on to Hollywood and become an assistant director on the movie Lost Boys (look for her name next time you see that flick.

The Seaton East-End gang (and later country folk like Frank and Ivan) spent a lot of time with each other: peddling lemonade along the main drag and doing fairly well if I remember correctly.  We stopped a few cars by yelling "You lost your hubcap." at the corner then tossing an old hubcap on the street.  This later graduated to dressing like ghosts and floating across the road as the cars were coming into town.  We covered Seaton like a cold sweat but drew the line at malicious mischief.  We were kids, not wanton vandals.  The apex of our congress together may be  that dead badger we hoisted on the bank's flagpole with a Seaton Bank check in its paw.  Or maybe it was the time we seceded from the Union.  Or maybe the time we shot pop-bottle rockets at a confused county deputy?  Or Buster Board's gutters?  Or the many other countless adventures we hatched and shared with each other.  And then we grew up and put away our childish things.

Like seeds in a prairie milkweed pod that we used to dissect and throw to the wind,  so have our childhoods and those who we spent time with in those long lazy days when no calendar was needed.  Each day was pretty much like another, wake up have breakfast , play all day with friends and come home, have supper and to bed.  Mark is in Aledo, Jennifer is in Geneseo, Kim in New York City, Barb in the Quad-Cities, Terry in California, Phil in Port Byron, and me in exile in Florida.  Bill died in 2007 and is buried in Candor Cemetery just outside Seaton.

And in a way we're all in BFE.