As befitting my age, and the circumstances of this brutal summer, I occasionally think about summers past.
I was remembering a summer day when I was nine in the North Texas town of Electra.
I often was shoeless in our neighborhood as were most of the other boys my age.
Anyway, one of the money raisers boys had back then was selling soda pop bottles.
We would get the princely sum of about two cents per bottle.
That was before Coke and the other top brands moved into aluminum cans, so most households accumulated lots of bottles.
So, one day I pile all of our bottles in the wheel barrow and proceed to push it to the grocer downtown, which was about 10 blocks from my house.
I was barefoot and by the time I’d gone about 100 yards pushing the wheel barrow on the sidewalks, I was seriously wondering why I didn’t take the precious few minutes it took to put on my sneakers.
Anyway, my delirious mind was thinking about spending my hard-earned coins on a baseball magazine or a model plane and so I pushed the extreme discomfort of the hot sidewalk out of my mind.
Trust me, although I was nine that variation of questionable tradeoffs was to play out in myriad other ways as I got older.
There were supermarkets by then, of course, but taking it to grocer meant I could take the buck or two from the bottles and go across the street to the magazine store.
Or, I could go to the Wacker’s 5&10 just down the street and there was this B-17 model plane just waiting for me. That model, by the way, was 50 cents.
The baseball magazines were in that 25-50-cent price range. I loved to pour through sports magazines, although baseball was the premier sport to me and reading about Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron and others was my dream.
It was a shop where there was no air conditioning so the doors were open and you could walk right up to the shelves laden with all kinds of magazines.
With my magazine purchase, I decided to push the wheel barrow to my Dad’s newspaper office around the corner and down the street.
Whatever griping I might receive about my judgment was worth avoiding the long trek back home.
