One summer day, Dad stuck an old wooden door up in a cedar tree and made us an instant tree house. It was complete with a comfortable seating arrangement of branches, a front door ladder, and a quick escape back door down a slanted branch. We also had a special nail that held a neat, rusty hook we found, but what made our tree house the envy of all the kids we brought home after school was the bat pole.
Of course, Bat Man was our most favoritest TV show, and with that simple addition, we had reached the height of childhood joy. Whizzing down a pole at lightning speed to take off on our “Bat Bikes” to fight crime in the cornfield–it just doesn’t get any better than that.
I was a sensitive child who was always burying some half-decayed animal I’d found and scrawling a meaningful epitaph in crayon on a piece of scrap lumber. My brother chided me for this goofiness and was certain that I must have a mental imbalance.
Once I made him rescue a mouse from the jaws of death (a.k.a. a cat). After much cat shaking, Tim finally had the poor creature in hand, whereupon it bit him and died. The cat was bit put off and had no interest in a dead mouse, so there was nothing to do but bury the poor thing and go get my crayons. Tim groaned, threw up his hands, remembered the mouse bite, and went into the house to find some antiseptic.