Trippy D's Extravaganza

I turned 11 in the summer of 1977, between 6th and 7th grade. Jimmy Carter was President. Star Wars had just come out. And Elvis only had a few weeks left to live. That same summer, Mom married her 4th husband Buddy, and we all moved to a house. Before that, Buddy had been staying with his Mom, and my Mom, my brother and I were in a government subsidized townhome where we had lived for 3 years. The new house was in a different school district, but Mom said it would be easy for me since I was going from elementary to junior high anyway and there would be tons of people who didn’t know each other. My brother Chris would have to be the new kid in third grade at his school, but again, Mom said it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, because who really knows very many people when you’re 8 years old. In the new neighborhood we were on the last street, as far back in the subdivision as you could go, which meant there were woods and a big empty field behind our house. And if you hiked through...

When we moved into our house in 1977, there was a black labrador in the backyard. The people who sold the house couldn’t take him so they left him and that’s how we ended up with Ben. Ben, I think, was really ok with them leaving him behind, because he was pretty attached to the house and the neighborhood. He was old and fat and slow but he would walk around the neighborhood, taking it easy and saying Hi to anyone who he happened upon. Sometimes he would lay down in the very middle of the street, and I mean right on the place where the stripe would separate the 2 lanes, except there wasn’t a stripe. Cars would slow down and honk at him but he would wait until they stopped completely and then he’d slowly stand up and saunter to the side of the road. So weird, like he was a living speed bump, keeping the cars from going too fast to notice some kid running after a ball or riding their bike out from behind a parked van. We were always afraid he’d get run over, but for some reason, we never...