Stoops & Cones

When are the best times of your life suppose to be? Someone once told me they were in high school. Then i heard college and of course now i'm hearing your twenties. I liked high school. I might have even loved it. I despised college and although i am nearing the end of my twenties its safe to say i really just didnt like them all that much. My best times were birth to twelve years old. I might even stretch that to fifteen years old. In my head life was perfect. I learned early on about death after losing my uncle when i was around eight years old. I learned about not having too much being one out of a ton of children. I grew up in a small apartment and thinking back those were the happiest days of my life. I think they were the best days for everyone. I distinctively remember sitting on my stoop one hot summer afternoon. I was waiting for everyone to come out and play. I was eating a mustard sandwich. Two slices of bread loaded with French's yellow mustard. So loaded that when i bit into it some would drip out the other end, just how i liked it. I knew it would be another great day in my carefree world of hopscotch and hide and go seek. Those summers were innocently amazing. Thinking back i can't remember ever feeling the effects of the real world on my family. I know they were there. I know we struggled often with how food would get on the table. Where we would live and things of that importance. It just never occured to me that that reality was in fact my life. To me life consisted of loving school, my two best friends M & F, playing with my siblings, building cardboard houses, lemonade sales, gate sales, mustard, wiffle ball, street games, mr. softee and hot summer nights sitting on our steps with my mom and dad. They were the best times and anything else that has followed will always come in second, third and so on. If children are in my future i would want them to have the exact childhood i did. Not my reality childhood, the childhood i created within the walls of our railroad apartment, on our front stoop, during one of our gatesales, the childhood everyone should experience. I know those were the days that prepared me to deal with the many tough roads ahead.