*this was written in 2010 (but never published – until today!)

I go for a walk most mornings while my kids are at school. I usually walk to the school, around its perimeter, and back home as I listen to a tape in my “World of Philosophy” series. One day, as I turned the corner around the school’s parking lot, I noticed a tree up ahead with multicolored spots all over the trunk. I squinted as I moved closer, trying to figure out what those spots could be. I soon realized that each spot was a wad of gum. Apparently kids have been leaving their gum here for quite some time.

I instinctively made an “euwww” sound and walked away, grumbling something about kids these days. I lost complete track of the lecture on which I had been so desperately trying to concentrate.

As I grow older, I, unfortunately, find myself more often than not mumbling about the state of the younger generation. I all too often declare, “Now when I was a kid, . . . “

So while I am muttering to myself that kids have no respect for nature, for property, a huge grin spreads across my face. And I laugh out loud. A high school student walking by shoots me a look reserved for eccentric middle-aged women as I pull off the headphones to better transport myself to late 1960s Chicago, where my neighborhood had a gum post.

Our family lived exactly one mile from school, which was considered to be too close to stay at school and eat lunch. So I walked the mile to school in the morning, the mile home for 

lunch, the mile back after lunch, and the mile home at the end of the school day. My sister and I love to repeat this fact of our childhood to amazed bystanders, especially considering Chicago winters. In fact, my sister’s husband grew so tired of the seemingly inflated story that on a recent trip to Chicago he decided to measure the distance, hoping to put the story to a quick end. Not surprising to us, he clocked the trip at exactly a mile. So the stories continue in her home and in mine.

But I do not remember the trip being a hardship. On the contrary, it was always an adventure. 

I’d cross a bridge over a railroad track and a long abandoned train station. Trains never stopped at that station in my lifetime. The station sparked my imagination and fears each time I passed it, but I never did get the chance to peek inside.

Many spring walks included snatching a branch of forsythia from an apartment building to bring home. I passed the hospital where I waved to my sister when she was sick. Crossing guards helped me navigate busy streets around the school. When I reached fifth grade, I was selected and received special training to be a crossing guard – an incredible honor. But a week into the school year, I lost my bright orange belt, the one that circled my waist and then crossed my chest over my shoulder. Embarrassed, I quit showing up at my designated intersection, yet continued attending official crossing guard meetings.

I passed a house with the television set positioned so that I could catch a glimpse of Bozo’s Circus through the window on my way home at lunch. Before my younger sister started school, I would arrive home for lunch boasting that I could guess what had already been on Bozo’s Circus before I came bounding in the door. I was always right; she was always amazed.

My sister would sit in the closed-in porch watching our old black and white Zenith. On warmer days, open windows encouraged a breeze. On colder days, she would huddle at the space heater, where I would soon join her. Mom would then bring in our lunch, served on an old yellow piano bench that served as a craft table / TV tray. She would place our plastic plates, mine decorated with Lassie, Jeannie’s with kitties, over the globs of dried glue.

Lunch was John’s frozen pizza, which my mom was famous for up and down Dobson Street. Apparently no other mom in the neighborhood could heat up a frozen pizza like my mom. Most told their mothers to just quit trying. Nobody knew that her trick was simply to skip preheating the oven. Or we indulged on Chef Boyardee ravioli. On special occasions, mom would serve Aunt Jemima’s toaster French toast, carefully cut up like a tic-tac-toe board and swimming in syrup and powdered sugar. Ok, so we weren’t the most nutritious family in town.

Before Bozo signed off, I would head back to school for the afternoon. On the way, I passed the mailbox where my friends mailed dirt and garbage. And I also passed by, and often times contributed to, the gum post.

The gum post was an old fence post that had never been dislodged from the cement. Long before it was my turn to trudge down Ridge Avenue to Oakton Elementary, children began putting old chewed up wads of gum down the center of the post. It became somewhat of a tradition.

We may have been a bit less brash than our modern day gum chewers, but we left our mark nonetheless. Maybe I am too hard on today’s kids. How can I be only forty years old and have already forgotten my own youth – not the youth of my romantic memories, but the reality of it. The destruction, the dishonesty, the recklessness, the insecurities, the anger, the ignorance, the passion, the immobilization, the apprehension, the uncertainty, the anonymity, the mystery, the discoveries, the innocence.

When I completed my mental return to the old gum post of my childhood, I was already home, and my walk was over. Maybe tomorrow I will stop by that tree again. But this time, rather than fret over today’s youth, I will blow one last bubble and then leave my own mark, for old time’s sake.