I was a rotten damn kid sometimes. There was this kid who lived across the street from me in Decatur, Illinois when I was growing up. His name was Jamie Bone. His dad’s name was Hoobie. I don’t know if it was a nickname or not but it sounds now to me like a nickname.

We were merciless to this kid, calling him “boner” all the time, pushing him down, inviting him along just to make him the butt of all the jokes and to leave him stranded when nobody was looking.

Whenever we played guns he was the first to die everytime and whenever he was “It” in Hide and Go Seek, we’d all let him hide and never go looking for him–it would sometimes be days until we saw him again (although I assume he finally gave up on us and went home and didn’t stay hiding for days).

But one time we went too far and the cops got called. These were small houses, not ghetto but middle class in a working class town which means they were respectable domiciles–nothing flashy or overbearing despite the errant pink house which was no doubt populated by human beings with melanocyte counts numbering far greater than my own. We weren’t poor but we all “weren’t rich” together, if you can dig what I’m saying.

So Hoobie bone had a pretty small yard and there was a great big oak tree in back which took up a lot of it. He had an industrial size picnic table underneath the tree which, to my knowledge, nobody besides us ever sat at. Well, one day we were goofing off and mucking around; a small pack of douche bags on the come up, and someone started picking at the bark on Hoobie Bone’s tree.

We were probably having a conversation that ranged in topics from what Serpentor was going to do to in the next GI Joe Marvel comic book in that fantastic story arc to who had the highest score on the 8-bit Nintendo Super Mario Brothers game.

And the bark kept coming off.

Pretty soon there were four hands picking it. Then there were six and finally, all eight hands were working feverishly, clawing and pulling the bark off this tree which had probably started growing back when FDR held Fireside Chats with a country struggling in an economic depression in a world undergoing a technological revolution and bracing for the most brutal war ever faced by mankind.

And here we were, a bunch of punk ass, know-nothing kids stripping the bark off this tree who had held up under Southern Illinois tornados, lightning storms, the onslaught of suburbia into the soybean fields and graveyards of proud Native American warriors, wives, sons and daughters–just ignorant and fucking with history.

The bark strips piled at our feet by the time the sun went down and there was an oval of open tree flesh about three feet high and two feet wide on the once proud oak, a scar that everyone driving by the Bone Home could see clearly day or night because of the spotlight that Hoobie Bone turned on each dusk to prevent prowlers from getting in his garage.

So it turned into this big thing, right? Cops were called. Parents were talked to and we were talked to in turn by our parents. My mother, God bless her, was always of the opinion that even when your son pulls a boner (pun intended), he’s still your son and you look out for your own. So, I don’t remember being punished, although I probably had my Nintendo taken away for a week or something like that.

But I do remember feeling ashamed of myself every time I walked outside and looked at the tree in the Bone’s backyard. I had done that. I had scummed up the neighborhood by making a living thing look like shit. I don’t know if I was quite mature enough back then to actually think these thoughts beyond shame but I absolutely remember the emotion of shame and the lesson it taught me.

I knew that I never wanted to leave the world around me shittier than when I found it. And it took me a lot of years, broken friendships, fist fights, and bridges of love blown clean off their moorings to figure out that it’s pretty damn easy to strip the bark off the relationships we have with the people around us in life. It’s easy to pick them apart, splinter by splinter, and leave a gaping scar that hangs in the air and rots for everyone to feel and smell. And I learned that it’s damn hard to keep your hands from prying out of boredom at the bark which holds our lives together.

Sometimes the greatest kindnesses in the world come out of the things we don’t say and what we stop ourselves from doing when every corpuscle of our existence is telling us to act and act now!

I recently went back home and drove through my old neighborhood. I almost cried when I saw that the Bone’s tree was still standing and the bark had fully grown back.

And I’ll be god damned if that house wasn’t painted pink.

[Post to Twitter] Tweet This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: