The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

When Johnny Miller was small, he lived on the old family homestead, several miles out of Armadillo Creek and down a winding dirt road. They'd often come into town, and stop at his Great-Aunty Tabby and Uncle Roger's house on Elm Street. Aunt Tabby and Uncle Roger were actually brother and sister, and had raised Johnny's Dad as if they were his parents.

Visiting them was always fun. They had air conditioning - a window unit in the living room, and a television set where Johnny could watch cool shows like The Price is Right. At home, the television did not come on until the five o'clock news, with the exception that often, on Saturdays, it came on at 4pm for Hee Haw.

Aunty Tabby would have dinners at her house, and would cook for a crowd. There was nothing at all like the wonderful aromas, as she served the platters of pot roast, gravy boats full of brown gravy, the mashed potatoes, with little pieces of skin still in them, sweet potatoes, baked in the oven, covered in butter, wrapped in foil, and home-canned green beans, and rolls. And if all this were not enough, there'd be fried pies for desert.

The annual Miller family reunion would usually be hosted at their house, and family would gather around from several states. A lot of the closer family would come out to stay at the farm where Johnny called home, and they'd line the kids up, wall to wall, on the floor, and the extra adults would sleep on the sofabed, or on a pallet on the floor like the kids.

Johnny, and his brother Tommy, who was a year and a half older than him, would run around with all the cousins, playing with kids their own age, for a change. They'd go into the old shed, sided and topped with rusty old tin sheets, which had a peaked roof, but was open just under the peak, and climb up, and lean out of the opening, pretending to hold guns and shoot at the brothers and cousins that were running wild, outside. They shot many a cowboy or Indian, or shot at Japs (who knew what they were... just somebody you were supposed to shoot at!)

By the time he was nine or ten, Johnny Miller had moved to town, and life was, well, different. He still went to the same school, even still rode the same old school bus, Number 3, driven by Mr. Jones. The house that they had moved into was inherited by his Dad, when Aunt Tabby and Uncle Roger got into a car accident, and were hurt bad enough that they'd spend most of the rest of their days in a nursing home.

The Millers still maintained a small garden there, and Johnny learned he could sell Christmas cards, to the neighbors, or indeed, around Armadillo, for extra money. He saw an advertisement for Grit Magazine, and started selling those, door to door. He did this for quite some time, and would spend time out in front of the grocery stores, as well. He had a hard time keeping the money there, though, as those Nestle Crunch candy bars inside were an awful temptation.

It seemed that every five weeks, the folks at Grit would send him four weeks worth of cards to account for the magazines with, and after a while, finally Mom declared an end to it. It had been a nice business venture for Johnny, and he earned a little money, and won a prize of a pocket knife through his sales, which, unfortunately, was soon lost in a tromp through the woods, never to be seen again.

In Armadillo Creek, even when he wasn't selling cards, or papers, he could mow grass for the neighbors. Aunt Florence, who wasn't his aunt, if she was related at all, but an elderly neighbor who was always close to the family, would let him come over and while away the days with her. They'd putter around the yard, pulling weeds out of the flower beds, or he'd mow her grass, or trim some bushes. He'd often, during the right time of year, eat handfuls of plump, juicy mulberries off her tree in the back yard. When she could, she'd give him a dollar or two for his "work", which he promptly spent on something or other, probably a coke and a candy bar, or a book.

Even if she hadn't paid him for his troubles, he'd have come anyway. He loved hearing her stories of a time gone by. Her husband, and others, used to go grade the streets and roads, long before the county took over. They might use mules, and heavy bars, to do what the road graders of today did, but they got it done as a community, not just somebody coming out once or twice a year from the county. And he learned that even Armadillo Creek had once had a movie house, although it had been closed now for many years.

Becoming a teenager changed Johnny. Not only was he in a new world, where there were other kids his age running around town with him, building snow forts in the winter, and riding bikes in the summer, but there were new "things" to be had as well. Johnny's family still didn't have a lot of money, and he'd have given almost anything to own one of those new, fancy gaming systems - the Atari.

Eventually, when the new wore off, and the better off kids were getting new gaming systems, Johnny got ahold of an old Atari at a yard sale, and spent many an hour playing Pitfall, and Pac Man, and lots of other games. Although this took up a little more of his time, Johnny never gave up on books, and reading. His mother taught him a love of westerns, and science fiction, and anything in between that was worth reading.

Some of his favorites ranged from the stories of the Sackett family by Louis L'amour, to Star Trek novels by various writers. Both worlds intrigued him. One, the voice of the past, told of a family that through generations stayed close and together and fought for goodness and freedom. The other, the voice of the future, told of a world where all of mankind stood together in peaceful brotherhood, along with their pointy-eared friends. The first told him of a past that was similar to his own background, where family and love of nature were so important, and the other whispered to him of what the future could be, beyond the troubles of the cold war and the world he was living in.

Armadillo Creek was a place where all of the good in life was there to be had, for anyone willing to accept it. And in a few short years, Johnny grew into a different person than the child from the farm. When he was fourteen, almost fifteen, someone knocked at the door of his classroom, calling him out.

His sister Ann's husband, Donald, was there, and told him, as gently as possible, that his Dad was gone. Just like that, out of the blue. As they rode, in silence, back to Johnny's house, thoughts kept whizzing through Johnny's head. Like, "I wonder how bad the truck was wrecked?" He couldn't imagine what else could have taken his Daddy away... but as they pulled into the driveway, the truck sat there, unscratched.

It seems that many years of smoking, and occasionally, drinking, and working long, long days, had taken their toll on his Daddy's heart, and it just up and quit, out of the blue. Johnny would be haunted for years by dreams of his Dad coming back in the middle of the night... of it being a 'hoax' or something, like the stories he had heard of Hank Williams or Elvis Presley not really being dead, after all.

Although the carefree days of his early teen years were gone, life did go on. Johnny's uncle came to stay with them for a time, and they worked on the old home out in the country, and moved back there, to his roots, selling the house in Armadillo Creek. Johnny would spend the remainder of his days as a teenager in that house, listening to the call of the wild, the whippoorwills singing in the evening air, and occasionally the distant sound of yipping from coyotes. Being back in the home of his childhood brought peace back into his heart, even though he never could quite find that part of him that was missing with his father's absence.