Memoirist

One of my earliest memories is gathering gangs of boys in the fields
to build trench forts and hold odd, creative wars with one another
using some native plant that we called spear grass, or bear grass.
I could not have been more than five, as I am sure I had not started
first grade, nor learned to ride a bike. We would work for days
like collective and war-like bower-birds building our groove-like
outposts of thatched mesquite, and would sit brooding under the
hot Texas sun doing nothing much more than staring at the dust
and shadows of the den we had made. There was no tobacco yet,
no alcohol, no pornography, nothing but our eyes. Oh, we may have
looked at plants, or pulled the legs off a grasshopper or two,
watching the legs kick, or squeezing the thighs to make them kick,
and I do remember collecting bowls of tadpoles and stealing fish
food to feed them. I cannot remember a single one of those boys,
nor who they later turned out to be, and it seems like only one Summer
that we had our gangs, and our wars. With the bicycle came individuality,
and then later bicycle gangs, and then racing among the bowls
that the former gangs of boys had left us, in their namelessness,
and ours.