Ah, yoot!

In a nostalgic mood today.

I think an ideal day would be to be ten years old once more, and experience all the following activities one more time:

After waking, I'd get up and have a bowl of Freakies cereal (or maybe Count Chocula) while I read a new horror comic (or watched Johnny Quest or Scooby Doo), followed by sitting under a tree and reading a Ray Bradbury story for the first time. After lunch, I'd buy a Dreamsicle from a passing ice-cream truck, then go back and find a new monster 8mm film clip in the mail. After watching it in the dark basement, I'd ride my bike to Ben Franklin's 5 & 10 and get some cheap rubber monster toy that would spark my imagination like the machines in a mad doctor's lab.

From there I'd ride over to Baker's Drugstore and get a Coke with cherry syrup in it, and drink it while ogling the latest issue of Famous Monsters, (or one of the other horror mags in the Warren lineup) and hope Shock Theater would get around to showing some of the films Uncle Forry so lovingly (and punningly) described. I'd go home and find my Memaw there to take me to a matinee. We'd go see a monster or fantasy flick, natch. (I'd have a Cherry Bomb, or maybe a Reese's cup.)

We'd go home after the movie and I'd draw monsters while dinner was prepared. Maybe play my Disney LP Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House while I was at it. Then, I'd go out after supper and catch fireflies with my brother, then he'd tell a scary story he'd made up. I'd describe the scenes in the monster film I was planning on making one day (it would have Dracula, Frankenstein, a teenage Mr. Hyde, AND a robot in it!) My father would holler at us (he did a lot of that) to get in the car (a station wagon with a moon roof) and we'd go to the Starlite Drive In.

We'd see something with a rubber makeup job prominently featured, like Planet of the Apes. (My dad did take us to see that, as he was interested in special makeup effects, bless him.) I'd come home tired, but would have fun taking my Marx Creature into the tub, then squirting a soapy blob from my Monster Crazy Foam can that would eat him! Yay!

I would go to bed feeling mighty powerful...The Basil Gogos versions of the Universal monsters (who lived in my closet) would be powerless to scare me that night...

(All the things I've just described I HAVE experienced, just not all on the same day!)

"BACKWARD, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for to-night!"
(Elizabth Akers Allen)