from light to dark in a few hours

One year we lived near the railroad tracks in a depressed little town north of here. Dad took a small church as pastor - in an act of kindness, I think. The church basement smelled of mildew, and only a handful of the townspeople attended. My dad always cared about poor communities and so-called lost causes. But after less than a year we moved back to our old home town. Dad went into a new line of work, no longer a pastor.

A bright spot in the year of the dingy, depressed town was a family of five beautiful girls. It was as if Sweden had airlifted a gift and set them down gently for all of us to enjoy beside the lake where they lived. Not that they were Swedish, I don't think they were, but they were perpetually blonde and tan, with the whitest teeth, biggest eyes and sweetest dimples. They charmed us all with their worldly innocence. It didn't hurt that they also had a colored TV. (This was 1966, so: Flipper the dolphin, and funny-wacky-leggy Phyllis Diller in flashy dresses and spiked hair and ankle boots.)

My 14-year-old brother was in love with one of the gifts - Candy, who was his age. Yes, that was really her name.

One summer evening after dinner he asked me to walk to their house, and I was happy to, since Candy's sister Barb was 10 like me. Off we trotted down the tracks, which led us straight to a radiant evening in Sweden-land. Even the girls' mother was full of cheerful goodwill and prettiness.

Time flew as we played, laughed and ate chocolate chip cookies, and before we knew it, dusk was falling. Reluctantly, we said good-bye to Candy, Barb, and the gang, and skipped the mile and a half home over the tracks as the sky darkened.

Arriving home in the dark, we recognized immediately that our house was not so full of cheer and prettiness as the cottage of the blonde beauties. Our poor dad and mom had no idea where we had been for the past 4 hours! My brother, four years older than I, had not mentioned our plans to them. As the younger guilty party, I was not deemed as culpable, so I did not suffer the sound whipping he did.

I wonder if my brother thinks of the family by the lake with guilty pleasure as I do.