Komfort Thru Kool-Aid

Dunno know 'bout you, but I'm keeping a close watch on Obama; and so far, his picks aren't totally reassuring.

When I was 10, I was best friends with Donna Drvaric, who, like me, liked to read.

My parents did a good thing when they chose to buy a tract home on a lot that backed onto Whitnall Park. The park is still there, in a suburb of Milwaukee, which had had a socialist government for many years and thus had stellar infrastructure (many socialists were, far as I can tell, and still are, about serving people – they created a great public school system {my highschool had everything from auto shop to 4th-year Latin, plus a calculus course that made my subsequent East Coast college calculus seem aimed at retards}, the best-designed freeway and other infrastructure in any city I've ever lived in, plus great public parks, among other things {I wish they'd taken a shot at health care}).

So anyway, on the border of my parents' yard and this really great park, I and my sis had located/enhanced what we called a fort but what I also thought of as a refuge. Boulders, trees, and a flat spot.

So during this one summer, Donna Drvaric and I regularly mixed up whatever combination of available Kool-Aid flavors we imagined might be most ambrosial (we had to complicate things); assembled selected fruit (we'd gotten the idea that fruit amp'd the luxury factor); gathered up our current reads and some comfy quilts; spread out in the leafy half-shade of our fort; and spent a decent number of summer days there, reading, eating fruit, and drinking Kool-Aid.

It was Donna's slightly older bro who intro'd me, in one afternoon, to both Love Potion No. 9 and Do Wah Diddy:



Check that drummer. Sorry, they f'd up the end; here are more versions, all enjoyable; but mysteriously, they all kinda f' the endings up:









Four decades later, when my mom was on her last cancer, I shot the pic below as she walked through our "fort" into the park.