Grades three through six were wonderful years, nestled in the rolling hills of the Town of Charlotte, Village of Sinclairville. Summers were filled with sleep outs in pup tents, playing army with toy guns, ramming around town on our banana seat bikes, and raiding neighbor’s gardens. Rows of carrots and onions would mysteriously disappear. Winters were spent sledding East Avenue hill, building snow forts, and playing hockey on the local farm pond with shovels for sticks and figure skates, shoveled clear of snow. We were all too poor to buy hockey skates, sticks, and pucks. No matter, in our minds we were winning the Stanley Cup at least once a week.

My friends, Tommy and Kevin, became masters of building tree forts. Tommy’s dad was the local undertaker in town, proprietor of Jordan’s Funeral Home. On his huge property was a piece of woods, his mother’s garden, dirt piles for us to jump on our bikes, and long driveways to race our skateboards. We scoured the neighborhood to come up with lumber and nails. A refuse door was a golden ticket. It would rest on two boards nailed between two trees, making the perfect platform for fighting off imaginary advancing enemy soldiers.

Oh, we loved to play soldiers. On rainy days we’d play indoors with little green men. Americans always won, exactly as reported by reports from Viet Nam on the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. Two of Sinclairville’s sons were sacrificed for our nation’s freedom. Walter and Peter. Two, out of a village of a couple of hundred. Over fifty years later and multiple visits to the Wall, just the thought of these two deaths cause my heart to break.

Walter was a helicopter pilot, Peter was an army infantryman, or so the grapevine reported. Peter’s younger brother was in special Ed class and loved to play around with us kids. We always made a place for him. The effects of Walter and Peter’s deaths weighed heavily on us. Ripples and whispers flowed though church pews and over back picket fences. Pain and grief were palpable, even though we kids had no idea how to respond.

Tommy, Kevin, and I would often lay in wait for Tommy’s dad to return from a call. His black Cadillac hearse would drive up the street and we’d scramble to take our places concealed in the hedges. We parted the bushes just enough to peek out and see his father pull the bagged corpse on the stretcher from the hearse and wheel it into the back door of the funeral parlor. Maybe, we hoped, we’d see an arm flop off the side. One summer day, we planned an ambush. Six pallbearers solemnly carried a casket out the front door, led by a somber preacher. We three suddenly stood up and raked the bereaved family, pallbearers, and corpse with our toy machine guns. Mrs. Nickerson, the family’s hired doorkeeper grabbed us by the nape of the neck and promptly removed us from the premises. Dinner that evening was eaten in shame and silence.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson, was a wonderful teacher and member of Dad’s congregation. She was married to a hard-working dairy farmer. Our bus driver, Ken Scott, bus 59, was also a dairy farmer. His callous hand laid out punishment to anyone who disrupted the silence or respectability of his bus.

When hunting season opened in November, senior high kids would carry their loaded shot guns to the bus stop. Because, well. You never knew when you’d see a twelve-point buck. The chamber would be emptied and the gun handed over to Ken for safe keeping until getting off the afternoon bus run. Not certain of the success of this innocent strategy, but it certainly reflected the culture and values of rural, western New York.

As I think about it, guns were part of the fabric of the community. Kevin had a beebee gun and a shooting range set up in his basement. My dad had a secret shotgun hidden in the stairwell that we all knew about. My sister’s boyfriend, Larry, had a gun until he shot out a neighbors basement window and his father took it away from him. His dad was a B-24 pilot shot down over the Polesti Oil Fields and held as a POW in a German camp until liberated. He kept a secret German Lugar in his attic, whose mysterious story us kids could only imagine.

The point was never about guns. Values came from the people, neighbors, all dirt poor, working farmers, teachers, undertakers, and bus drivers who genuinely cared for their neighbors. They coached the little league teams and responded to calls as members of the volunteer fire department. They bought ten cent Cokes from Kenny’s barbershop and drank them around the wood stove in front of Peterson’s Agway. We worshiped together, either in the Baptist, Catholic, or Dad’s United Methodist churches. We laughed, loved, and mourned together as neighbors, as friends, as God’s beloved community.

The Beloved Community; where all are loved. All are cared for. All are valued. All supported and supporting each other.

Good information about God’s Kingdom, even for an elementary school kid.