Sometimes we'd walk down to an old deserted wooden cottage that stood partly on stilts over the water of a small cove. We'd always thought the little run down structure was used in an old movie called The Monster From The Black Lagoon. It may have, old Tarzan movies had been shot around our secret woods back in the '50s...but we never really knew for sure about the cottage! Diving into the clear waters of the river on hot Summer days seemed to make us think we were special somehow, like the Gods had let us borrow this place for awhile, holding us close to whisper thoughts of reassurance. It was something us boys became bonded to without ever knowing it, like the way a mother deer becomes one with her baby. No effort really, it just happens.

Looking back, it was one reason I always felt there was greatness in my blood. In my lofty dreams while in the woods I saw myself as a warrior of a nation, I would beat on my chest and scream like an Eagle, or an inventor that people across the World admired, or as a great tennis player that no one could ever beat. In reality, or just the woods, I was a dreamer, but maybe that was enough to give a boy a boy like me a sense of self-esteem. For I became all that I wanted in those Secret Woods.. It was only when I left the woods with my buddies that a lump in my throat would start. Mike was a tall boy for his age of 13, tanned from the Florida Sun to a creamy bronze, and Wheat-colored hair that was straight and kind of long...really quite goodlooking. His bright blue eyes would sparkle with enthusiasm when talking about race cars, and I think he dreamed of being a musician because we would sing together often when we camped out, and he was always playing a badly beaten up guitar he'd found in the dumpster behind the BP gas station. He'd pound out chords that never really sounded right.

Girls always thought he was cute, and he ate up the attention. Lacking the good looks and charm of his brother, Billy was a handful of a boy to be around with wild emotions, but there was a tenderness in him I'll never forget. It was the way he let his defenses down when we reached the secret woods, sometimes crying if we ran off without him. It was the obvious way Billy begged for a little praise by trying so hard to pop wheelies on his old rusty bike, or the way he snickered at, and would beg money off, tourists around Silver Springs and come running back to us with pride bursting from his little chest.

Oh, I've run ahead of myself, Silver Springs is where it all began, a natural spring-fed river that produced water so clear you could see a dime lying on the bottom in 25 feet of water. It was pure nectar from the Earth, and everything seemed to thrive from it. Silver Springs was a little cracker-town built around a theme park with glass bottom boats, Jungle boat cruises, deer ranch, gift shops and the Ross Allen's Reptile Institute, an attraction dedicated to alarming the curious Northerners with snakes of all varieties, including the biggest snake, Ross himself. But all around and throughout the park was our secret woods, always calling Mike, Billy and me away from our realities to our dreams...or maybe the opposite! In the small town of Silver Springs in the late '60s, early '70s, there was the theme park, a few hotels, two gas stations, an antique car museum and not much else. Most of the people living in the Springs lived off the low-paying jobs that the tourist park provided, including us boys' mothers! My grandma and grandpa owned a little gas station/convenience store directly across the boulevard from the park. It was a little tin roof store that sold just about anything you could think of , I remember the black men gathered around the side drinking Schilitz and Black Label beer, laughing loudly in their drunkenness. My grandparents were more than happy to sell them their medicine and then talk bad about them behind their backs. Not so shocking, it was kind the Southern way in those days!

Black people's tin roof shacks were all over the back streets of the Springs, nowhere near in view of the wealthy white tourists who'd come to see beauty, not reality, but they were there just the same. Maybe the tourists were coming to the Springs for the same reason us boys went to the woods, to dream! I never knew, but I always wondered why the blacks lived in such conditions, and why they accepted their humility so naturally. They never seemed to mind...guess it was the Southern way again!

Although my grandparents owned a small store and had a black maid named Annie Mae, Mom and Pop Weaver only shared their wealth with my mother, sister and me reluctantly. We were living with them temporarily after my parent's divorce, and it was understood this arrangement wouldn't last, and that my mother must find a means elsewhere. She soon did with a man I hated from the minute I met him, he was stealing the only parent I had left from the very-ugly divorce that left me traumatized and very clingy to my mother, like a gun-shy hunting dog I thought.

The lover of my mother was anything but with his childish rages that became physically dangerous for my mother and sister at times, and he made damn sure I knew who the new boss was. He liked me as long as I played the game, and I was down right scared of him, so I tried to learn his ways of being a man through violent outbursts, drinking beer, cleaning the fish we caught, killing animals mercilessly with guns, or club, moving from shack to shack. But there was greatness in my blood, I felt, and so I knew down inside behind my acceptance of him I rejected everything he was, kind of like the blacks' own facade of acceptance over what they despised; their poverty, their lack of control over their lives, etc.

Chuck was to become my desperate mother's husband eventually, and he used to take me Armadillo hunting with him. I'd watch as he beat the running creature with a club that bore the markings of former not-so-lucky animals. His excitement of the kill was evident, as he acted like a boy who just hit the winning run in a baseball game, but his greater damage was done on my sister who he made a target of humiliation.