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[Victoria Waterfield]

Yeah. And it seems kind of pretentious and makes me cranky. Maybe it's just been a long week.  I'll try again later, since so many of youall think highly of it.

Phew, I was thinking I was the only one.

[jay-ell]

Yeah, except for the "cartooning" bit, this one gets a resounding "meh" from me. 

But then, I'm hormonal ATM. 

[Formica]

So none of you have your own concrete bridge?

Mine was around the corner from my parent's house. In a large freeway construction project, the width of it was doubled from two lanes to four. It was over a concrete-embanked creek that had been modified by the Corps of Engineers for flood control purposes. And it was all mine.

Every day during the summer I'd sit underneath it with my sunflower seeds, my CD player (a real Sony Discman!), my Dr. Pepper, a book, and my cigarettes. Egrets would come and go with their slender, orange bills. Raccoons would wash their catches in the slow moving water. And no one hardly ever came down there except me. The path that wound along with the creek provided a wonderful walking space, quiet and serene in the midst of old suburban bustle, improvised and simple as opposed to those carefully sculpted "greenbelts" affluent communities create to make themselves feel better about their Yukon Denalis. And unlike Teodor I had some wonderful intimate escapades there, too.

Years later they put up a fence with a big, threatening sign about tresspassing. Ignoring it got dogs set upon me by paranoid neighbors I once waved to, when I damned the sign and went to a place I called my own.

You can never go back.

[Toaster]

Man, this has me thinking that al my freinds and I should all go back to our old cement bridge. I bet that would be all Hell of nostalgaic. All, like, "This is where we traded Pokemon", and "This is where you almost died", and, "This is where I threw up on you. Twice." I think it would be even better if I tricked them into going there, and I did it to all of them separately, so that they would all just find each othere there coincidentally, and I would come out from behind the brick wall and be all like "Good times. Good times" So theatrical. I love it.

[theinevitable]

I have never lived close enough to any of my friends to have a place like that. Damn. we were never really able to hang out without parents having to get involved to drive us. Hell of lame.

[jaydub]

The house I lived in from 4th to 6th grade sat on 5 acres of undeveloped bushland.  The lot was rectangular and sat high on the flanks of a small hill, completely overgrown with eucalyptus and bushes of one sort or another.  The other side of the hill had a huge sandstone quarry (from which the local houses were built), and back 50 yards or so from the house was a natural sandstone "cave". I think it was carved out by wind - it wasn't anything like the limestone caves you might be thinking of.  It was deep enough to get you well out of any rain, but was pretty open to the world around it.  My brother and I used to play pirates and whatnot back in there, and read books, set off firecrackers, and set fire to green army men.  I bet now if I went back and found it (assuming it hasn't been bulldozed for housing developments) it would be a lot smaller than I remember - but it was a magnificent cavern to us at the time.

[colmore]

The one, and I mean only one, plus of modern style (fequently gated and sidwealk-free)  strip-developed suburbs is the number of neighborhood kids.  You ride training wheel bikes with the kids who later introduce you to pot and take your virginity.  It helps if your county does middle and high schools neighborhood by neighborhood.

Sin while you're young.  So many things get less fun after highschool / the first couple of years of college.  Be bad while it still feels *bad.*

[Popegeorgeringo]

All of you dudes flashing on your concrete bridges...me, I'm remembering my own bad head story.  I checked with her on the finish to make sure she was okay, but she decided to quit anyway and spat like she had a mouth of bird seed.  Not only did it get my #####...oops I guess this story is too detailed for this forum.  Sorry.

[Dangermoose]

My old cement bridge was actually an old wooden bridge.  Then they tore it down and put in a new cement bridge.  Which was a sad event.

These bridges, are they magnets of sad?

[KeithHernandez]

My old cement bridge was a old wooden stage in a park.  Also the swings and forest there.

[wombat]

OK, I like it better this afternoon, but I still think it would have been just as good without the Chris Ware references. But maybe that's just because I'm such a philistine that I've never read any Chris Ware because, as I said recently elsewhere, I never read comics printed on paper and bound together.

[jay-ell]

...oops I guess this story is too detailed for this forum.  Sorry.

Forgive him guys, he's new. 

pope, don't you know we're the dirtiest dudes in town? 

[V-Adore]

One of my personal cement bridges from childhood was the old gravel pit near my house. I spent way too many summer afternoons out there swimming, rain and shine, finding shiny pieces of mica and getting the chiggers. The day that they closed it off to anyone not living along it was one of the saddest and strangest of my childhood. They tried to rename it "Lark Pond"... but that was stupid. It was a gravel pit, and I loved it because it was just a gravel pit.

[jay-ell]

My best friend/neighbor and I had a place called "the woods."  We lived in suburban Ohio, though, so "the woods" consisted of a swath of overgrown brambles and wild berry vines about six feet wide and running the length of her backyard.  It was behind her father's tool shed, so it afforded more privacy than would have otherwise been the case in the thin undergrowth.  We built a clubhouse back there with scrap lumber, taking care to make use of the natural environment to the greatest possible extent -- the fork in that tree was an easy chair; this particularly low-hanging branch served as a "door."  Basically, we used plywood to smash down the vines for the floor, and the rest of the architecture was in our imaginations.  That summer, the local zoo secured a special exhibit with two pandas from China, so much of our time in "the woods" was spent playing as our alter egos, a pair of pandas named Panzee and Panzoo.  I was about nine and she must have been seven, and that fall when we returned to school we each wrote a story about the adventures of Panzee and Panzoo for a school-wide creative writing contest.  She won for her grade level, and I won for mine. 

The next summer, as a too-cool-for-you rising middle-schooler, I told her that I couldn't "ride hosss" with her anymore -- this was the imagination game we played on our bikes -- because my "hoss" had died.  (We're still friends anyway, somehow.) 

The Summer of Pandas marked the last period of true freedom in my childhood. 

It was like "Bridge to Terabithia" except nobody died. 

[CortJstr]

...oops I guess this story is too detailed for this forum.  Sorry.

Forgive him guys, he's new. 

pope, don't you know we're the dirtiest dudes in town? 

I think a joke was being made. He "saw" that ##### was filtered and assumed that meant he'd gone too far for our delicate sensibilities.

Unless you got the joke and were making a counter-joke that I missed.