My life as I remember it

Donuts and Cars by Martin Franks  W h e ther   you  lean towards  a corporate outfit ,  like Dunkin’ or  Winc h ells ,  or one of the millions of mom  & pop shops, the re will always be something to satisfy , ready and waiting.   Flour and sugar ,  and then other stuff with lots of sugar in  i t, on top.  T here are over a million combinations .  I’ve  never met a donut I  wouldn’t  devour with joy, even a  maple bun  which ,  like the platypus, is an anomaly.  My love of the doughy  delight, like most things, started early.  Every Saturday  me and my crew ,  Burt  Fontian ,  Larry Durbin,  Lamont Washington ,  and Steve Albert ,  would  ride our bikes two and a half miles to  the greatest donut shop in the world :   Jolly Donuts .   We had to cross  a  major street , ...

Last Days of Childhood By Martin Franks     Graduating fifth grade was a bigger deal to everyone but the kids that were actually graduating. For us it was just another day we had to go to school [ but didn’t  have to learn anything. Like when you had a substitute teacher or your regular teacher was a few days away from a complete mental breakdown, which happened to both our second and fourth grade teachers. We all had to dress up for this deal , which was easier for the church kids than it was for the non-church kids. At the last-minute Mom remembered we had to dress nice and ran down the block to borrow a dress shirt and a clip - on tie from Billy Peterson’s mom. Billy got run over by and ice cream truck on Bradly Street a year earlier and died. Mom knew that Billy’s mom still had a lot of Billy’s clothes. I should have felt weird in a dead kid 's clothes, but all I felt was uncomfortable. Billy was wider and shorter than I was. At school, when Burt aske...

Weed By Martin Franks Born in East Moline, Illinois. The fifth of the Quad Cities, which also includes Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa. Whenever I asked people about the number discrepancy, they always gave me that look like, “Don’t be an asshole .” When I told them it should be called the Quint Cities they’d get really mad and sometimes chase me off . I wondered about a lot of stuff back then, and I still wonder about a lot of stuff now. The world has always fascinated me. Like the expression, “You catch more flies with honey,” which is not true. You catch way more files with human shit. I know, because me and Burt Fontaine did an experiment the summer before we started middle school. That was also the summer of 1977, the summer we discovered weed. We didn’t so much discover weed that summer as we were offered it by Todd Dunkel. Todd was four years older than us, but was still in our fifth grade class. He started kindergarten a year...