Ice Cream and Puppies

What I wouldn’t give to be young again. Maybe somewhere around the age of, well, lets see, say five or six. A time when I didn’t have any worries. A time when I was free to play, free to have fun, free to be a kid, and well, just be free. It was a time of kindergarten, playing red rover, chasing the girls around the playground at recess and cooties. Ah, I remember that well. I can’t help but smile as I think about those days. I am now a man. A man with a job. A man with my whole world in front of me. But what I wouldn’t give to go back to that time. The time of ice cream and puppies.

It was so much easier then. I didn’t know any better. I was just growing up a young boy in a small town, what I thought was a small town anyway. Now, that small town has become the mainstay of where I grew up. I was down there not very long ago and I didn’t even recognize it. Well, I did, but my how it has changed. So many businesses have sprung up on Maybank Highway. The gas stations seem to be placed strategically at every intersection that Johns Island has. Which is only two. That’s it. But there are two self-serve joe and go stops at one intersection and three at the other. Home is not the place it used to be when I was young and frivolous. No, home is now a booming town of busy highways which people travel just to get back and forth to work. They aren’t what they were when I was still there. It’s not a joyriding town anymore. Johns Island is now an industrial zone. No, let me rephrase that; it’s now a twilight zone.
But, that twilight zone is still my home place, and I cannot help but still love it. Although I now live in a different county than Charleston, South Carolina, Johns Island will always be considered my home. Growing up as a small boy there, I had no worries at all. All I ever wanted to do was ride on top of a wheelbarrow load of pine straw pushed by my papa or just ride my Western Flyer around "my roads" I made in the yard. Yes, I said "my roads." I rode my Western Flyer so much around my Johns Island yard, there was perfect ruts where grass had once grown. And those roads took me places where only my imagination could take me. I didn’t know who Dale Earnhardt was then, but I did know who Cale Yarborough was and I used to pretend that I was him as I would fly around "my roads." My papa used to watch me as he sat in the rocking chair on the front porch as I would pretend to be Cale fighting the high banked turns of Daytona. Yes, those are memories I will always cherish.

All too soon though, those days were gone and I had grown into a teenager and graduated from high school. That was a not a task for me, but it was a special moment for my family. As I was the only person in the Hewett family to ever graduate from high school. Well, in true form I was the only Hewett, but technically, my grandmother was actually a Hewett when she graduated from high school. My grandmother was already married when she graduated, but she had to keep it quiet because in 1946, a person was not supposed to be married and in school. Shows you just how much the times have changed. To date, my grandmother, me, and my cousin Kathy are the only "Hewett’s" to every graduate from high school, but me, well, I am the only one to go to college and get a degree. That has taken me limits I never could have imagined, although it was a rather rocky start.

In a commute from Johns Island through the downtown streets of Charleston, I attended the College of Charleston thanks to scholarships I was awarded upon graduating high school. Talk about a commute. It was not bad, it just got tiresome, and being back on Johns Island recently gave me a new perspective. I would not want to make that commute now. I always hated downtown Charleston and still do. With the growth of both cities, it is almost impossible to even pull out into traffic.

College of Charleston was fun for a while, but it got very tiring. Then my grandparents fell into ill health, so I quit, found a job, and helped my parents take care of them. I worked while keeping up with them. It was a job in itself. All the while I was doing that, as young as I was, one would have thought I kept up with the changing time. I didn’t. I had no idea that the place I called home was beginning to change. To tell you the truth, I think my family was one of the causes of that gradual change and we just didn’t know it. We decided to sell our house; the house my mother called home since she had been two years old. I believe we sparked something on that island that has now grew into a metropolis.

In the almost 13 years since moving to the property my mama was born on in Hendersonville, a small village outside of Walterboro, South Carolina, I now appreciate what it was like living on Johns Island as I grew up. I went back to college, got a Bachelor’s degree, and I have a very good job. Never in my life did I think I would graduate from the University of South Carolina since I am a Clemson fan, but I guess a good education is better than no education. I have done all of this while living in a small area with no growth around us. Nothing like what has happened to my home place.

But, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be a young boy once again. It would be different however. I would be growing up in a different era than I already have. I would see things that I didn’t see. I think that’s what made it even more fun growing up in the late seventies and early eighties as I did. I didn’t see progress as that. I was just growing up and didn’t care that Johns Island was getting a McDonald’s. I just wanted to be a boy, although the Mickey D’s came along after I was 18. But still, when I was there, Johns Island was still sort of a country town.

Although I am not ashamed to say that I am from Johns Island, South Carolina, and I am not ashamed that it is now a growing community, it’s just that it is no longer what I remember. Hendersonville is what I remember growing up. Quiet, serene, and down home. Where everybody knows everybody and everybody is your friend. If one looks around when they visit, they would see that Hendersonville is the time of ice cream and puppies.