"All things truly wicked start from an innocence." - Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I had this great quote about the innocence of childhood, which, like the innocence of childhood, I lost, so you get Hemingway instead.

All this was brought on by the Peep Show photo at the left. You see, when I was a kid, my Mom and Gram used to tell me stories about when they were kids. One of the things that I always used to love hearing about were the "Peep Shows". Now don't go there. When my mother was a child, she went to a fair, possibly the Bloomsburg Fair, and they had a display of newly hatched chicks and the more approachable fluffy yellow, yet slightly older, chicks. The fluffy yellow chicks were provided with chick-sized Ferris wheels and sliding boards and merry-go-rounds for their chick amusement.

Apparently, they actually did hop onto the Ferris wheel ride and slide down the sliding board.

I had long thought this to be a figment of my mother's imagination, until this year, when I saw a similar stair and sliding board arrangement for ducklings at the PA Farm Show. That will teach me not to believe my momma.

So I grew up hearing about these "Peep" shows. We called chicks, "peeps". She also told me about buying pink and blue dyed chicks at Renniger's Market and flower shops when she was a kid. They'd sell them around Easter, and even I remember boxes of little yellow and white chicks for sale on Sunday's at "the auction" when I was very young. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly for the chiklets, party-colored chicks had fallen out of fashion by the time I was a kid in the early 70's. Still, there are square black and white photos of me, at about two-years old, reaching a tentative index finger toward a tiny, oblivious peep, staring up at my comparative hugeness from the news-paper covered kitchen floor. Peeps were delicate, and I was always told to pet them with "one finger" to avoid an untimely peep death caused by my juvenile exuberance.

The peeps magically disappeared when they started to grow pin feathers and get ugly. I have no memory of this, but I am assured that they lived long happy lives on Wagner's farm. Wagner was our milkman and came every week to the house to deliver our glass bottled milk. I'm pretty sure that PETA would challenge the "long happy lives" part of that equation, but for the sake of maintaining my relatively happy childhood, I intend to continue believing just that.

The punchline to this story came years later as my family and I were driving to Philadelphia. I must have been about six or seven, and could read well for my age. As we travelled down Rt 61, I noticed a sign on a storefront we were passing. Excitedly, I yelled out from the backseat, "Oh look, a peep show! Can we go?"

You could have heard a pin drop. I'm surprised that my Grandfather didn't slam on the brakes and kill us all.

Really, it was an innocent mistake on my part. I'd been hearing these stories about "peep shows" and there was a sign for one. Of course it was also a sign for the "local" Adult Shop, but I wouldn't know what that was for another few years. All I knew then was that I'd said something that horrified everyone in the car and that the advertised "peep show" was definitely NOT the type of peep show I thought it was.

No one adequately explained, at the time, what that type of peep show was.

My cunning plan was to bring this all around and talk about the loss of innocence that occurs after an injury or serious illness, but instead I'm going to leave that (mostly) unsaid, and just leave you with the image of me, hands splayed against the backseat window, wishing for all the world to see pink and blue peeps joyously riding miniature Ferris wheels.

Truth be told, and with all apologies to PETA, I'd still like to see that.