Hostesses Unaware

   Our house was a gathering place for all the local kids during our growing-up years.  Local meant primarily all the kids on our street all the time, the kids from the corner on down through the lane most of the time, and occasionally some upstreet kids.  We weren't fans of them and later learned that some of them thought downstreet was slumming it.  But downstreet was the hub as far as we were concerned; we were all comfortable enough to be able to ignore each other in perfect harmony.  However, another element was introduced when the families on the street, most of them older than my mother's age, had their grandchildren visit.  The women would ask my mother if their children could come down to play with the Madigan girls, such obedient and perfect children we were. Moreover, we had a front porch, a back yard, and a vacant lot next door. The grandparents meant visitors to our yard, not the inside of the house, because that was an unspoken rule in our neighborhood. Don't be a bother to others and play outside.   At first, that could be a little awkward, during the initial visit, carrying with it as it did a sense of obligation which was new to us.  But gradually the visiting  kids adapted to the way the hierarchy worked, and fit right into our games and pursuits.
    One family had visitors from West Virginia who stayed summers for a few years.  There was a girl named Patti and her younger brother Steve.  We were somewhat impressed because Patti had an accent, and also because she was unfailingly the most perfectly groomed child of 10 years old we had ever encountered.  Although they pretty much lived out of a suitcase during the visits, and she seemed to have only one outfit of clothing, her shirt was always crisp and ironed and her blonde hair never out of place. We were too young to realize that was the way of  her Southern mother. Though she appeared bandbox perfect, she dove right into all activities and had an affinity for horror stories.  One older boy had attended Boy Scout Camp, and had shared those campfire horror stories with us, and when she pleaded with us from her seat on the doghouse roof, somebody would usually recount the tale of an iron claw stuck to a car's door handle after leaving a drive-in, or some other ghoulish story.  Oddly enough, while she came down every day, her brother never did, although at the age of 6, he would not have been the youngest on the scene.  We lose track of each other, as children do,  never knowing when the last sighting of each other would be.  We did learn of little brother Steve years later, though.  He had become a Secret Service Agent and was widely  portrayed by the media for his efforts in protecting President Reagan  during  the 1981  assassination attempt.