The Woods!

I grew up next to the woods. Houston is half scrubby, half pine trees. So some really big humongous trees grow, and when the world wants to go ahead and take something back, it does quickly. But at the end of my street were woods, where a creek fed into a bayou. The bayou separated the neighborhood from a very posh golf course, Houston Country Club. And then some little unnamed creek separated us from a tennis club, which we belonged to. I spent an amazing amount of time down in those woods. Luckily, as a kid, I wasn't susceptible to poison ivy, so I was always (like always) down there farting around, pretending. There were lots of houses that cantilevered over it. One of my favorite places to go was where a lady would put her huge mynah birds out. And they'd be out for a couple hours, and all they would do was scream, "Brian!" Never not laugh-out-loud funny. That's where we learned how to smoke grapevine. As a kid of the '70s, we'd grab cigarettes off the bar at our house and go down…