'Possum Patch: A Ride in the Country

Monday, March 29, 2010

A Ride in the Country

In the 1940s entertainment had to be simple and cheap and for our family, going for A Ride in the Country fell into this category.

Unlike some other applications, in this instance “cheap” and “easy” did not mean the same thing at all. Although the cost was limited to the price of some carefully rationed gasoline and maybe an extra quart of oil, very little about our family rides in the country ever proved to be easy.

To begin with everyone had to “get cleaned up”. This meant we had to wash faces and hands, put on shoes and make sure everyone had on underwear. If I take a minute I can feel again the child that was me and the excitement of that preparation and the urgency in the fear of being left behind.

The logistics alone would stop most people in today’s world. When I was very small Dad would drive, and when I was older it was my oldest brother. Mom and one of my older sisters sat next to him in front. Most often it was Kathryn because her legs were shorter and it was easier for her to get out of the way when it came time to shift. (It was a floor shift thing you know.) One or another of the children who got stuck boarding with us while their parents did who knew what..who knew where would be on Mom’s lap.

So that left the back seat for my other older sister, her baby girl, my two other brothers, my third sister and myself. I was too small to deserve a whole seat space and too large to stand between someone’s knees or sit on a lap so I generally rode stretched out on the shelf at the rear window. I remember it being very hot but I liked the privacy. Believe it or not, more often than not, someone would bring along a friend. Yes, we actually had friends who looked forward to our family doings as much as we did. I don’t remember where they sat.

The car I remember most was a box-like little Chevvie sedan. I saw one again at a car show a few years ago and I could not believe how small it was!

The road to the highway was a mile-long series of hills that caused us all to clutch each other going down and to hold our breath, lean forward and exert a communal mental energy urging the little car to make it to the top, on the way up. Everyone relaxed a little when we made it to the highway but only until whoever was driving started cussing and waggling the steering wheel around. That meant we had a flat.

No Drive in the Country was ever completed without at least one, and sometimes two or three, flat tires. Tires and their tubes were the bane of any ride in the country. The flat-repair process was rather complicated and ate up a lot of time. Everyone had to get out so the back seat could be raised up so the jack and patching stuff could be reached. The car was jacked up. The driver, whose job this generally was because everyone else was either too little to be much use or had wandered off looking for a bush or some wild plums or just to not have to hear the loud shouting and cussing, did a lot of shouting and cussing. When the flat was fixed everyone got back in and we went on until the next flat occurred.

There were other entertaining reasons to go for a drive …

We always tried to catch explosions, house fires and floods. This kind of news was easily obtained by phone through insistent rings on the party line. Even if it wasn’t our ring..(we all had a code..say two longs and a short..or a short and three longs etc..) an unusual amount of phone activity meant something was happening and everyone was bound to listen.

House fires generally occurred at night and because of the urgency of the thing the “getting cleaned up” part was minimal. No one could see if your face or hands were dirty and no one worried about whether you had on underwear. Floods had to wait for the weekend and sometimes were disappointingly receded and we had to be content with looking at dirt marks on the sides of buildings where the water had been. The only thing that exploded with any regularity was the feed mill in NKC.

The day we went to Sears to get the new console phonograph was memorable. It was hard to find room for it but my brother managed. The very first fish I ever caught..a beautiful Gar for those who fish.. stiff with rigor mortis..rode home on the floorboards at Daddy's feet.

The hot August day my very first niece came home from the hospital was, of course, a family event. We all got cleaned up, piled in the car and went to escort the new parents from the hospital…track them to their tiny upstairs apartment and watched while a very nervous young father tried to stuff her baby arms into a soft shirt.

A few years later I recall Daddy taking a smaller crew, diminished by time and the departures of adulthood, to see a straw stuck into an oak tree by a tornado at Excelsior Springs. Evidently, by the time we got there, someone had pulled out the straw because we never could find a tree with a straw sticking out of it.

They just don’t make entertainment like they used to.

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A Bedtime Story for Chickens

Once upon a time there was a little red hen. Each morning she woke early and left the special chicken house and worked hard scratching all day and laid very nice eggs in the special nest in the special house for chickens. But she had one bad habit. She did not like to go to bed at Chicken Bedtime with the other chickens. One morning she did not wake early. She did not wake at all. Fluffy red feathers blew in the breeze beneath the apple tree where the racoon liked to perch at night.

The Moral of the Story is: Go to bed when you're supposed to.

Memoirs

These are my memories and even though others have their own, perhaps contradictory, memories these are mine.

Memoirs Chapter 1

Our House

Unlike many people, I spent my childhood in the same house in which I was born. My childhood was encompassed by the sameness of each room, the never-changing porches, ragged lawns and roughly wooded acres and the multiplicity of a neighborhood comprised of families with names that told the history of the Midwest without even trying.

As an adult I’ve been fascinated by those old names: West, Woods, Rogers, Yates, Mathews, Alexander, Shields, Faucett and of course ours, descendents of the Lewis’s, Allens, Bakers and McDonalds, all reaching back to the English and Scots Irish Kentucky and Tennessee immigrations of the very early 1800s.

The other names were newer, German or Irish and with German and Irish mores: Rittermeir, Rintschler, Stock, (Dad’s name), Ostertag, McGosker, Kirkpatrick, O’Dell, Coopersmith, Mylars.

Many of these German and Irish families, fleeing hunger and conscription, lured by land and wages, came a decade or two later in the 19^th century during and shortly after the building of the railroads and stayed to build the Midwest after the end of the Civil War.

Dad built most of our house. I understand it was just two small rooms sitting on a brushy five acre lot at the edge of a dirt road when Dad, Mom and my six older siblings moved in. He later bought an adjacent forty acres.

He dug a basement, added two upstairs rooms and two downstairs rooms and a porch at the back. The path from the back porch wound down past the walnut tree and through the tall weeds to the out house. A very large family of spiders owned one whole corner of the outhouse so I never sat on that side.

Dad had a lot of help from friends that worked with him as laborers at different building sites that evidently had a lot of “left overs.” His friends were generous fellows and made steady contributions from those sites in the form of left over buckets of nails, left over gravel, left over lumber and so forth. The day the guy came with the concrete truck with the left over concrete for the basement floor was a banner day. Thank heavens for left overs because we really needed the room.

I can just barely remember a pot bellied stove into which went old newspapers, little sticks of wood and sometimes bigger chunks of wood or a scuttle of coal. Dad’s big heavy coffee pot sat on the stove top and the smell of the coffee mixed with the smell of the burning wood and the steam from the coffee made the rooms seem a lot warmer than they were.

Before long the house was modernized even further and a monstrous coal stove taller than either of my parents lurked just under the basement

stairs. Heat rose into the house through a large grate in the living room.

A few steps away from the furnace was the coal bin accessed through a low basement window that opened onto the driveway. The coal truck would be backed down the drive and the driver, usually a black man, would shovel the coal by hand through the window.

Many people say that they can’t remember anything before they were four or five years old and I don’t know why. I remember a great deal before that. They say people remember intense experiences and that is probably true.

My first actual memory was of standing, crying in my crib, gripping the top rails, dressed in a little white flannel gown that tied at the back of the neck, and being very scared. It was bedtime and my crib was in my parents’ room. Mother came to me and lay me down and pinned the blanket to the bottom sheet on each side of me so I would not get uncovered in the night and told me, “Shhh”.

Soon after that my bed was moved into what later became the bathroom. It was a tiny room that opened off of my parents’ room with just enough room for my crib to fit along one wall. This was the room in which I slept during the Chicken Wars.

We had no well and water was saved from rain or hauled in I guess but stored in the cistern near the back porch. It had a large square concrete top with a smaller concrete square that could be moved to check the level of the water and to remove anything unsavory. Two cinder blocks placed on this cap kept it in place.

Frogs and toads lived in the inside rim of the cistern and Daddy said they never hurt anything but the snake he found once had to be removed. He did not like snakes.

During the Chicken Wars of my infancy me and my brother, just a couple of years older than I, would run to the concrete of the cistern top to evade the old Banty rooster. The rooster was very protective of his hens but the hens always came to people expecting to be fed. It was a no-win situation for us.

Even though we were forbidden to hurt the old rooster my brother always fought back hard, throwing dirt clods and sticks and even once throwing a pan of water on him that had been set out for the dog but we always lost and wound up high tailing it for the cistern top.

There we would wait until either someone came to rescue us or the old rooster forgot we were there and wandered off.

My nightmares at that time always involved that wretched rooster and the safety of the cistern.

My worst rooster nightmare was probably my last as it occurred during one of my parents’ weekly Pinochle game and I was taken up to sit on Mom’s lap and be made over by Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank and the Mylars from next door who had been fortunate or smart enough to leave their kids at home.

And Daddy took noisy little sips of coffee from his saucer and clicked his false teeth at me, making the bottom ones slide almost out and it was always the best of jokes although Mom found the saucer sipping thing and the clicking teeth disgusting.

On Saturday nights we, that is the family, went to Nelsons Tavern where Mom and Dad and sometimes my older siblings and their friends would dance to the juke box and Dad would drink how ever much beer he could afford, generally one or two, and Mom would drink Coca Cola out of cool green bottles, slowly so it would last.

Mostly they danced with each other but occasionally a careful ritual would transpire. During a lull when they were not dancing, someone might come to our table and ask Dad if it was alright if he asked his wife to dance and Dad would always say they could and they would ask Mom to dance and she would leave her Coca Cola to dance. She particularly loved the Polka and the Schottische.

Although both Dad and Mom loved music and loved to dance, they did not dance well together. Mother, a very reserved person, danced rather stiffly and with considerable rigidity. Watching them was a little like watching a happy bee cavorting around an upright zinnia blossom. The bee is busy but the zinnia never quite participates.

Daddy said she danced like she had a poker up her butt but I don’t think he ever said it to her face.

And sometimes Dad would turn to Mom and ask if she cared if he danced with so and so and Mom would say no, she didn’t care and Dad would do the ritual. He would go to the table of the lady with whom he wished to dance and he would ask her husband if he would mind if he asked his wife to dance. Dad would turn to the lady and ask her if she would like to dance and off they would go.

A request was seldom refused within reason. But the ritual was always observed. No man approached another person’s wife without that permission. It made for the most orderly and friendly of situations wherein everybody could have a great time and the risk of misunderstandings was minimal.

Up to the time I got bored with party life and was considered old enough to be left at home with the bigger kids, I had lots of partners myself. Johnny Spoons, known for keeping time to the juke box by rapping out the beat with two spoons held between a thumb and two fingers, often partnered me to the poignant strains of Good Night Irene or Sentimental Journey but we both liked the polkas better. Even though he was very old and because of an injury, unable to keep up with polka steps, he seemed to enjoy it.

Shorty, however, was my favorite partner, partly because he wasn’t much taller than I was as a four year old. Shorty wasn’t really short but he too had been injured and was unable to stand erect. This meant we could pretty much look each other in the eye and Shorty’s eyes were always merry and happy.

Sometimes he would stand me up on the bar and everyone would clap and holler and I would do my four-year-old version of the hootchy cootchy to the music of the Sabre Dance and be rewarded with a bag of chips and an orange Nehi soda.

But I tired of the party life. I didn’t like sleeping on a pile of coats on a hard table and was finally allowed to stay home. I’m the only person I know who gave up the bar scene at such a tender age.

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Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

'Possum Patch

Monday, March 29, 2010

A Ride in the Country

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