'Possum Patch

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The View From the 12th Floor

The View From the 12th. Floor

The view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor by the name of Ligenfelter, in the Pavilion Section of the sprawling North Kansas City Hospital, stretched below and away to the south and east and west like an artful diorama of industry.

The scene before me, the distant Kansas City skyline, a broad and winding river, acres of flat-topped warehouses edged in by miles of busy streets and more acres of railroad tracks and their slowly moving cargos lent a lazy somnolence to the scene that tended to lull the senses.

But as I looked out across that river-bottom land, seeking out things and buildings and places familiar in my memories, it came to me that I was looking at the history of my family. What we were and what we had become had its inception in this small strip of flat land bounded by great rivers and their bridges, tall Loess bluffs and fields of fertile loam and yellow clay. It lay before me as an opened book lies upon a nightstand, waiting to be read.

To the east, just left of Harrah’s, the new (relatively speaking) gambling boat, the swift current of the Missouri pushed and rippled in orderly rows of roiling motion on to the east and a little bit north at this point, only to turn east and south again to continue it’s rolling, pushing advance to the even mightier Mississippi at the northern edge of St Louis, clear over on the Eastern edge of the state.

But in 1844 it was here and upon this river, up from the Mississippi, in its turn up from the Port of New Orleans, and on to St. Joseph, that Margaret Mary and Joseph Whiskerchen, our Great-Great Grandparents, and their children, newly from Rheinborg, Germany, brought everything they owned to find and farm a new home. Our Great Grandmother Mary Margaret Whiskerchen, the first of this family to be born in this country, married John Lewis and raised 14 children, one of whom was our grandmother, Eliza Lewis Stock.

And to the west the traffic of Burlington Street, that is actually Oak Street to the north and Oak Street to the south and becomes 71 Highway even further south, can be seen in patches between tall buildings and a few tall trees. This is a very old thoroughfare and although unpaved in 1908, it did go clear to the river where the ferry shuttled back and forth.

In that year it was a ferry that brought my mother’s mother, a pregnant-but-unwed, college educated, Missouri farm girl to the South bank of the Missouri where she was provided a carriage to take her up the hill to The Willows, a sanctuary for girls like her, and a well known baby mill, at 20^th and Main. By raising my eyes just a little and there to the center of the Kansas City skyline and a little beyond I knew that that was where my mother was born.

Adopted by a North Missouri farm family, she told me of riding her pony on the loess bluff on this north side of the river overlooking what is now 210 hwy and of sitting her pony and looking out across at the limestone bluffs of Cliff Drive on the opposite side and down upon the hayfields that stretched from the foot of the bluff upon which she sat into what became Armour Road.

In 1912 the Armour-Swift-Burlington (ASB) Bridge at the end of Burlington Street was finally finished. By 1927 the bridge had suffered a fire at one section and needed other repairs and Dad was one of the fortunate who was employed, on that project.

Almost directly down and in front of my high window stands the tall square towers of what is left of the old mills where for over a hundred years cereal grains were ground, stored and shipped. Perhaps they still are. Dad worked at Corn Products, just east of the mills, and always came home wrapped in the North Town scent of warm ground grain.

And I know that the street that I look down upon goes to the west to the corner of Swift and Armour and the old Crown Drug Store where after school my sister served malts and grilled hamburgers and cold Coca Cola’s. And there on Armour was the hardware store where my brother worked after school and Saturdays and the huge, stark National Belles Hess building, the garment factory where my other sister, after her marriage, worked until she was too far pregnant to climb the stairs or stand the heat. And on that street my cousin’s filling station was the only chance to fill up until you got “over the river” or back north several miles.

And the Armour Theater, where my very first date and I, (we were 12 years old and he had walked five miles to escort me to the bus stop into Northtown,) shivered and screamed through the bleakness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in black and white.

And 12 floors below me, in the single-floor three-wing infancy of this very hospital, my youngest daughter was born.

That small, sterile room so empty of all but myself just a few minutes ago had somehow become full to bursting, thanks to the view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

Sunday, July 25, 2010

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.

The Art of Pig Watching

Perhaps you spurn the art of pig-watching and consider it a waste of time. Perhaps you have never had the opportunity to watch too many pigs and are ignorant on the subject. And perhaps you have just never been so lucky.

But those of us lucky enough to have had the opportunity and taken the time to spend an hour or two on a good day pig-watching are permanently blessed with a deep knowledge of what life appreciation is all about. If you have never watched a 300 pound sow in a 6-inch deep mud puddle you have no yardstick to determine what real contentment looks like.

It doesn’t take much to maintain a pig’s ordinary, run of the mill daily happiness factor. Typically jolly fellows and girls, they live and let live and require little emotional support. I have never seen a depressed pig.

But it takes a good puddle to send a pig into the kind of ecstasy that stays with you.

My first pig venture with Gretchen and Gertrude and the inimitable Festus (described in an earlier Blog) were eventually followed by a couple I referred to as Ma and Pa Kettle.

Beautiful black Hamps with a white band completely around their middles, their naming was somewhat of a misnomer in that unlike the original Hollywood Kettles whose cleanliness and personal habits supposedly left a lot to be desired, MY Kettles were very tidy people.

Their bathroom habits were discreet and their bedding area was moved, at intervals chosen by them, to different pasture spots almost every night resulting in a clean bed.

However, due to the odiferousness of the pig reputation in general I chose a spot for the pig lot down in the northeast corner of the main pasture. (closer to my neighbor’s place than mine.) This made pig-watching a little inconvenient but we’re kind of short on entertainment here in North Missouri so I didn’t mind making the trip down the gravel to the pig pasture.

Whenever company came the entertainment agenda always included a jaunt “down to see the pigs” and we would lean on the fence posts and discuss stuff and watch the Kettles in their pursuit of the maximum pleasure derivable from three acres of grass and the mud from a small spring that ran along the side of their yard.

Sometimes in the summer when the spring dried up, being a true spring and only wet when it was actually spring, I would try to fill the trough with water at least once a day just for the show. It took the Kettles about 45 seconds to upend the trough , scoot it out of the way and plop into their very own self-made mud hole. Little eyes blinking in rapture, snouts whiff-whiffing and smurfing in the muddy ripples, squirming contendedly on one side, only getting up to drop with a splat onto the other side like a Brooklynite in Miami taking the sun…their pleasure was downright contagious and kind of inspiring.

In no time, because of the shallowness of the mud, they would begin to look like Oreos in reverse..soft gooey on the two outsides with a strip of dry and bristly in between. Often they would drift off to sleep on the wet bed of their cool and pleasant spa and not wake until the sun had dried the mud on their sides and turned them into what would then look like Navajo bake ovens.

But generally I did my pig watching at days end, when after work I would stop at the barn, fill the bucket with feed and head on down to the pig lot and spend a relaxing half hour watching the Kettles enjoy life.

Pigs are not all that dumb, (although not as smart as some people would have you believe) and the Kettles soon came to recognize the sound of my truck turning the corner a quarter of a mile up the gravel as I turned off the blacktop. Heck, maybe they heard the truck before that. Who knows how far pigs can hear when they are thinking about food?

I might never have known about there ability to anticipate my arrival at all but one night they, being just too clever by half, had managed to get under the fence and decided to come to meet me. The sight of the Kettles trotting up the road, in happy silhouette just there where the gravel of the road to the east met sky, was a sight to see. They were so pleased with themselves it was impossible not to be happy with them.

Sorry to say, this was the end of pig farming for me. That one taste of freedom was too much for the Kettles and their desire to see the world was beyond my pig fencing skills. But I do miss the pig watching at the end of the day.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Inspection Time

Oh Boy, Oh Boy Oh Boy…this is really good news. I know I whine and complain a lot but this is REALLY good news.

I just this morning, this very morning, had my 15-year-old Buick inspected and retagged for two years and it is not only not even the end of the month but it only cost me $85!

This may seem like a minimal boon to those unaware of my relationship with Steve, my mechanic, or his capacity to hold my fate in his hands but around here it is a big %$@@**&$ deal?

For 15 years I have, at the very last minute, thrown myself upon his mercy and he has always managed to save me from pedestrian life by simply adding a few sets of brakes, new mufflers, a new tire or two etc. And I, whipped and beaten by the State and my own procrastination, slumping across his greasy counter, would commence to write a check that he and I both knew might bounce at least once.

Strangely enough these checks began to assume a terrible similarity in that they all exceeded $100! Over the years even our conversations on this matter have begun to be a little redundant.

“See these little wiry things sticking out of the side of your tires here, Laura?” says Steve, my mechanic. “Well, yes I noticed that.” say I, “What do you suppose the matter is?”

And Steve would say, “Well, the matter is Laura that this car won’t pass with these tires.”

And I would try not to let Steve see how rattled I was at the possibility of the cost of a new set of tires but he must be a good guesser because he would say, “I might have some used ones around here good enough to pass and other than that it’s just a few replacement bulbs and a new wiper blade on the passenger side…(I never replace that one..my passengers are better off not seeing anything.) ..and that should get you by.”

And I say “How much will that be all together, Steve?” and he would get out his greasy little receipt book and figure on it with his Independent Farmer’s Bank ball point pen and it would always come out to “…can’t say exactly Laura but it looks like about $100 or maybe a little more.” And that’s what it would be including the “little more.”

Or he might say, “See how that bungy cord you have holding the hood down allows the hood to flop up and down, Laura?” (That was on the old pick-up)..And I would say, “I plan to get a new bungy cord the very next time I’m in town, Steve.” But he says, “You been saying that for awhile, Laura but you really need to get that latch fixed. It won’t pass with a bungy cord.” And I would say, “Well, can you do it?” and he would say “I think so, but I’ll have to order a spring…(thingy)” and I say, “Well, how much do you think it will be all together?”

And out would come the little receipt book and the Independent Farmer’s Bank ball point pen and it would always come out to “…can’t say exactly Laura but it looks like about $100 or maybe a little more.” And that’s what it would be plus a little more.

And that’s why this is such REALLY good news. I know there’s not that much difference between $85 and $100. Yes, I know that. But it’s the TREND that’s encouraging.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Maggie, an Honorable Partner

As one of a large litter of pups left in a dog kennel to starve following the removal of their mother, Maggie, the only survivor, managed to squirm under the chain link fence and get rescued by a horrified neighbor. The lady happened to have a friend willing to care for her and when she was about six months old, a teenager in dog years, I answered the ad that read: “Blue Heeler needs a home” and Maggie came to the farm.

It didn’t take long for Maggie to become an integral part of the farm and within a year she was what you might call a full partner. My only requirements of her in the beginning were that she not leave the place and not to kill poultry.

Her only requirements of me were that she be allowed to stay as near me as possible as much as possible and that I would listen to “dog reason” occasionally.

She learned immediately that her boundary was the fence line and the open gate at the gravel road but the chicken killing thing was a hard lesson to learn and cost a lot of poor hens their lives that first year.

I learned immediately that she was a companion worth having and that I could depend on her. I also learned to listen to dog reason.

She was an extremely happy dog in those busy years and confident in her own importance and ability to hold up her end. Her favorite entertainment was walking the pasture, for whatever purpose, 15 feet ahead of me, tail brush wagging, pretending that she was the leader and I was the follower. Maybe she was. I never could figure out how she knew where we were going. If the plan was to check the gully off to the east for a missing heifer she struck off in that direction. If the idea was to run the south fence line checking for downed wire she headed straight for it.

I learned very soon that she had a few strong hatreds. She passionately hated pigs and her aversion to large sticks in my presence turned her into a totally different dog that you really would not like to meet. And she had a primeval hatred of guns.

We were both young then, in those years when my own strength and determination would be tested to the max, and the work was hard. In the beginning there were disagreements, as in any partnership, mostly regarding what Maggie thought was in my best interest.

She was determined to keep a safe zone between me and anything larger than me and at first this made caring for the stock a little difficult. However, as my hard-earned herd of sale barn heifers grew and the danger of being smashed or trampled as the individuals in the herd fought for the first bite increased, I learned to appreciate Maggie’s wisdom and depend on her protection. She never failed me.

She hated to see me climb and this battle, which I finally won because of the necessity of the thing, caused me a few bumps and scrapes. The cattle were separated from the hay storage side of the barn by an ancient stanchion topped by woven wire fencing and I had to stand on the stanchion and shove the hay bales over the wire fencing. To Maggie this was double jeopardy. I was not only three feet off the ground but at some risk of falling into the pen with the cows.

Her whimpering pleas ignored, she would brace her feet in the dirt of the barn floor, grab the cuff of my cover-alls and hang on with all her might while I did the haying as best I could with a 40-pound dog attached to my leg. More than once I lost patience and kicked out at her, cussing a blue streak, winding up flat on my back on the floor. This had to stop so I did win this one.

Maggie was a perfect mimic. She was like a canine mocking bird. I guess you would call her a mocking dog. More than once I jumped from my bed thinking I had coyotes right under my bedroom window only to see Maggie sitting there answering the yip yips of some far off coyote pack just for the fun of it.

Or I would hear the tinny bark of a very small dog by the barn and go out to see her sitting in the drive answering the neighbor’s terrier or a deep full bark of what I was sure had to be a St. Bernard in the neighborhood and it would just be Maggie woof woofing away.

I don’t know how she did it and am not sure why she did it but I think she just thought it was fun.

She did, however take her responsibilities very seriously. In fact she was a dedicated worrier. Beneath my bedroom window, guarding through the night, she could not keep her worries to herself and would often, when the coyotes were running or stray people were out and about, trouble my sleep with her pitiful grumbling, mumbling whimpers and this would go on and on only to be silenced by my loud shouts to “shut up that damn whining” and my banging on the outside wall by the window beneath which she slept.

Our only disagreement that seriously threatened our arrangement and Maggie's place at the farm involved a gun. Like I said she hated guns. The merest glimpse of a gun, or any facsimile of one, resulted in the morphing of a very gay, amenable, hard working companion into a rigidly intense, deadly serious canine stranger.

I kept a gun. It was a rifle and kept for the purpose of some emergency that might arise for a woman living alone in a rather isolated area. Of course and fortunately, no such emergency ever did arise and hasn't to this day.

The gun's actual use, with a few rare exceptions, had been confined to the two occasions when I, fortified with three or four ounces of Vodka mixed with a tablespoon of orange juice, performed necessary mercy killings. It had also been waved wildly at stray dogs and one errant fox seen carrying off a fat Peking duck five mornings in a row.

But a neighbor's dog, having made friends with Maggie, who was a total push over in that regard, had persistently ravaged and killed throughout the poultry population and was arrogant enough to come into the yard in broad daylight while I was standing there to repeat his acts of destruction right in front of me.

I looked at the bodies strewn across the yard and I had had enough. I got the rifle and standing in the driveway with the intention of either scaring the be jesus out of him or killing him dead which ever my aim served, was banging away while Maggie's wildly piteous pleadings and whimperings fell on deaf ears. As a last resort, from her way of thinking, she stood on her hind legs and clamped down on my left hand that supported the gun while my right worked away at the trigger.

I was stunned. First by the pain of it and then by the fact that she would actually do this to me. She did not bite, or tear..just clamped down hard and hung on, her whimperings and whining, louder and louder, ascending to a frantic pitch going up and down the scale while her grip stayed firm. I dropped the gun. She dropped to the ground and rolled belly up in one motion, crying so loud I could hardly hear anything else. Her despair was total. It was obvious that every instinct bred into her told her that this was a death warrant.

My hand hurt where one of her long canine teeth had met the lower teeth in the web of my thumb and forefinger. I stared at the fat puncture wound seeping blood. But I had had enough of killing.

"That's alright Maggie." I told her. "You were right, girl," I said, "We'll never use the gun again, but don't ever do that again either." and because she knew I had forgiven this unforgivable act, (which after all is what forgiveness is all about), and after at least thirty seconds of subdued body language..the head hanging the drooped tail..and so on, she became her old self again and was happy to go on with chores.

I never used the gun again and was eventually happy to find a home for it with one of the boys..I can't remember which one. As for Maggie, she kept her end of the bargain and never in eighteen years ever met a human being with anything other than friendliness and love.

Maggie was a fine, fine dog and an honorable partner.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Maggie's Gone

Well, Maggie’s gone. She was eighteen years old and a fine, fine dog. If ever a dog deserved rest it was Maggie. But humans are a complex sort and being no exception I find myself angered by her leaving. Not at her..just mad in general. Eighteen years is a long time to have someone sitting by your porch door or under your bedroom window. Maggie always had my back.

Last Wednesday at the morning feeding time she was very bad, wobbly and wouldn’t leave her spot beneath the shade of the elm tree ten feet from the back door. I spoke to her and took her water and a handful of food which she ignored. She was impatient with my hand upon her head and rose stiffly to turn her back to me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that her mind was now on other things.

Sometime during the day she left the elm tree and I thought she probably went to the cellar, which is left open for her and Pansy the Pyr in this heat but when she was not at the back door Thursday morning of course I knew why. I checked the cellar, both sheds and the barn without finding her. I checked the edge of the pasture for any sign of a fresh dog path in the tall grass. I found it but did not follow. I couldn’t believe she chose to do this thing alone.

In my humanness I wanted it different for her. I wanted to do better by her. But she wanted the privacy of the tall grass whispering and the cool brown earth and sky to look at and I didn’t follow.

To me dogs are of two kinds. There are the face watchers and the hand watchers. Hand watchers are the terriers and hunters motivated by games, food and directions for the hunt. Face watchers are the herders, the nurturers, the lovers of humans in all their folly.

Hand watchers are tons of fun and full of energy and are often extremely loyal and protective.

But I believe it’s the face watchers that can see into the human heart….every brave or cowardly smile, every tear that never falls… is reflected in the eyes of a face watcher.

Maggie was a face watcher.

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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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