Tonica Days #6--Growing Up in Segregated America
1 Comments Published by tet on Thursday, August 14 at 3:53 PM.
Today, August 14, 2008, marks the one-hundredth anniversary of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. One of the results of such riots in cities across the Midwest was the creation of “sunset laws” as we called them—regulations that forbade people of color from remaining in a community after dark. These laws resulted in cities and towns in the North becoming much more segregated than those in the South. Black people were not merely forced to drink from different water fountains or use designated bathrooms; they were instead excluded from being any part of the communities, whatsoever.
The assortment of ethnic groups that surrounded me when I was a boy was limited to the long-term residents of America on my mother’s side and the universally Catholic collection of immigrants on my father’s. To the best of my knowledge, there was no overt racism or hatred within that mixture of folks simply because there was no one around to hate—no one bothered to tell me, as a child, that there were people with skin even darker than Skinny Bernardoni and the other Italians. We knew from the July 4th celebrations every year, when Wilson Warrner read the Gettysburg Address, that soldiers from Tonica had fought to free slaves from their masters, but that was a long time ago—it may as well have been on another planet. There was nothing on television in the mid-1950s to show us anything different. The United States was a land of white people, as far as anyone could tell.
When I was six and showing interest in astronomy (and sciences in general), my grandmother decided that it was important for me to get to the museums in Chicago. Since she was too timid to drive in large-city traffic, the two of us embarked on a Rock Island coach to the Windy City. As we approached the city, I noticed the slums of Blue Island out my window. Four-story tenements rose as far as the eye could see. The back sides of the apartment buildings, with their outside stairways, back porches, and lines of colorful laundry were a surprise to me. I asked my grandmother, “What are those?”
She replied, “That’s where Negroes—black people—live. They came up from the South years ago because they were mistreated.”
“Black people? You mean black like a cat? What are they like?”
“They’re people like us, they just look different. We don’t have any around our part of the country because there was some trouble once—I don’t know what it was, something about a travelling show, maybe. In any case, they can’t come to LaSalle or Peru, but there are some who live over in Streator.”
The train pulled to a stop and several plump, older black women boarded. They came back to where my grandmother and I were sitting and once they were seated, my grandmother spent the rest of the trip into Chicago visiting with them. At one point, I remember one of them commenting on how friendly the two of us were.
1958 Chicago was a rainbow of colors in ethnicity—a true melting pot. The prosperity of the period in the urban areas had enabled everyone we saw on the street to dress better than either of us—we stood out not because of our nationality or color, but because we were obviously rural poor. Nonetheless, the city-dwellers we met were universally polite, much more than one would expect today.
I learned as much on the train and street that day as I did in the planetarium or museums. I started looking more closely at the newspapers that my father insisted I read daily. Changes were beginning in the South at this time and I noticed that there was fighting going on in places like Little Rock over where kids could go to school. I thought it strange that such a little thing, such a tiny thing as where someone’s folks had come from originally would cause people to be angry and want to exclude others. No one since has ever given me a convincing argument for why that should be the case.
The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s removed the legal restrictions, of course, and none of the cities in question would be comfortable now admitting that the laws that they had had really existed. There is always a delay between changes in social rules and the implementation of those changes. When I left the farm in 1970, I came to a college town where twelve square blocks of its ghetto had been burned down three months before. I was, in my classes, surrounded by people of wildly different backgrounds for the first time in my life. Even so, the dorm floor where I was placed was selected for boys from small towns across the Midwest, so it was universally white and middle- to lower-class.
The sunset laws are all lost history now, hidden away like all of the discrimination that was part of American Apartheid. Those of us who lived through those days listen to speakers talking about fairness, equality, and civil rights and complaining about how bad things are now. We know what it was like then, the progress that has been made, and that there’s really no comparison possible—so much progress has been made. We also know, however, that without constant vigilance regarding our freedoms, the different will never be truly safe in our country.
Tom
Labels: laws, perceptions, race, Tonica Days
Tonica Days #5--Farmboys on the Wall
3 Comments Published by tet on Saturday, September 29 at 1:50 PM.
October, 2007
The lights came up in the theatre and the credits for Across the Universe were playing over the multicolored faces of the actors and actresses spinning weightlessly. For over two hours, kitten and I had watched the stories of young people as they lived through five years of the 1960s, sung to the tune of no less than 33 Beatles songs. I turned to her, said, "Darling, I know you like to sit through the credits, but please, just this once, we need to leave. I've got a white-hot light burning its way out of my brain. If I don't get this down in print, I'll scream."
I drove home quickly, because I wanted to write this while the music was still echoing in my head. The movie had touched on the war in Vietnam in juxtaposition with Beatles music and memories came back so hard and so deeply that I almost had to leave in the middle. To a certain extent, what you are going to read now is a catharsis for me.
So often, people talk about the Vietnam War as something to compare other things to. They talk about it as a bad example of how well-meaning people can destroy nations. They speak of it as the great cause where the people made a difference. It was more than that. It was something that overwhelmed our lives for ten years, reached into the heart of my community and changed us forever.
Small towns are one of the places where soldiers come from. The parts of big cities where tenements crowd closely together are another source, but when you read the casualty lists of a war, you see the names of places like Sedan, Kansas, Lula, Georgia or, in our case, Tonica, Illinois. Every Memorial Day, we would gather as children at the Civil War cemetery on the hill overlooking the grade school and listen while Wilson Warrner read the Gettysburg Address in a deep, resounding voice that needed no amplification whatsoever.
We didn't think much of war, or going to it when I was a kid. Korea was in a stalemate when I was born. All of our fathers, of course, had been in World War 2--my father had met my mother when he returned from Europe and his best friend had taken him to a cabaret to see their new torch singer. When the mood struck, my father would talk about the good times that he had while he was in Europe--building airfields for the Brits, sneaking into town after it had been declared off-limits. He told me of watching aircraft come back from their bombing missions--the American B-17s at dusk and the British planes at dawn.
It was accepted that, while war was an event that happened far, far away from Tonica, participation was a duty that would occasionally fall to young men from the town. As I grew into my teens, I, like everyone else in my generation watched war unfold in real-time. By the time I was thirteen years old, we saw nightly news reports from Vietnam with video footage of our brave soldiers saving villagers from the enemy. Two hours later, my father would point out that the soldiers in the Combat! TV show had been trying to take that town in France for two months longer than he had taken in real life.
One of the first soldiers to return from Vietnam after he finished his tour was asked to speak to a school assembly. I was fourteen at the time--it was 1966. He spoke of the camaraderie of the troops, of the good work that they were doing. He presented a slide show with photographs of the countryside. There were muddy, muddy roads--we all knew about them. The poles carrying electricity to the villages there were tilted from the vertical as badly as the ones going down US 51. There were all manner of trees, though, in the photos that were unlike anything that we had ever seen. At the end, there were two slides showing enemy bodies. He apologized for not planning properly, "I'm sorry kids," he said, "I should have taken those out--don't mean to upset any of you."
Two of the Seniors in the back watched the slide show with a great deal of interest. Mike Puetz and Cody Calkins were inseparable.
I didn't know Cody very well at all, which was surprising, since his father, Ray Calkins, was the man who farmed my grandmother's land over in Deer Park township. I knew that he was in the FFA and he, being a senior, got to dance with all the girls at the sock-hops. Mike was the older brother of my buddy, Jim (who was my age). Mike played varsity basketball with a fervor that would incite the team to legendary feats when he'd swivel and then shoot unerringly. He was so thin that opposing team members would dive out of the way when they saw his elbows coming--we said that they were as sharp as railroad spikes. He resembled Gomer Pyle, a comic caricature of a Marine private, more than anything else.
All through my high school years, there would be graduates leaving for the various branches of the service and then returning. Most of the time, they didn't wait to be drafted--they volunteered in the hope that they'd get the sort of jobs that would help them when they returned to the farm since there wasn't a lot of call for trained killers in north central Illinois. Cody and Mike both graduated in the Spring of 1967.
As time went on, the war escalated. Some people began having doubts about whether or not the whole thing was a good idea or not. At the same time, my father's post-traumatic stress from his war began to take a toll on his personality and his relations with me. We had shouting matches over the politics of Johnson and Nixon that would sometimes last for up to an hour. As 1968 progressed, I spent more and more time away from the house and over at the Puetzs' place. Mike and his buddy Lowell Beenenga loved to fish at a pond Lowell's father had dug at the southern end of Ticona Road (the road which ran beside my house and connected to the Lowell Road, which led into Tonica.) That summer, at the pond, they taught me about Playboy centerfolds and how to drink beer. I only had a bike, so there was no danger riding home except for DeHasque's dog, which would lurk by the side of the road and wait for me to wobble by.
By September, it was pretty obvious that Mike was going to get drafted. He decided to volunteer for the artillery, since he was big enough to lug the equipment around, and he heard that they got better training. It was the end of summer and I had just started my junior year.
He stopped back after basic and we had a huge party for him and by dark, I ended up way too drunk to walk or bike home, so Mike and his brother drove me up to the house. We didn't want the night to end--the next morning he'd head back and it would be a long, long time before we saw him again.
Occasionally, during the school year, his sisters would receive letters from him and bring them to school. They weren't particularly eloquent, but they were consistenly funny. Winter turned to spring, then summer. In the middle of July 1969, we heard that Cody had been killed in action. This surprised us, since we hadn't really thought a lot about him since he had left town. He had been so quiet compared to his buddy Mike that it never really sunk in that he was overseas. I was absolutely ashamed that I had never bothered to get to know him well.
Mike finished his first tour and came back to the farm. He was changed. Where there had been a vivacious life-of-the-party fellow, there was now a serious man--a good soldier, but an angry one. He had been offered the chance to serve the rest of his term of service in the states, but he confided to us that he wanted to go back. He felt truly sorry that his best friend had died and wanted to make absolutely sure that Cody's sacrifice would not have been in vain.
I was becoming more and more sure that the war was not going to end well. I had been studying history in preparation for college and had found volumes on guerilla warfare in the Pacific. I talked to Mike, asking him if he really thought all this was worth it. He said that he thought it was--that the people there seemed grateful that the Americans were helping them out, especially since the Viet Cong had all but vanished by the time he had gotten there and that that they were fighting the North Vietnamese for the most part.
Early in 1970, Nixon sent US troops on incursions into Cambodia in an attempt to block the movement of supplies to enemy units operating in the areas around and south of Saigon. Mike was acting as a forward observer in an OH-6A helicopter that was shot down by enemy fire. It took them a long time to recover the body and ship it home.
I got to his wake early and was invited to sit with his brothers and sisters, since I had been virtually adopted by the family. The coffin was a shiny medium-brown with a flag draped over it and his basic training photograph next to its head. His mother came to me when she saw me begin to tear up and said, "I know that you say that you're an atheist, but if you want to, you can kneel and pray with me--it won't hurt anything, and you might feel better about everything."
She was right about that.
About twenty-five years later, I was at the Mall in Washington, DC and had a chance to go to The Wall. It's so quiet that you tread as softly as you can, lest you make a sound that would disturb the somber locale. The granite is mirror-smooth and in front of it are offerings that visitors would bring--a photo of a child, flowers, a little book of poems. Near the entrance to the ramp which leads to the center of the memorial, there's a notebook with torn, plastic-covered pages, in which you can reference the location of the fallen soldier's names:
Panel 21W, Line 106--PFC Cody Ray Calkins
Panel 14W, Line 128--Sgt Michael Duane Puetz
They were both 20 years old, and will be forever.
--Tom
The lights came up in the theatre and the credits for Across the Universe were playing over the multicolored faces of the actors and actresses spinning weightlessly. For over two hours, kitten and I had watched the stories of young people as they lived through five years of the 1960s, sung to the tune of no less than 33 Beatles songs. I turned to her, said, "Darling, I know you like to sit through the credits, but please, just this once, we need to leave. I've got a white-hot light burning its way out of my brain. If I don't get this down in print, I'll scream."
I drove home quickly, because I wanted to write this while the music was still echoing in my head. The movie had touched on the war in Vietnam in juxtaposition with Beatles music and memories came back so hard and so deeply that I almost had to leave in the middle. To a certain extent, what you are going to read now is a catharsis for me.
So often, people talk about the Vietnam War as something to compare other things to. They talk about it as a bad example of how well-meaning people can destroy nations. They speak of it as the great cause where the people made a difference. It was more than that. It was something that overwhelmed our lives for ten years, reached into the heart of my community and changed us forever.
Small towns are one of the places where soldiers come from. The parts of big cities where tenements crowd closely together are another source, but when you read the casualty lists of a war, you see the names of places like Sedan, Kansas, Lula, Georgia or, in our case, Tonica, Illinois. Every Memorial Day, we would gather as children at the Civil War cemetery on the hill overlooking the grade school and listen while Wilson Warrner read the Gettysburg Address in a deep, resounding voice that needed no amplification whatsoever.
We didn't think much of war, or going to it when I was a kid. Korea was in a stalemate when I was born. All of our fathers, of course, had been in World War 2--my father had met my mother when he returned from Europe and his best friend had taken him to a cabaret to see their new torch singer. When the mood struck, my father would talk about the good times that he had while he was in Europe--building airfields for the Brits, sneaking into town after it had been declared off-limits. He told me of watching aircraft come back from their bombing missions--the American B-17s at dusk and the British planes at dawn.
It was accepted that, while war was an event that happened far, far away from Tonica, participation was a duty that would occasionally fall to young men from the town. As I grew into my teens, I, like everyone else in my generation watched war unfold in real-time. By the time I was thirteen years old, we saw nightly news reports from Vietnam with video footage of our brave soldiers saving villagers from the enemy. Two hours later, my father would point out that the soldiers in the Combat! TV show had been trying to take that town in France for two months longer than he had taken in real life.
One of the first soldiers to return from Vietnam after he finished his tour was asked to speak to a school assembly. I was fourteen at the time--it was 1966. He spoke of the camaraderie of the troops, of the good work that they were doing. He presented a slide show with photographs of the countryside. There were muddy, muddy roads--we all knew about them. The poles carrying electricity to the villages there were tilted from the vertical as badly as the ones going down US 51. There were all manner of trees, though, in the photos that were unlike anything that we had ever seen. At the end, there were two slides showing enemy bodies. He apologized for not planning properly, "I'm sorry kids," he said, "I should have taken those out--don't mean to upset any of you."
Two of the Seniors in the back watched the slide show with a great deal of interest. Mike Puetz and Cody Calkins were inseparable.
I didn't know Cody very well at all, which was surprising, since his father, Ray Calkins, was the man who farmed my grandmother's land over in Deer Park township. I knew that he was in the FFA and he, being a senior, got to dance with all the girls at the sock-hops. Mike was the older brother of my buddy, Jim (who was my age). Mike played varsity basketball with a fervor that would incite the team to legendary feats when he'd swivel and then shoot unerringly. He was so thin that opposing team members would dive out of the way when they saw his elbows coming--we said that they were as sharp as railroad spikes. He resembled Gomer Pyle, a comic caricature of a Marine private, more than anything else.
All through my high school years, there would be graduates leaving for the various branches of the service and then returning. Most of the time, they didn't wait to be drafted--they volunteered in the hope that they'd get the sort of jobs that would help them when they returned to the farm since there wasn't a lot of call for trained killers in north central Illinois. Cody and Mike both graduated in the Spring of 1967.
As time went on, the war escalated. Some people began having doubts about whether or not the whole thing was a good idea or not. At the same time, my father's post-traumatic stress from his war began to take a toll on his personality and his relations with me. We had shouting matches over the politics of Johnson and Nixon that would sometimes last for up to an hour. As 1968 progressed, I spent more and more time away from the house and over at the Puetzs' place. Mike and his buddy Lowell Beenenga loved to fish at a pond Lowell's father had dug at the southern end of Ticona Road (the road which ran beside my house and connected to the Lowell Road, which led into Tonica.) That summer, at the pond, they taught me about Playboy centerfolds and how to drink beer. I only had a bike, so there was no danger riding home except for DeHasque's dog, which would lurk by the side of the road and wait for me to wobble by.
By September, it was pretty obvious that Mike was going to get drafted. He decided to volunteer for the artillery, since he was big enough to lug the equipment around, and he heard that they got better training. It was the end of summer and I had just started my junior year.
He stopped back after basic and we had a huge party for him and by dark, I ended up way too drunk to walk or bike home, so Mike and his brother drove me up to the house. We didn't want the night to end--the next morning he'd head back and it would be a long, long time before we saw him again.
Occasionally, during the school year, his sisters would receive letters from him and bring them to school. They weren't particularly eloquent, but they were consistenly funny. Winter turned to spring, then summer. In the middle of July 1969, we heard that Cody had been killed in action. This surprised us, since we hadn't really thought a lot about him since he had left town. He had been so quiet compared to his buddy Mike that it never really sunk in that he was overseas. I was absolutely ashamed that I had never bothered to get to know him well.
Mike finished his first tour and came back to the farm. He was changed. Where there had been a vivacious life-of-the-party fellow, there was now a serious man--a good soldier, but an angry one. He had been offered the chance to serve the rest of his term of service in the states, but he confided to us that he wanted to go back. He felt truly sorry that his best friend had died and wanted to make absolutely sure that Cody's sacrifice would not have been in vain.
I was becoming more and more sure that the war was not going to end well. I had been studying history in preparation for college and had found volumes on guerilla warfare in the Pacific. I talked to Mike, asking him if he really thought all this was worth it. He said that he thought it was--that the people there seemed grateful that the Americans were helping them out, especially since the Viet Cong had all but vanished by the time he had gotten there and that that they were fighting the North Vietnamese for the most part.
Early in 1970, Nixon sent US troops on incursions into Cambodia in an attempt to block the movement of supplies to enemy units operating in the areas around and south of Saigon. Mike was acting as a forward observer in an OH-6A helicopter that was shot down by enemy fire. It took them a long time to recover the body and ship it home.
I got to his wake early and was invited to sit with his brothers and sisters, since I had been virtually adopted by the family. The coffin was a shiny medium-brown with a flag draped over it and his basic training photograph next to its head. His mother came to me when she saw me begin to tear up and said, "I know that you say that you're an atheist, but if you want to, you can kneel and pray with me--it won't hurt anything, and you might feel better about everything."
She was right about that.
About twenty-five years later, I was at the Mall in Washington, DC and had a chance to go to The Wall. It's so quiet that you tread as softly as you can, lest you make a sound that would disturb the somber locale. The granite is mirror-smooth and in front of it are offerings that visitors would bring--a photo of a child, flowers, a little book of poems. Near the entrance to the ramp which leads to the center of the memorial, there's a notebook with torn, plastic-covered pages, in which you can reference the location of the fallen soldier's names:
Panel 21W, Line 106--PFC Cody Ray Calkins
Panel 14W, Line 128--Sgt Michael Duane Puetz
They were both 20 years old, and will be forever.
--Tom
Labels: history, Tet, Tonica Days, Vietnam
Spring/Summer 1968...
Farm cats are not the kind of fluffy, playful creatures that most associate with the feline species. They're strictly blue-collar, the miners and factory-workers of the breed. A broken-eared, stub-tailed female resembles the pampered Persians and Siamese of high society as closely as a Wal-Mart associate resembles Paris Hilton or a runway model.
This is not to say that they're not respected. On our farm, they served as self-replicating guardians of the grain, chasing the voles, mice, and rats (often in quite entertaining ways) and minimizing the amount of waste when the crib corn was dry, shelled and sent to market. In return, they were given leftovers on the cistern top behind the house and cow's milk in the barn, if they wished it.
Taking into account our familiarity, therefore, with the species, it was even more surprising when my brother came running into our milking parlor from the attached haybarn one evening, breathless. "There's a bobcat up there!" he panted, brushing bits of hay from his pants.
My father, who knew quite well that bobcats were much too shy to ever be found in a working barn, figured that it was a ploy by my brother to avoid tossing bales of hay down for the cows. He finished removing the milking machine from the udder of the last Holstein of the night's milking and dumped its contents into the bucket that I was to carry in to the milkhouse and pour into the bulk tank. He turned his cap backwards, hitched up his pants a notch, and headed into the haybarn to investigate whatever had terrorized my brother. I watched gleefully, hoping against hope that the little brat would be caught in a lie and berated creatively.
A few moments later, there was a sound of rustling, some swearing that would have done George Patton proud, and my father came sliding out of the haybarn. His cap flew from his head and landed at the feet of the largest feral cat that I had ever seen. This was not a tomcat, per se, but the Platonic ideal of a tomcat, a Hercules or Alexander the Great of a tomcat, ready to clean our stables or conquer LaSalle County for the Macedonians.
This creature was at least 25 pounds, with no sign of the battlescars normally visible on ferals. Jet black, with glowing yellow eyes, he seemed a creature of campfire fiction, although the Halloween stories normally told about such were still six months distant. He sniffed the green John Deere cap, perhaps commenting internally on my father's hygiene, batted the cap down the slope into the parlor and strode confidentially back into the hayloft.
The three of us conferred, and it became obvious that the grass in the pasture was probably long enough by now for the cows to go outside and graze for the night, and that no hay would be necessary, after all. We opened the cows' stanchions and drove them outside, dumped the milk into the bulktank, cleaned the equipment and headed for the house, buzzing with excitement.
Mother, when she finally got us to slow down enough to understand our story, was at first incredulous, but, as time passed, realized that we were not exaggerating (much.) My father and I began to quickly regret, however, that we had told her when we realized that we had seen that look in her eyes before: My mother was beginning to see this as a challenge.
Mother was quite a hand with animals. She claimed that she had never met one that didn't like her, and this was proven to me the day that I watched her feed a Lorna Doone to a raccoon that had wandered up from the woods that were behind the houses. She began to search the refrigerator for something with which she could tame this ravening beast. She settled on a bit of hamburger that had been left over from lunch earlier that day and put it on a small Blue Willow plate. She turned the lights on in the haybarn and walked in, holding the offering before her like an Egyptian priestess bringing beer for Bastet.
The rest of us peered around the corner of the door, keeping a route of escape open in case the diplomacy (or worship) failed to placate the tomcat. He was still there, prowling and marking his new territory while vibrating a tail the size of a Polish sausage. Mother sang to him, "Hello, Big Guy, sweet Big Guy, come and eat this food, Big Guy." She set the plate on the hay, then slowly backed towards our door, nearly knocking us over as she stepped out without taking her eyes from the cat and the plate. Big Guy, as he had evidently just been named, sniffed the plate for only a moment before accepting her offering and devouring a stack of ground beef that would have been a quarter pound after cooking.
In the days that followed, Big Guy would move to the far side of the haybarn and allow us to take the bales necessary for the cows. Each evening, my mother would bring him a treat, placing the plate five feet closer to the house. Within a month, he had come up to the cistern-top and was eating with the other cats. He would tolerate them for the most part, as long as they did not come too close while he had food on his special plate or show any affection towards my mother. If either of those things happened, retribution was swift. A huge paw would strike the offender, and the poor creature would find itself rolling, head over tail, down the slope in the general direction of the corncrib.
By midsummer, Big Guy would follow mother into the house. My father, at first, protested, then quickly withdrew his objection when he realized that he really didn't have any way to stop him from entering. He would roam the rooms, always being a perfect gentleman and respecting our need for him to restrain his territorial urges. He gave the three of us fellows a wide berth, but would follow mother around the kitchen constantly rubbing against her ankles nearly hard enough to trip her.
One very hot July day, he leapt onto the table while we were eating ice cream and began devouring mother's bowl. After he had done this once, he became obsessed with the substance and would watch carefully for any sign of the freezer opening, at which point he would begin doing a dance complex enough to perhaps teach other cats its location. My brother made the mistake one afternoon of bringing an ice cream cone into the house, at which point Big Guy stood up on his hind legs like a prairie dog (reaching perhaps three feet into the air) and began batting at the cone. My brother handed him the cone, partly for amusement and partly out of fear, and he held the cone in his paws and proceeded to lick it like a small child.
Having a giant feral cat in the house did present some problems, however. Eventually, no matter how much you liked him, you had to put the cat out. Since none of the rest of us were really safe in close proximity to him, mother would sing, "time to go out, Big Guy, see the world, Big Guy," and he would hiss and snarl and exit through the back door. Woe, though, awaited any creature unlucky enough to be nearby when this happened. He would walk around the house like a black-hatted gunfighter in a Saturday afternoon movie, slugging each and every cat that found itself within reach. After ten minutes or so, he would calm down and find a spot to wait until he could return to what had rightfully become his territory.
All of this led up to one of the more interesting things that I have seen in my life. We were all in the house one Sunday afternoon that August when my uncle and aunt from Chicago arrived. My uncle was an unlikable sort--a crooked dentist who had made a great deal of money selling false teeth without the necessary license to do so. He was ostentatious to a fault, and was tolerated for the sake of his wife, my father's oldest sister, who was a much-loved, if constantly tipsy, character.
Uncle Hank had a toy poodle that was as annoying as he was, unfortunately. He found it amusing beyond words to release it from his car and allow it to run amok across the farmstead, yipping shrilly at the cats and kittens and forcing them up the trees behind the house.
This time, however, was a bit different. Mother had exiled Big Guy from the house right after seeing their Cadillac enter the driveway. He was, therefore, in a Olympian-grade snit as he began his gauntlet of victims. Just as he reached the corner of the house, my uncle released the poodle, expecting his usual barrel of laughs at the expense of our animals.
The poodle rounded the corner of the house and ran smack into a creature that must have appeared to it as being straight from the Pit. The canine stopped short, raising a small cloud of dust and sat on its haunches, silent. Big guy suddenly appeared to increase in size by at least fifty percent and smote the dog across the nose with both paws like Muhammed Ali on a good night. The dog shrieked as if disembowelled and headed back for the car, which was locked by this time. It ran back and forth at a high rate of speed, since the cat behind it no longer resembled a creature of flesh and blood, but could be described more accurately as a black streak. Finally, the hapless pup noticed that the bark of the burr oak in front of the house might present it with some purchase.
So there, I will leave this pleasant memory, with the poodle desperately hanging by its front paws seven feet above the ground on a limb while Big Guy leaps at its dangling tail over and over and over again....
There aren't too many things I've seen since that were funnier.
Tom
Farm cats are not the kind of fluffy, playful creatures that most associate with the feline species. They're strictly blue-collar, the miners and factory-workers of the breed. A broken-eared, stub-tailed female resembles the pampered Persians and Siamese of high society as closely as a Wal-Mart associate resembles Paris Hilton or a runway model.
This is not to say that they're not respected. On our farm, they served as self-replicating guardians of the grain, chasing the voles, mice, and rats (often in quite entertaining ways) and minimizing the amount of waste when the crib corn was dry, shelled and sent to market. In return, they were given leftovers on the cistern top behind the house and cow's milk in the barn, if they wished it.
Taking into account our familiarity, therefore, with the species, it was even more surprising when my brother came running into our milking parlor from the attached haybarn one evening, breathless. "There's a bobcat up there!" he panted, brushing bits of hay from his pants.
My father, who knew quite well that bobcats were much too shy to ever be found in a working barn, figured that it was a ploy by my brother to avoid tossing bales of hay down for the cows. He finished removing the milking machine from the udder of the last Holstein of the night's milking and dumped its contents into the bucket that I was to carry in to the milkhouse and pour into the bulk tank. He turned his cap backwards, hitched up his pants a notch, and headed into the haybarn to investigate whatever had terrorized my brother. I watched gleefully, hoping against hope that the little brat would be caught in a lie and berated creatively.
A few moments later, there was a sound of rustling, some swearing that would have done George Patton proud, and my father came sliding out of the haybarn. His cap flew from his head and landed at the feet of the largest feral cat that I had ever seen. This was not a tomcat, per se, but the Platonic ideal of a tomcat, a Hercules or Alexander the Great of a tomcat, ready to clean our stables or conquer LaSalle County for the Macedonians.
This creature was at least 25 pounds, with no sign of the battlescars normally visible on ferals. Jet black, with glowing yellow eyes, he seemed a creature of campfire fiction, although the Halloween stories normally told about such were still six months distant. He sniffed the green John Deere cap, perhaps commenting internally on my father's hygiene, batted the cap down the slope into the parlor and strode confidentially back into the hayloft.
The three of us conferred, and it became obvious that the grass in the pasture was probably long enough by now for the cows to go outside and graze for the night, and that no hay would be necessary, after all. We opened the cows' stanchions and drove them outside, dumped the milk into the bulktank, cleaned the equipment and headed for the house, buzzing with excitement.
Mother, when she finally got us to slow down enough to understand our story, was at first incredulous, but, as time passed, realized that we were not exaggerating (much.) My father and I began to quickly regret, however, that we had told her when we realized that we had seen that look in her eyes before: My mother was beginning to see this as a challenge.
Mother was quite a hand with animals. She claimed that she had never met one that didn't like her, and this was proven to me the day that I watched her feed a Lorna Doone to a raccoon that had wandered up from the woods that were behind the houses. She began to search the refrigerator for something with which she could tame this ravening beast. She settled on a bit of hamburger that had been left over from lunch earlier that day and put it on a small Blue Willow plate. She turned the lights on in the haybarn and walked in, holding the offering before her like an Egyptian priestess bringing beer for Bastet.
The rest of us peered around the corner of the door, keeping a route of escape open in case the diplomacy (or worship) failed to placate the tomcat. He was still there, prowling and marking his new territory while vibrating a tail the size of a Polish sausage. Mother sang to him, "Hello, Big Guy, sweet Big Guy, come and eat this food, Big Guy." She set the plate on the hay, then slowly backed towards our door, nearly knocking us over as she stepped out without taking her eyes from the cat and the plate. Big Guy, as he had evidently just been named, sniffed the plate for only a moment before accepting her offering and devouring a stack of ground beef that would have been a quarter pound after cooking.
In the days that followed, Big Guy would move to the far side of the haybarn and allow us to take the bales necessary for the cows. Each evening, my mother would bring him a treat, placing the plate five feet closer to the house. Within a month, he had come up to the cistern-top and was eating with the other cats. He would tolerate them for the most part, as long as they did not come too close while he had food on his special plate or show any affection towards my mother. If either of those things happened, retribution was swift. A huge paw would strike the offender, and the poor creature would find itself rolling, head over tail, down the slope in the general direction of the corncrib.
By midsummer, Big Guy would follow mother into the house. My father, at first, protested, then quickly withdrew his objection when he realized that he really didn't have any way to stop him from entering. He would roam the rooms, always being a perfect gentleman and respecting our need for him to restrain his territorial urges. He gave the three of us fellows a wide berth, but would follow mother around the kitchen constantly rubbing against her ankles nearly hard enough to trip her.
One very hot July day, he leapt onto the table while we were eating ice cream and began devouring mother's bowl. After he had done this once, he became obsessed with the substance and would watch carefully for any sign of the freezer opening, at which point he would begin doing a dance complex enough to perhaps teach other cats its location. My brother made the mistake one afternoon of bringing an ice cream cone into the house, at which point Big Guy stood up on his hind legs like a prairie dog (reaching perhaps three feet into the air) and began batting at the cone. My brother handed him the cone, partly for amusement and partly out of fear, and he held the cone in his paws and proceeded to lick it like a small child.
Having a giant feral cat in the house did present some problems, however. Eventually, no matter how much you liked him, you had to put the cat out. Since none of the rest of us were really safe in close proximity to him, mother would sing, "time to go out, Big Guy, see the world, Big Guy," and he would hiss and snarl and exit through the back door. Woe, though, awaited any creature unlucky enough to be nearby when this happened. He would walk around the house like a black-hatted gunfighter in a Saturday afternoon movie, slugging each and every cat that found itself within reach. After ten minutes or so, he would calm down and find a spot to wait until he could return to what had rightfully become his territory.
All of this led up to one of the more interesting things that I have seen in my life. We were all in the house one Sunday afternoon that August when my uncle and aunt from Chicago arrived. My uncle was an unlikable sort--a crooked dentist who had made a great deal of money selling false teeth without the necessary license to do so. He was ostentatious to a fault, and was tolerated for the sake of his wife, my father's oldest sister, who was a much-loved, if constantly tipsy, character.
Uncle Hank had a toy poodle that was as annoying as he was, unfortunately. He found it amusing beyond words to release it from his car and allow it to run amok across the farmstead, yipping shrilly at the cats and kittens and forcing them up the trees behind the house.
This time, however, was a bit different. Mother had exiled Big Guy from the house right after seeing their Cadillac enter the driveway. He was, therefore, in a Olympian-grade snit as he began his gauntlet of victims. Just as he reached the corner of the house, my uncle released the poodle, expecting his usual barrel of laughs at the expense of our animals.
The poodle rounded the corner of the house and ran smack into a creature that must have appeared to it as being straight from the Pit. The canine stopped short, raising a small cloud of dust and sat on its haunches, silent. Big guy suddenly appeared to increase in size by at least fifty percent and smote the dog across the nose with both paws like Muhammed Ali on a good night. The dog shrieked as if disembowelled and headed back for the car, which was locked by this time. It ran back and forth at a high rate of speed, since the cat behind it no longer resembled a creature of flesh and blood, but could be described more accurately as a black streak. Finally, the hapless pup noticed that the bark of the burr oak in front of the house might present it with some purchase.
So there, I will leave this pleasant memory, with the poodle desperately hanging by its front paws seven feet above the ground on a limb while Big Guy leaps at its dangling tail over and over and over again....
There aren't too many things I've seen since that were funnier.
Tom
September 1968...
Even now, nearly forty years later, I remember it. The flash from the lightning bolt reflected from her eyes and burned itself onto my retina as she lay in my arms. The cooler wind from the gust front swept across the orchard where we had parked--soon we would have to scramble for the shelter of the car.
By the time the first big drops struck the leaves above us, we had gathered as many of our clothes as we could find, tossed them into the front seat and had snuggled in the back under the blanket, picking the remaining blades of grass that had come in with it. The wind howled noticeably and the lightning forked, again and again, hitting trees so close that the strikes weren't followed by thunder, but instead accompanied by the crack of superheated air.
We giggled in pretended terror at the closest ones, holding each other more tightly each time. In the strobe light, we noticed each other's face and I enjoyed, once again, the wonder of a girl who kissed back with feeling.
Eventually, the storm passed--heading off toward Chicago, where it would dampen the fun of other teenagers until it ended somewhere over Ontario. We opened the doors, inhaling deeply of the ozone-laden air as we rearranged our clothing by the overhead light until we were sure that we passed muster. I clumsily tried to refasten her bra, but the nuances of female undergarments were still far beyond the expertise of my fingers.
The rain had been severe enough--an inch or so in an hour--that I had to rock my father's Buick for several minutes before we were able to get to the lane leading back to the township road. A couple hours had passed, but the dance at the high school wouldn't yet be over.
I parked at the edge of the lot, we leaned together for a last kiss, then she walked toward Tonica High, where the old gymnasium had been decorated for the back-to-school dance. I would follow ten minutes later, making sure that no one saw me and could make the connection between the two of us.
You see, at sixteen, nothing matters as much as being included. We were both outsiders, ridiculed and unaccepted for reasons that our tormentors seldom bothered to explain.
She was not a pretty girl, but instead interesting in ways that would not bear fruit until college. Her hair was raven black, her shape too wide across the hips and too small across the bust. Her mother had been unwed and way too young at the time of her birth. She tended towards the white blouses and knee socks below plaid skirts that the girls at the Catholic school wore.
I was lost in thought most of the time. It was nearly impossible for me to overcome my shyness long enough to speak to a girl. We didn't have a shower at the house, so it was difficult to remove the detrius of farm life from my body. My mother bought me clothing from the Sears catalog that she felt were the latest thing, but that were guaranteed to result in at least one occasion per week when I would be cornered and slapped repeatedly by the tough boys.
When I entered the dance, I looked for her across the floor. She was talking to the few girls that would speak to her--each of them too fat or too skinny to be included in the cliques of girls dancing with each other on the floor with one eye out for the basketball stars. The other girls noted my interest and turned up their lips in disgust.
My neighbor friends, Joe and Billy, were leaning against one of the poles that held the balcony up. They had secreted their packs of Marlboro Reds in the pockets of their jeans lest the banker or the grocer who had agreed to chaperone the dance find them and confiscate them--the height of irony, since the grocer himself had probably sold them the cigarettes over the noon hour.
We watched the movements of the cool girls dancing on the floor. Billy was good-looking enough that he would probably get a chance to spin with LouAnn out on the floor once or twice before the evening finished. The two of them noticed the small foursome of outcast girls off to the side and made the kind of cutting remarks that only uncaring males could make, just loud enough for them to be heard. I cringed, but said nothing, knowing that even the slightest hint of defense would result in both of them ostracizing me for at least a month. I couldn't afford that, since the two of them were as close to a defense as I could find against abuse from the tougher crowd.
I stood and joked, aching to speak, to hold, to touch the girl across the room once more. I was sure that she felt the same about me, but if I dared to approach her group, she'd lose the few friends that she had. It wasn't worth taking the chance for either of us.
As the last few songs played on the hi-fi, we wandered off to the parking lot. She waited in the darkness after her friends drove off, I waited in my car for that moment. She opened the door and slid in beside me, her hands flew around my neck and she covered my face with kisses. After a few minutes, we resigned ourselves to our curfews. My father, in particular, was adamant about the car being back at the house before midnight and our assignations were dependent on having a vehicle to get us away from the lights of town.
"So," I said, "you have any idea about the Homecoming Dance?"
"Sure, " she replied, "the insurance agent is going to be chaperoning and he's got three little kids. He should be gone for hours. I'll let you know when he and his wife have left and the kids are in bed and you can slip in with no one the wiser."
"Sounds good. I really can't wait. Do you think we've got time for one more..."
She put a finger to my lips and smiled in the light of the streetlamps that we were passing. "You know better than that. Mom waits up and so does your dad. I'll see you at school and even if we can't talk, we can look at each other and smile, right?"
She stepped out of the car and into the gravel driveway of her house. The lights reflected from the puddles in front of her as I watched her go inside. I put the Buick into gear and headed off into the country....
I think back now, lyrics of a half-dozen classic rock songs running through my head--Night Moves, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Brown-Eyed Girl and so many others. I was troubled for years thinking that I had done her wrong by not being willing to acknowledge her in public, in front of our tormenters despite the cost.
A few years ago, I got an email from her. She, like myself, was a grandparent. She had married several times, lived all over the country and sometimes, when she saw the lightning in the distance, thought about how we felt together and regretted that we didn't know more about life when we had each other. My conscience was put to rest at last.
So here's to you, my brown-eyed girl--there is nothing quite as sweet as the wickedness of the completely innocent. I will never forget you, even if I live to be a hundred.
"I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Aint it funny how the night moves
When you just dont seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in..."
Tom
Even now, nearly forty years later, I remember it. The flash from the lightning bolt reflected from her eyes and burned itself onto my retina as she lay in my arms. The cooler wind from the gust front swept across the orchard where we had parked--soon we would have to scramble for the shelter of the car.
By the time the first big drops struck the leaves above us, we had gathered as many of our clothes as we could find, tossed them into the front seat and had snuggled in the back under the blanket, picking the remaining blades of grass that had come in with it. The wind howled noticeably and the lightning forked, again and again, hitting trees so close that the strikes weren't followed by thunder, but instead accompanied by the crack of superheated air.
We giggled in pretended terror at the closest ones, holding each other more tightly each time. In the strobe light, we noticed each other's face and I enjoyed, once again, the wonder of a girl who kissed back with feeling.
Eventually, the storm passed--heading off toward Chicago, where it would dampen the fun of other teenagers until it ended somewhere over Ontario. We opened the doors, inhaling deeply of the ozone-laden air as we rearranged our clothing by the overhead light until we were sure that we passed muster. I clumsily tried to refasten her bra, but the nuances of female undergarments were still far beyond the expertise of my fingers.
The rain had been severe enough--an inch or so in an hour--that I had to rock my father's Buick for several minutes before we were able to get to the lane leading back to the township road. A couple hours had passed, but the dance at the high school wouldn't yet be over.
I parked at the edge of the lot, we leaned together for a last kiss, then she walked toward Tonica High, where the old gymnasium had been decorated for the back-to-school dance. I would follow ten minutes later, making sure that no one saw me and could make the connection between the two of us.
You see, at sixteen, nothing matters as much as being included. We were both outsiders, ridiculed and unaccepted for reasons that our tormentors seldom bothered to explain.
She was not a pretty girl, but instead interesting in ways that would not bear fruit until college. Her hair was raven black, her shape too wide across the hips and too small across the bust. Her mother had been unwed and way too young at the time of her birth. She tended towards the white blouses and knee socks below plaid skirts that the girls at the Catholic school wore.
I was lost in thought most of the time. It was nearly impossible for me to overcome my shyness long enough to speak to a girl. We didn't have a shower at the house, so it was difficult to remove the detrius of farm life from my body. My mother bought me clothing from the Sears catalog that she felt were the latest thing, but that were guaranteed to result in at least one occasion per week when I would be cornered and slapped repeatedly by the tough boys.
When I entered the dance, I looked for her across the floor. She was talking to the few girls that would speak to her--each of them too fat or too skinny to be included in the cliques of girls dancing with each other on the floor with one eye out for the basketball stars. The other girls noted my interest and turned up their lips in disgust.
My neighbor friends, Joe and Billy, were leaning against one of the poles that held the balcony up. They had secreted their packs of Marlboro Reds in the pockets of their jeans lest the banker or the grocer who had agreed to chaperone the dance find them and confiscate them--the height of irony, since the grocer himself had probably sold them the cigarettes over the noon hour.
We watched the movements of the cool girls dancing on the floor. Billy was good-looking enough that he would probably get a chance to spin with LouAnn out on the floor once or twice before the evening finished. The two of them noticed the small foursome of outcast girls off to the side and made the kind of cutting remarks that only uncaring males could make, just loud enough for them to be heard. I cringed, but said nothing, knowing that even the slightest hint of defense would result in both of them ostracizing me for at least a month. I couldn't afford that, since the two of them were as close to a defense as I could find against abuse from the tougher crowd.
I stood and joked, aching to speak, to hold, to touch the girl across the room once more. I was sure that she felt the same about me, but if I dared to approach her group, she'd lose the few friends that she had. It wasn't worth taking the chance for either of us.
As the last few songs played on the hi-fi, we wandered off to the parking lot. She waited in the darkness after her friends drove off, I waited in my car for that moment. She opened the door and slid in beside me, her hands flew around my neck and she covered my face with kisses. After a few minutes, we resigned ourselves to our curfews. My father, in particular, was adamant about the car being back at the house before midnight and our assignations were dependent on having a vehicle to get us away from the lights of town.
"So," I said, "you have any idea about the Homecoming Dance?"
"Sure, " she replied, "the insurance agent is going to be chaperoning and he's got three little kids. He should be gone for hours. I'll let you know when he and his wife have left and the kids are in bed and you can slip in with no one the wiser."
"Sounds good. I really can't wait. Do you think we've got time for one more..."
She put a finger to my lips and smiled in the light of the streetlamps that we were passing. "You know better than that. Mom waits up and so does your dad. I'll see you at school and even if we can't talk, we can look at each other and smile, right?"
She stepped out of the car and into the gravel driveway of her house. The lights reflected from the puddles in front of her as I watched her go inside. I put the Buick into gear and headed off into the country....
I think back now, lyrics of a half-dozen classic rock songs running through my head--Night Moves, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Brown-Eyed Girl and so many others. I was troubled for years thinking that I had done her wrong by not being willing to acknowledge her in public, in front of our tormenters despite the cost.
A few years ago, I got an email from her. She, like myself, was a grandparent. She had married several times, lived all over the country and sometimes, when she saw the lightning in the distance, thought about how we felt together and regretted that we didn't know more about life when we had each other. My conscience was put to rest at last.
So here's to you, my brown-eyed girl--there is nothing quite as sweet as the wickedness of the completely innocent. I will never forget you, even if I live to be a hundred.
"I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Aint it funny how the night moves
When you just dont seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in..."
Tom
Labels: coming of age, personal, teen angst, Tet, Tonica Days
October 1962....
It was over 75 miles to the center of Chicago, so we were going to be the survivors.
How much can a ten-year old understand about the end of the world? My father had lost the woman who would have been my mother in London, killed by a V-2 rocket as she left her job at the Windmill. He told me and my brother about the rockets and bombs then and that we'd have to stay in the basement for a few days while the dust settled, then we could come up and figure out what to do next.
I had been reading two serials in the Saturday Evening Post--Fail-Safe and Triumph, both explaining in detail the events leading up to a nuclear exchange. In my Uncle Joe's library in Oglesby, I had read Level 7 and Alas, Babylon so I knew what to expect. The cover of Level 7 had a blurb--"the story of a society hell-bent on nuclear destruction."
That certainly summed up the world I was seeing on the set in the living room. Each night, Huntley and Brinkley would show photos of ships blockading Cuba and read the announcements by the Soviet head of state and the American replies.
The Chicago Tribune had diagrams, concentric circles centered at State and Randolph with a legend describing the extent of destruction that would occur within each of them in the case of a 50-megaton explosion. There were listings of times that the USAF would be making sonic booms above the city, as they practiced for possible attacks on the Baku oil fields adjoining the Caspian Sea.
It was Indian Summer, the leaves has already turned and fallen, and we were burning the ones that my grandmother had removed from her yard. A pall of smoke hung in the still air over the farm. My father would tune between the stations on the radio listening for new information while he milked. The sky was filled with contrails since as many planes as possible were kept in the air to avoid being surprised on the ground by a first-strike.
Fifteen minutes from detected launch to detonation--that's what was expected. We waited for the CONELRAD symbol to come up on the television. The radio had two frequencies marked by the manufacturer that we were to tune to when the announcement was made of the attack.
I read, went to school--tried to get all of this off of my mind. It was easy sometimes, when Billy from down the road would clown on the bus. Still, part of my mind waited for the flash and my body would tense as I looked for a spot that would provide shade from the searing heat of the fireball.
The month drew to a close. The newspapers announced that Khrushchev had backed down and that the missles would be withdrawn. The flights overhead were less noticeable, although they never disappeared completely. The exercises at school returned to fire drills instead of students collecting in the halls and sitting against the walls in the interior hallway.
The anticipation didn't go away completely, either. As I grew to adulthood, there was always that little air-raid warden in the back of my head that cautioned me to look for a safe spot, perhaps under that desk over there. Occasionally, I would jerk uncontrollably when an unexpected flashbulb went off, then shake my head with embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, I watched on a television as the Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. Some of our nuclear missles were going to be dismantled and their silos filled with concrete. As that evening progressed, the tension in my shoulders that had first appeared in the Missle October finally went away. I hoped at the time that it would be forever. As it was, the danger retreated for a decade, then returned from a different direction.
There are many idealistic projects that we can work to promote. There are hungry and hopeless people that we see every day. There are those scarred by violence that need the righteous to seek justice.
Being a child can be hard enough as it is. For the future of humanity, it is essential that no child on this planet needs to wake weeping from a dream in which they are startled to consciousness just in time to be burned alive.
Tom
It was over 75 miles to the center of Chicago, so we were going to be the survivors.
How much can a ten-year old understand about the end of the world? My father had lost the woman who would have been my mother in London, killed by a V-2 rocket as she left her job at the Windmill. He told me and my brother about the rockets and bombs then and that we'd have to stay in the basement for a few days while the dust settled, then we could come up and figure out what to do next.
I had been reading two serials in the Saturday Evening Post--Fail-Safe and Triumph, both explaining in detail the events leading up to a nuclear exchange. In my Uncle Joe's library in Oglesby, I had read Level 7 and Alas, Babylon so I knew what to expect. The cover of Level 7 had a blurb--"the story of a society hell-bent on nuclear destruction."
That certainly summed up the world I was seeing on the set in the living room. Each night, Huntley and Brinkley would show photos of ships blockading Cuba and read the announcements by the Soviet head of state and the American replies.
The Chicago Tribune had diagrams, concentric circles centered at State and Randolph with a legend describing the extent of destruction that would occur within each of them in the case of a 50-megaton explosion. There were listings of times that the USAF would be making sonic booms above the city, as they practiced for possible attacks on the Baku oil fields adjoining the Caspian Sea.
It was Indian Summer, the leaves has already turned and fallen, and we were burning the ones that my grandmother had removed from her yard. A pall of smoke hung in the still air over the farm. My father would tune between the stations on the radio listening for new information while he milked. The sky was filled with contrails since as many planes as possible were kept in the air to avoid being surprised on the ground by a first-strike.
Fifteen minutes from detected launch to detonation--that's what was expected. We waited for the CONELRAD symbol to come up on the television. The radio had two frequencies marked by the manufacturer that we were to tune to when the announcement was made of the attack.
I read, went to school--tried to get all of this off of my mind. It was easy sometimes, when Billy from down the road would clown on the bus. Still, part of my mind waited for the flash and my body would tense as I looked for a spot that would provide shade from the searing heat of the fireball.
The month drew to a close. The newspapers announced that Khrushchev had backed down and that the missles would be withdrawn. The flights overhead were less noticeable, although they never disappeared completely. The exercises at school returned to fire drills instead of students collecting in the halls and sitting against the walls in the interior hallway.
The anticipation didn't go away completely, either. As I grew to adulthood, there was always that little air-raid warden in the back of my head that cautioned me to look for a safe spot, perhaps under that desk over there. Occasionally, I would jerk uncontrollably when an unexpected flashbulb went off, then shake my head with embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, I watched on a television as the Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. Some of our nuclear missles were going to be dismantled and their silos filled with concrete. As that evening progressed, the tension in my shoulders that had first appeared in the Missle October finally went away. I hoped at the time that it would be forever. As it was, the danger retreated for a decade, then returned from a different direction.
There are many idealistic projects that we can work to promote. There are hungry and hopeless people that we see every day. There are those scarred by violence that need the righteous to seek justice.
Being a child can be hard enough as it is. For the future of humanity, it is essential that no child on this planet needs to wake weeping from a dream in which they are startled to consciousness just in time to be burned alive.
Tom
Labels: Cold War, history, personal, Tet, Tonica Days
August, 1957...
The thing I most remember about being five was that everything that was man-made was drab.
The barn had not been painted in twenty years, so the bits of red paint on its sides had faded to rust color. From my four-foot high vantage point, you could not see the occasional traffic on the dirt road running past the house, but a car's approach was announced by a cloud of grey dust. Mother's shift had once been cheery, but years of washing it with the borax needed to soften the well water had faded it until you had to strain to make out the flowers that covered it.
By mid-morning, the black-and-white television had lost my interest. Captain Kangaroo was over, and Commander 5 wouldn't be on until noon. I sat, playing with my black and white kitten, Muffin, moving a stick through the grass until she chased it. I looked up into the blue, blue sky and watched the white contrails of a B-52 on watch move from one horizon to another.
Mother was hanging laundry out on the line, holding a wooden clothespin in her mouth while wrestling with the bedsheets. Occasionally, there was a breeze that would lift one up with a snap, its brown pin flying back into her basket, from which she retrieved it and started the process over again.
Lunchtime came. If I went slowly and looked carefully for cars, I was allowed to cross the road to my grandmother's house across the way. Her house was off-white, too, but was surrounded by riotous colors.
My grandmother had had a fight with the Catholic Church about twenty years before, and had never returned to Confession or Mass. Denied Communion, she spent her Sundays on her knees in her flower gardens, tending to the creations of God in a gesture of respect that she hoped Christ and His Mother would understand. If one judged by the results of her labors, God was very pleased with her.
Today, she was waiting for a mole. She sat on a kitchen chair in the shade of a two-hundred year old burr oak with a pitchfolk by her side. She held her finger to her mouth and pointed to the end of the tunnel-mound which had stopped moving at my approach. I stood like a statue waiting for the next step afraid to even breathe deeply. Suddenly, fluidly, she struck at the end of the mound and with one motion, lifted the impaled mole into the air. It described an arc of ten feet or so, landing wounded at the feet of her orange tiger cat, who made short work of the pest.
She made little sandwiches for me, cutting the slices of bread into quarters. We returned to the yard, she in her beige straw hat, me in my off-white T-shirt and brown shorts. I was amazed that everything with color had a name. The flowers were lillies and petunias and african violets. The red insects (not bugs, as she constantly reminded me) were called ladybugs and wouldn't bite if you wanted to pick one up. The insects with the shiny wings were beetles and I must kill them when I see them, since they ate flowers. The long green ones that prayed were Praying Mantises. They ate other insects that were pests, so they needed to be left alone to do their work.
The red birds were cardinals and had four different songs. In the little birdhouse was Jenny Wren, and when Grandma spoke or whistled to her, Jenny would reply with her 10-note song. Jenny was brown like the dust, and tiny. The robins had orange bellies and would occasionally pull a worm from the ground when Grandma wet the earth in a section of the garden.
The heat of the day settled in, and we drank lemonade in the shade. The cows, black and white Holsteins, grazed on the short grass outside the fence. Soon Mother would come for them, and it would be time to go home. For now, I watched, wide-eyed, as a yellow and black bumblebee moved from one flower to another, the sacs on its legs full to overflowing with pollen stolen from the garden.
My father returned from the fields where he had cultivated beans all day. You could just make out the faded blue of his shirt under the layers of dust. Supper was shades of brown and grey also--mashed potatoes and pork cooked so thoroughly as to have little flavor left in it. Mother put together a small bowl of vegetables--early squash and cucumbers from the garden. I waited until she looked the other way, then moved mine back into the bowl from my plate. She was obviously tired, since she didn't bother to reprimand me this time.
Dusk fell and my father finished up milking the dozen cows by hand, dumping the milk into cans that sat in the cold trough of water that served a dual purpose. It was deep enough to keep the cans cool overnight while also providing water for the cows who slept near it.
I was not tired, so I sat after sundown on the stones of the cistern cover waiting for the lightning bugs to come out to play....
And, for the first time, became aware of what was happening as the light faded. There was no moon that evening to dilute the view from our back yard. One by one, lights appeared in the sky--not the few visible from a backyard in 2007--but thousands of them, for there were no yard lights, no outside lights at all on farms then to obscure the view.
There were sweeping expanses of glory, the summer Milky Way casting a diffuse glow within the night. Not only were the lights everywhere in the sky, but they were different colors! In the very south, there was a red lantern shining among other bright stars that were arrayed in arcs. Further up the sky, there were bright orange and yellow stars standing out. Everywhere I looked, there was glory, even down to the edge of the sky near Highway 51 a mile away, where I could see the orange running lights of semis heading to their destinations.
Time passed. Occasionally, I remembered to breathe, sometimes not, for I realized that this was what my Grandmother had been talking about when she spoke of the presence of God. I learned a secret that day, one that has served me well for the rest of my life.
There are always times when life fades into the drab, when it is apparent that the vanities of mankind are impermanent. At those times, I can look upward and realize that the sky above me is the same one that I saw that day, so long ago. The house is gone, my Grandmother, too--gone like my kitten, Muffin.
The burr oak looks the same as it did that day. The fields still have corn and beans in them, but no cows low at the thought of grain for supper, and the skies will be there long after I'm gone, too.
Tom
The thing I most remember about being five was that everything that was man-made was drab.
The barn had not been painted in twenty years, so the bits of red paint on its sides had faded to rust color. From my four-foot high vantage point, you could not see the occasional traffic on the dirt road running past the house, but a car's approach was announced by a cloud of grey dust. Mother's shift had once been cheery, but years of washing it with the borax needed to soften the well water had faded it until you had to strain to make out the flowers that covered it.
By mid-morning, the black-and-white television had lost my interest. Captain Kangaroo was over, and Commander 5 wouldn't be on until noon. I sat, playing with my black and white kitten, Muffin, moving a stick through the grass until she chased it. I looked up into the blue, blue sky and watched the white contrails of a B-52 on watch move from one horizon to another.
Mother was hanging laundry out on the line, holding a wooden clothespin in her mouth while wrestling with the bedsheets. Occasionally, there was a breeze that would lift one up with a snap, its brown pin flying back into her basket, from which she retrieved it and started the process over again.
Lunchtime came. If I went slowly and looked carefully for cars, I was allowed to cross the road to my grandmother's house across the way. Her house was off-white, too, but was surrounded by riotous colors.
My grandmother had had a fight with the Catholic Church about twenty years before, and had never returned to Confession or Mass. Denied Communion, she spent her Sundays on her knees in her flower gardens, tending to the creations of God in a gesture of respect that she hoped Christ and His Mother would understand. If one judged by the results of her labors, God was very pleased with her.
Today, she was waiting for a mole. She sat on a kitchen chair in the shade of a two-hundred year old burr oak with a pitchfolk by her side. She held her finger to her mouth and pointed to the end of the tunnel-mound which had stopped moving at my approach. I stood like a statue waiting for the next step afraid to even breathe deeply. Suddenly, fluidly, she struck at the end of the mound and with one motion, lifted the impaled mole into the air. It described an arc of ten feet or so, landing wounded at the feet of her orange tiger cat, who made short work of the pest.
She made little sandwiches for me, cutting the slices of bread into quarters. We returned to the yard, she in her beige straw hat, me in my off-white T-shirt and brown shorts. I was amazed that everything with color had a name. The flowers were lillies and petunias and african violets. The red insects (not bugs, as she constantly reminded me) were called ladybugs and wouldn't bite if you wanted to pick one up. The insects with the shiny wings were beetles and I must kill them when I see them, since they ate flowers. The long green ones that prayed were Praying Mantises. They ate other insects that were pests, so they needed to be left alone to do their work.
The red birds were cardinals and had four different songs. In the little birdhouse was Jenny Wren, and when Grandma spoke or whistled to her, Jenny would reply with her 10-note song. Jenny was brown like the dust, and tiny. The robins had orange bellies and would occasionally pull a worm from the ground when Grandma wet the earth in a section of the garden.
The heat of the day settled in, and we drank lemonade in the shade. The cows, black and white Holsteins, grazed on the short grass outside the fence. Soon Mother would come for them, and it would be time to go home. For now, I watched, wide-eyed, as a yellow and black bumblebee moved from one flower to another, the sacs on its legs full to overflowing with pollen stolen from the garden.
My father returned from the fields where he had cultivated beans all day. You could just make out the faded blue of his shirt under the layers of dust. Supper was shades of brown and grey also--mashed potatoes and pork cooked so thoroughly as to have little flavor left in it. Mother put together a small bowl of vegetables--early squash and cucumbers from the garden. I waited until she looked the other way, then moved mine back into the bowl from my plate. She was obviously tired, since she didn't bother to reprimand me this time.
Dusk fell and my father finished up milking the dozen cows by hand, dumping the milk into cans that sat in the cold trough of water that served a dual purpose. It was deep enough to keep the cans cool overnight while also providing water for the cows who slept near it.
I was not tired, so I sat after sundown on the stones of the cistern cover waiting for the lightning bugs to come out to play....
And, for the first time, became aware of what was happening as the light faded. There was no moon that evening to dilute the view from our back yard. One by one, lights appeared in the sky--not the few visible from a backyard in 2007--but thousands of them, for there were no yard lights, no outside lights at all on farms then to obscure the view.
There were sweeping expanses of glory, the summer Milky Way casting a diffuse glow within the night. Not only were the lights everywhere in the sky, but they were different colors! In the very south, there was a red lantern shining among other bright stars that were arrayed in arcs. Further up the sky, there were bright orange and yellow stars standing out. Everywhere I looked, there was glory, even down to the edge of the sky near Highway 51 a mile away, where I could see the orange running lights of semis heading to their destinations.
Time passed. Occasionally, I remembered to breathe, sometimes not, for I realized that this was what my Grandmother had been talking about when she spoke of the presence of God. I learned a secret that day, one that has served me well for the rest of my life.
There are always times when life fades into the drab, when it is apparent that the vanities of mankind are impermanent. At those times, I can look upward and realize that the sky above me is the same one that I saw that day, so long ago. The house is gone, my Grandmother, too--gone like my kitten, Muffin.
The burr oak looks the same as it did that day. The fields still have corn and beans in them, but no cows low at the thought of grain for supper, and the skies will be there long after I'm gone, too.
Tom
Labels: childhood, personal, philosophy, Tet, Tonica Days
