On Saturdays, Shopping and Masculinity in the Fifties.

Daddy, Mom and my brother and I would all pile in the ’57 Chevy on Saturday afternoons to shop at Sears. Dad minded my brother and I as Mom spent what seemed to be an eternity poring over bolts of fabric.  We would wait on the periphery of the fabric and notions department, each hanging on to each of Dad’s index fingers, shuffling our keds on the floor. After hours of standing and waiting (it was probably more like fifteen minutes), we began to tug on Dad’s fingers, begging him to please, please PLEEEEEZ take us to the toy department. He would stand fast (was he holding Mom’s purse?), not wanting to desert Mom who was intently looking for the exact perfect couple of yards she would use to make my brother and I matching shirts. Maybe he knew better than take us to the toy department, knowing we would eventually be in tears if we didn’t get to buy some toy we’d found and just had to have. We’d let go of his fingers to wander, not too far away, in neighboring departments. We would make up our own fun, hide and seek in the round racks or some such. We were probably just annoying enough to annoy other shoppers within earshot.

The hosiery department was next to the fabric department. Once my brother, fascinated by the feel of the hosiery on the ankle of a plastic leg he could barely reach, popped it out of its toe-stand to bounce and tumble across the sales floor. He busted out bawlin’. Dad tried to stifle laughs as he swept him up in his arms. A sales lady picked up the leg and tried to console my brother by showing him it wasn’t damaged.

You know, I was telling this story over lunch with our management team the other day, and I mentioned Dad holding Mom’s purse. Somebody made the comment, “Maybe his balls were in [the purse].” But you know? Dad’s balls were exactly where they were supposed to be and he was not less masculine holding Mom’s purse and hanging out by the fabric and hosiery departments of a Sears corralling a couple of bored little boys. He looked confidently like what he was, a good husband and a good Dad doing what good men do.

 

Talmadge: Whistled home

There were evenings in summer, when we kids in the neighborhood, after supper, would gather in someone’s backyard to play kids’ games-Red Rover comes to mind. We stood in two teams, holding hands in a line opposite each other. In memory there must have been a dozen kids in each team facing. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send [someone called by name] right over!”

A war! The person called had to cross the distance between us and break the line of the other team holding hands. If the person called couldn’t, they became part of the team they tried to break. If they did break the line, the team holding had to surrender a team-member to the other side. It went back-and-forth, the calling, the holding. The break. Surrender sometimes. I could hold a hold even if it hurt.

As sun set and dusk ensued, there would come a loud thweet from our front porch, from Dad. An undeniable whistle piercing…what? The universe? My brother and I knew instantly we were called. We left the game where it stood. Going home with things unsettled, the war not won. Left to settle-up another day.

 

Christmas Memory: bb guns

One Christmas, my brother and I got Daisy bb guns. We wanted them bad. We couldn’t wait to shoot them, but it was mid-winter in Rockford. Daddy set us up a stack of boxes packed with newspaper in the basement with a target stapled to the side. It wasn’t long before we bored of straight shootin’ and opted up for tricks. We went upstairs, stole Mom’s hand-mirror off her vanity, and commenced fancy-shootin’ backwards Annie Oakley style. My brother’s first shot riccocheted off the blocks of the basement wall and hit my brother in the back of his head. Didn’t hurt him. Didn’t break the skin. But how he howled. It stung! We could have put an eye out!

 

Talmadge: You Are There

My brother and I spent our earliest years, for me, my first twelve years, on a dead-end street named Talmadge Avenue in North Park, a section of Rockford, Illinois–some eighty or ninety miles west of Chicago, some dozen miles south of Wisconsin’s border. Maybe a dozen houses were on the street. Maybe a couple-dozen kids in four or five families.

There were a couple of vacant lots across from our house and a little more toward the dead end of the street. Every summer these grew to prairie because no one cared for them. They grew waist-high in grass and wild-flowers, burrs and snakeweed.

All we kids in the neighborhood built elaborate forts in the grass by lying down and rolling out circular rooms of flattened grass. Over a course of days, we’d roll out a wild-west of circles, we flattened paths between them. We spent hours playing in this maze we created. We played “cowboys and indians” We were informed by the television shows we watched in the evenings with our families. We had a trading post. We would have great wars with murderous raids, then pretend-smoke the peace-pipe. When we sat “indian style” in our circles, the grass was higher than our heads.

I don’t recall how it came to be, whether everyone had been called to lunch by their Moms, or whether we had merely grown tired of each other and wandered off to do other things. I don’t know where my brother might have gotten off to, but occasionally I would find myself alone in the fort, lying on my back, encircled, the wall of grass gently moved by small breezes. Me, shading my face from a bright, warm sun with one of a series of books I had. “You Are There with Winston Churchill….with Thomas Alva Edison….with Charles Lindburgh,” reading outside, hidden in the high grass on a quiet summer afternoon, holding a book framed by a sky-blue sky.

 

Drive-In (Incidents from the Life of Ryan)

At the drive-in Sheila Ryan:

(1) Gained her first knowledge of the Holocaust.

(2) Proposed a fun activity she has yet to enact.

Separate incidents.

 

Coloring Book

I was working furiously on a coloring-book Earth while my father fried biscuit-donuts and side-pork crackles across the room.

At the time I tended to ponder notions of Heaven and Hell more than I should have, given my pedigree. Indeed I had little reason to accept either as anything less than metaphysical certitude.

Hell was buried somewhere on page 23. Heaven was probably just beyond the table’s edge.

“Dad,” I paused, “how far would I have to dig to get to Hell?”
“I guess that depends on how deep of a hole you’re in to start with.” he answered without even looking up from the stove.

I hated it when he pulled that shit.

 

From the Comments

Brother T writes:

“Come here. You’ve got to see this!”

My mother called me out of the house and pointed to the boiling, green sky. The radio chirped about tornadoes to the west. As with you my recollection predates Super-Mega-HD-Mine’s-Bigger-Than-Yours radar and the jockeying for position to translate tragedy to Nielson up-ticks. When we had a storm we turned the television to channel 1. If the screen lit up with snow then the legend was that the tornado was already on top of you.

“Come here. You’ve got to see this!”

We took my father’s truck out of the river valley and up to the high ground south of town where we could see forever. There’s a particular truth in this cliché . What I saw in the distance I will most certainly see forever. A massive, indifferent wedge inching its way across the horizon – silent and black as coal.

As we drove to church the following morning we crossed the tornado’s path and saw chaos where homes had been for generations. Such random and violent devastation.

“Dad?” I asked. “Why would God do this?”
“I don’t know boy.” he answered. “Just sit back.”

We continued on to church where my father delivered his sermon to a numbed congregation and did his best to address my questions as I was not the only one asking that morning.

The truth of the matter was that he really, really didn’t know.

“Come here. You’ve got to see this!”

Indeed.

 

Tornado 1967

I had to google a little bit to remember this.

When I was twelve, if memory serves, a Friday afternoon, for some reason our whole family was home in Cherry Valley, IL. We were watching the clouds outside the house. Dark gray, roiling. A tornado warning had just been issued on the television. The air smelled. As I recall, wet, rainy, metallic. I don’t remember seeing images that day like images I’ve seen since of what tornados look like.

Still the clouds. Roiling. It was exciting!

At some point, Daddy said, “Everybody in the basement!” We went the back door, and down the stairs. We stood near the washer and dryer. We stood there, as near as I remember, just a few minutes. We came back up to see sun peeking through the western clouds.

I remember seeing, later that evening, the news. The tornado in Belvidere. Just six miles away. Destruction at the Chrysler plant. Kids died at a school. I don’t remember talk of it being an F4 tornado. This, before such things were a topic of conversation on television. We can put names on things we don’t understand these days and we think we know more.

 

An Ornamental Remembery

The sight of a charming ornament from the Jensen-Neece tree sparked a remembery of my favorite childhood ornament, “Two-Star Hennessy”. Two-Star Hennessy was a golden ball figured with two glittering pink stars, one centered in each hemisphere. (Its name, bestowed by my father, referred to Hennessy cognac; two stars perhaps designated V.S.)

I must have been four (perhaps I was five) when Two-Star Hennessy’s spell so enchanted me that I hooked it over my ear (to this day I love big dramatic earrings) and whirled about the living room in a dizzy waltz.

And shattered Two-Star Hennessy.

I felt as though a shard of rose-gold glass had pierced my heart.

But you know what? Come next Christmas (or maybe it was that very same Yule), another Two-Star Hennessy appeared on our tree. Thus did I learn of mass production, and with that knowledge came a slight but perceptible rift between my household world and the realm of enchantment.

(Cross-posted at Memorycemetery)

 

Winter Wonderland

Shirley came of age in Pittsburgh. Now she lives in Galveston.

I came of age in Dallas. Now I live in northern Illinois.

Just this week I offered her a bald recital of scraping-and-shoveling. This is what I received in return.