Foothills of Childhood - Part 9

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 9 (Some Colorful Characters)

*Asterisk marks the names changed for the sake of a small town.


Before the absence of Uncle Wayne, I recall the days of life as a child almost always in terms of summer.  Winter in the North woods is Hellish cold, but we were stock of good timber and somehow always found the fight with Mother Nature one that could be won, would be a good argument while we endeavored to beat her up, and after the conquest we could just laze around all summer and forget about it.  

When I was little on Halyday Street, I rode a little tricycle around the intersection area there on Main Street.  Across the four-way light, was a Golden Dawn store - and before that, I do remember a little tiny neighborhood grocery store, that 1910 pale kitchen green color.  You walked into one small room with one counter, some tables and one hanging unclothed light bulb.  I must have been a baby with this memory, because I view the scene from above it, not below it.  As if I am being carried upright and high.  

By the time the Golden Dawn moved in, I was big enough to hold onto the front of the grocery cart and ride it the whole trip through the store.  And those metal gateways that let you in and out were just perfect for me to reach up and swing from, for a good part of the shopping trip.  There was a teenage boy in the back at the meat counter who always gave me a free hot dog to munch on while Mama walked around and did what she did best, talk to all the people in the store. 

 He was Bob Evans, must have been my first boyfriend fantasy.  Or maybe I was just another little sister, but I always could count on a freebie, and it's been a lesson learned for utilization (with some dignity and carefully scrutinized selectivity) ever since, being a woman now and all....

At the store we could always be sure to run into some of the local colorful characters.  There was crazy Duke from up the run, who was one of the old men in hard gray suits and hard brown shoes and old cloth caps, who never worked anymore.  I never knew their stories.  They were too old and not too friendly, just "on the lonesome."  

Duke walked with a swaying rocking motion like a man with one leg about six inches too short.  Maybe it was, and I didn't notice this detail, being a kid.  He always talked to himself or to some invisible party alongside his wildly swaying short self.  His head moved quickly and sharply looking down before stepping off the curb and then up just far enough to check the traffic as he moved across the street.  He did a lot of crossing of the street there, and sitting on the bench in Cupola Park, the little patch of grass and clay in front of the old train depot.

Another good body we might have run into as *Flo Ring.  Flo may have been the most colorful of the bunch, she certainly was ugly.  She really was one of the homeliest women I had ever laid eyes on, and that's being kind.  I remember she was one of the half-witted ones that lived up the hill and around.  Some of these were born in the institution out at Polk, but some were not, and there were a lot due to the inbreeding of the woods-folk.  

She was just  - what we then would colloquially call 'retarded'  -  enough - to be unable to read or write, but smart enough to know what she could do.  And that lead to the way of life that would at least sustain her, not well, but at least alive, when the sun didn't shine and the long fight for warmth began again.  And maybe with her talents, she ended up being the warmest one of all during the cold spells.  

Flo was loud and boisterous.  Mama always got a large charge out of hanging out the upstairs window and calling down to her to ask what the Hell was going on these days.  Flo would always stop and yell up to her and tell her (and the rest of the neighborhood) just who was porking her now, and who they porked before her.  Mama would laugh like Hell and go running out the back door to tell anybody out in the yard who missed any of that report.  They would all let up a whoop in unison and laugh and start telling the latest dirty jokes.  

Mama got a lot of those jokes from Flo.  My sister Joanne was always embarrassed because Mama would stand at the open screen door and converse with this obnoxious loud prostitute on Main and Halyday, right in front of her teenage friends and all that, but years later, my sister and I took what we could learn from Florence too.   Well, maybe my sister took a little more than I did.  But then she had more fun.  The part I learned was the loud obnoxious "entertain the troops" part.  There would always be someone with an open screen door willing to laugh.  And my sister would always be warm in the winter time.

morfedite."  Now of course, I had no idea what a "morfedite" was, and for good reason obviously: no one else did either, including the person in question.  They had a name, probably something like Kim or Pat, or Kerry or Dawn/Don...which could go either way.   I don't even remember if the hair was long or short or if it even mattered.   Imagine the ambivalent nature of this one growing up and going to school with the sorts of people that live in a small town.  Imagine gym class....what did they wear?  How did they cope?

Down Main Street about a half mile was a group of small shacks built up the hillside along sets of wood and stone steps.  They were lived in by people poorer than ourselves.  I don't even know how people get to be this down trodden, but when they do, it's the saddest thing to see.   They always looked old and sad.  The sadness always was at the bottom of a pool of cheap booze.  The saddest house was the *Smuckers.  

They had a few children, and no employment and no money at all.  I remember going down there one Halloween and seeing the boxes they used for furniture inside the shack.  They put paper bags over the windows when the glass broke.   The glass broke from fights and bottles flying from the hands of a drunken father dispossessed of his senses.  The woman was always afraid to do or say anything.  She never had a family to go to, and had to stay with the kids to make sure...to make sure of what?  What would ever change?  

Somewhere in their past there had been a fire.  It had burned all the hair off one side of the youngest child's head, and melted away half of her face, and part of the other side.  She was quiet, sullen and timid beyond belief.  When I was her age, I was quiet and timid too.  Strangers could hardly get a word out of me, but it was nothing like 'Cathleen.'

School started for me, and it meant standing every morning out in front of the neighborhood triad of buildings to wait for the school bus, along with all the local bafoonery of students, a sad lot of intellectual morass.  I watched with deep sadness and anger as the bigger older kids started to ridicule poor little Cathy with her life-long scars and her life-long loss and her life-long resolution to be the recipient of this abuse.  

They would push her around and then hit her on the head with their metal lunch pails.  She would go silent, her eyes water with fear, and her lips quiver, but she didn't cry out or give in to the bullying.  When we got on the bus, I timidly sat beside her by choice.  We were both six.  I hated starting school by myself without my Mom, no one familiar in the room at all.  But Cathy needed a whole lot more camaraderie than I did.  

I asked her to come up to my house and play.  I offered her my Indian bow and arrow set and the feather headdress.  She came up that weekend with her big sister.  We were having a nice time getting to know each other and learning that we were none of us alone, until my well-meaning next door neighbor came out with a broom swinging in the air and chasing them off like wild dogs or vermin from the tunnel next to the house, warning them not to come back.  'Drakie,' the broom wielder said they had lice.  Sometimes you just can't win for all the losing.