Archives for March 1, 2012

       I remember a special time when my mother was alive.  It was my fifth birthday, and my daddy bought me a bicycle.  It was the most wondrous gift I’d ever received.  Bright blue with silver streaks on the fenders, and squirrel tails on the handlebars.  I watched in wonder and horror as my mama and daddy skinned those squirrels in scalding hot water after their hunting trips.  The tails were a bonus, however and the envy of my playmates, whose dads and mamas weren’t into the shotgun experience.

       I was a quick learner, and I took to that bike like a turkey on a Thanksgiving table.  By the end of the first week, I could fly like the wind, and tasted my first bite of newly-found freedom, rejoicing when looking over my shoulder, that if I spied that Rag Man–I could out-pedal him forever more.

       The day after my birthday, my daddy managed to parlay two weeks of mowing a neighbor’s lawn in exchange for a dilapidated larger bike which he gave to my mama.  She was thrilled, and that summer, we began taking short, then longer rides together.  We would assemble tiny cucumber sandwiches, pack them in our baskets, and meander along the back roads.  Stopping near a wooded area, we’d lay down an old blanket over the softest patches of pine needles, and downy moss and eat our sandwiches.

       Occasionally, we’d tramp thru the nearby woods, and Johnny jump-ups, violets, woodsy sorrel, tiny fern fronds and poke, just peeping from the soil would be pulled from the damp earth.  Their slender stems would be wrapped in dampened newspaper and carefully brought back home, where together we’d arrange miniature bouquets in old perfume bottles and empty pill containers.

       Sometimes, we’d search out a blackberry patch and set about picking just enough berries to surprise my dad with a warm cobbler, swimming in cold cream that had crystalized atop the milk bottles in the old ice box.   Returning to the house, my mama would exclaim:  “Sonny, pull out that ‘ol cast-iron skillet.  I’m about to give you a cookin’ lesson.”  Then together, we’d chop up some fat bacon, fry it in the skillet, throw in the poke leaves, sprinkle in a bit of vinegar, a tad of salt and pepper and last of all, some bits of stale bread.  When my daddy arrived home, the first thing he’d say was “My nose tells me my girls have fixed my favorite meal, and I just bet we’re going to have blackberry cobbler for dessert!  “Teddy, get your feet off that rung.”  I’m not sure which tickled me more–his delight at my fixin’s, or his growling at Teddy.

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       Often, while on our bicycles, we’d stop by a house down the street from us where two brothers lived.  They seemed to enjoy my mother’s visits a great deal, and she would carry on long and interesting conversations with them to their delight.  I always resented these intrusions, and I’d show how annoyed I was by dragging my toes impatiently in their graveled driveway until the white powder covered my sandals.  Whining, I’d plead “Mama, come on.  You promised–puh-leeze.”

       Neither brother had married.  Joseph, the older one liked to garden, and while our yard was a hither and thither frenzy of common flowers and weeds, theirs was an awesome and imaginative array of neat and orderly plants of every variety.  The yard was a labyrinth of bushes with wild blooms, vines in a rainbow of colors,  flower patches everywhere, and  a small vegetable garden  with the tops of the onions, carrots, radishes and such, marching in straight and even rows, saluting the sky.

       Joseph knew all the botanical names for his rare and exotic flowers and he loved to impress my mother.  “This one is a Zanthis Teropodus (or something like that, but it sounded like an old dinosaur to me.)   “This here is an Elopidea Maryandi.”  My mother would gasp “Oh, my!”

       I’d love to have mustered up the smarty-pantsness to say to him “Boy, oh boy, you should see my mother throw her coffee grounds on our flowers–that’s about all she knows about gardening.”  This might have gotten me out of there fast, but for sure, I’d be sent to bed without any supper.

       Slight in stature, Joseph wore gold, wire-rimmed glasses, was interested in books, and had a job at the Pittsville Public Library.  He looked creepy in an over-sized tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.  He wore that jacket in all weather, hot or cold.  It was later I discovered that underneath the jacket, he’d occasionally smuggle a book or two from the library shelves.  He had acquired quite an extensive library of his own.

       Mike, the younger brother was the complete opposite.  He was my mother’s age, good looking, with a sun-tanned complexion and perfect white teeth.  He dressed well, and his muscles bulged beneath his suits.  He wore a different flashy tie every day which was always knotted perfectly, and his hair was slicked back, looking all wet and shiny.  Employed at Pitts Department Store, he held the position of “Assistant Manager of the Ladies Fashion Salon”, and traveled to Chicago and New York on occasion.  “One of these days, I’m gonna bring you some perfume from New York.”  My mother would gasp “Oh, my!”

       My daddy looked down on these two, but in particular, Mike.  More than once I heard him complain to my mother “I don’t like the way he swaggers, smokes with that damned cigarette hanging off those lips, and flexes his muscles when you’re around.  I can just hear the neighbors talking about your visits to those two.  You’re going to get a reputation–and I don’t want Sunny around them either!”

       This just seemed to kindle mama’s free spirit that much more, and she’d pull out a cigarette, tap it on the table and give my dad “the look”.  After a few seconds of seeing her eyelids all scrunched up and staring straight ahead without blinking, he’d slink out of the room.

       One balmy afternoon the phone rang and it was Joseph.  “You’ve got to come down here quickly!  That rare plant I told you about?  Well, it just got it’s first bloom–ever, and I want you to see it.”  My mama said to him “You called at just the right time.  Sunny and I were about to take a bike ride.”  And to me, she cautioned:  “Sunshine , we’re going over to Joseph’s to see his rare flower.  You are NOT to touch it–DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”  I looked down at my Mary Jane’s, knowing that in a few moments they were going to be splattered in chalky white dust.

       We were led into Joseph’s Immaculate Gardenia of Eden.  Pouting because I didn’t want to be there, and angry at my mother’s warning that I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the flower’s arrival, I knelt down to smell it, reached out–and accidentally broke the stem in two!

       The air was filled with shock and silence.  I looked up to see the glare of three adult faces staring back at me in disappointment.  Utterly ashamed and saddened, I looked into the palm of my hand at this newly born baby flower dying by the second, and blinking my eyes, a lone tear ran down my cheek and watered it one last time.

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       The next year, at my mother’s funeral, Joseph offered to give a reading.  My father reluctantly agreed, and when Joseph opened his book, there was the flower I had broken off–dried and crinkly; it’s color gone forever.

       I overheard my father tell one of the mourners:  “Mike isn’t here–he’s in New York ‘fooling around’ with the buyer of the new line Pitts is hoping to introduce.  Then his eyebrows got a crooked look and his eyeballs rolled around aside his head.

       Later, the policemen told my dad that when they went to question the two brothers, Joseph explained to them that he had been watering his precious flowers that morning, and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.

       A most peculiar family lived directly across the street from us.  Their house was three-storied, with a little separate bungalow of two small rooms in the back of their lot.  They had seven children, which was unique for the times.  The mother wore dentures that not only clicked when she talked, but shifted back and forth as well, as though they were platens of corn cob typing aimlessly away.

       She was often in a state of disarray with her hosiery rolled down around purple, swollen ankles, a filthy housedress covered by a food-slopped apron, and her long, unkempt dirty hair spilling over both.  Her shoulders were massive, her forearms muscular, and her fingers resembled fat little sausages.  Izzy was the neighborhood troublemaker and was known to be dangerously mean to those who crossed her.

       Her husband, Eddie Morrison, was fairly good looking with a receding shock of wispy blonde hair.  He had a strong and hard body thanks to his job as a laborer at Rubber Molds Consolidated, where he hoisted tires onto wooden pallets after they were cured and taken off the molds.  He was considered a failure by Izzy, who ruled their family, and she took great pleasure in letting him know what a failure he was.  He often looked at my mother with a wistful glance.

       I sometimes pondered just how they acquired all those children, but I was too young at the time to comprehend that two of them resembled the Neanderthal tattooed bartender down at Tim’s, or that the youngest daughter of darker pigmentation might have been sired by the Rag Man himself.

       Izzy had never taken to the domestic scene, and consequently most of their kids bordered on delinquency:  shoplifting, smoking, filching money from the rusted Maxwell House can; but Billy, their sixteen year old, earned his spending money as the paper boy on our block.  Now, I had never heard of ‘hormones’, but Billy was inquisitive.  One day, he waylaid me and said “I’ll give you a nickel to pull down your under drawers.”  I shook my head “no”.  He countered:  “Okay then, a nickel and two pennies.”  I turned my back to him and began to run away, but then he called after me “How about a WHOLE DIME?”  Well, I whipped my cotton undies down so fast, even he was startled!  And let me tell you–penny candy never tasted so sweet as the dime’s worth I purchased later that day at Biddle’s Drugstore down the road a piece.

       The grandfather, Izzy’s father, was known to all the kids in the neighborhood as ‘Gran’daddy Edwards’.  A widower, he lived behind them in that scary old two-room bungalow.  The first time I saw him, I asked him how old he was.  He grinned at me and said,  “Why, honey, I’m one hundred and ten.”  He had moved into the bungalow after his wife had gone straight upstairs to be with the Lord.  He was missing more than a few teeth, his fingernails were stained a darkened yellow and curved over the ends of his fingers, his baggy trousers were held up by suspenders that had long since lost their elasticity, and he had a foul smell reminiscent of undergarments soiled by dried urine.  My parents had always cautioned me “Sunny, you must always be respectful of older folks.”  Because of my parent’s admonishment, I had stood quiet and still more than once while being subjected to his undulating embraces when no one else was around.

       Although the entire neighborhood might be thought of as ‘needy’, some were more needing than others, and because of my daddy’s steady employment at Pitts’ Auto Agency, mama took it upon herself to befriend those less fortunate.  “Mildred, I know how little time you have what with that new baby and all, so here’s a pie–your favorite–cherry.”  “Glen, when that wife of yours comes home from the hospital. you just cheer her up with this.”  “Izzy–here’s a warm cherry pie I baked for you and your family.”  Izzy, more often than not, fed the pie to her dogs.

       After my mama’s funeral, most of the neighbors dropped by to offer their condolences.  Eddie Morrison came with his children and Gran’daddy Edwards.  Eddie shook my father’s hand and told him “Now, if there’s anything I can do for you, all you have to do is holler.”  The children reluctantly filed by with a “sorry”, a “too bad”,  a mumble, and in Billy’s case, he put his arm around my shoulder and slipped a dime in my pocket.  Gran’daddy Edwards, who lusted over not only my mama’s pies, but her as well, gave me a quick hug and a sly wink.

       Izzy stayed home–she was busy baking my father a cherry pie–cherries she probably stole from my mama’s own cherry tree.

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       The next two years became a blur–neither significantly good or bad, but just as the years became a blur, so the memory of my mother began to fade, and eventually, I had to study a photograph to remember her pretty face.