Do you read music?

READ THIS!

(You don’t need to read the music; it has words, too.)

Life is good, I guess.

I have gone ’round and around and up and down today.  I got
so frustrated with my writing that I was unable for a few hours to
settle down to any task at all.  There’s jewelry work sitting here
unfinished, but I couldn’t get into it.  I wanted to write, but
couldn’t decide where to pick up the thread. 

The memoir segment I posted earlier today was something I started
working on days ago.  When I started it, I thought it was the
logical “what comes next” place to start.  But it wouldn’t
flow.  I plodded through, putting one word after another.

My mind kept wandering, running ahead to the time that comes right
after the end of that segment.  Jumping around in time brings
headaches and hassles when I try to tie it all together, so I’ve been
trying to maintain some continuity.

Then, when I’d finished and posted this bit about the summer of ’55, I
remembered some important things about the summers of ’53 and ’54 that
I’d left out of those earlier episodes.  So much for trying to
maintain continuity.  Now I need to go back and find a way to fit
in the stuff I just remembered.

My memoirs are going to read like a crazy quilt.   I’ve had
some doubts that I’d live long enough to write it all down.  If I
have to write it all and then edit it into some coherent and sensible
form, forget it.

I decided I needed to vent some of that frustration, but couldn’t get
into xTools for half an hour or so.  By the time I did start to
write out what I was feeling, I looked at the words on the screen and
realized that the angst had passed.  What a petty bunch of crap,
nothing worth getting my knickers in a knot over.

I do have other things to get in a stew about, things that might even
be more important in the great cosmic scheme of things.  I could
start worrying about my health and physical condition, family finances,
cold weather and our diminished firewood supply — there’s a long list
of things I could worry about.

Why bother? 

I’m here.  It’s now.  I’m recovering from the recent
concussion and whiplash injuries.  For today, at least, there’s
wood in the wood box.  There’s moose meat in the freezer and fuel
in my gas tank.  Things could be so much worse….

Wow, Toto!
Apparently there’s more to Kansas than wheat fields.

This memoir segment follows Firebug and my Hollywood movie entry, and overlaps part of the out-of-sequence Panhandle Christmas.

I was ill throughout the winter I was in sixth grade, with my worst
school attendance record ever.  My failure to show up for PE and
my wimpy performance when I did go to school earned me the first of
only two “F” grades I ever got.  (The second one would come on a
drafting course I took by correspondence when I was working toward my
diploma after I’d dropped out to get married.)  A series of
infections made my memories of that winter into a feverish blur with only a few lucid moments.

I had books and TV for amusement during the long days alone in our
apartment over the movie theater while Mama worked in the sundries
store next door.  I sent in box tops and got my Winky Dink Magic
Screen so I could follow the squiggle on the TV tube with erasable
crayons to draw the mystery picture and reveal the secret
message.  I’d tried it directly on the TV with regular crayons
before I got my static-adhering green plastic Magic Screen, and we
never did get all the waxy smear off the old Philco.

My mother’s friend Florence, referred to as a “grass widow” by the
women I heard talking about her, had a baby out of wedlock.  The
absence of an identifiable father was only one notable feature of Flo’s
situation.  She was in her forties, and the baby was “retarded”
with Down Syndrome.  Mama referred to him as a mongoloid
idiot.  He wasn’t cute, but he was sweet-natured.  I got to
baby-sit with him a few times while Mama and Flo spent an evening at
the beer joint on the last block of Main Street before the railroad
tracks.  Other than my door-to-door sales of greeting cards and
Girl Scout cookies, and the work I did in my mother’s store, that was
my first real paying job.  We were at Flo’s house the first time I
met Pam Williams,
the new girl in town. 

Pam was younger than I and older than my cousin Liz.  She became
one of the Main Street kids, our ragtag and largely unsupervised gang
whose working parents were not quite fully acceptable to the older
families in town or the Mennonite farmers in the surrounding
area.  Pam’s father was a widower.  He eventually married
Florence and bought the sundries store from my mother. That summer,
after school was out, we packed up everything we owned into the trunk
and back seat of our 1948 Chevy coupe and went the thirty-some miles to
Wichita, moving back in
again with “Granny Conners”, my aunt Alice.

I
loved that place, especially the shady yard and its concrete retaining wall
inset with a random mosaic of broken china and glass scrounged from the
city dump.   Granny tenderly cared for her lawn, flowers and
trees.  At the back of the lot she had a castor bean shrub and
moonflowers that would open their big white blossoms at night,
attracting fireflies.  The catalpa tree beside the mosaic “patio”
in the backyard (really the cover over the well) was her special
treasure.

Granny’s house had been locally famous when they built it.  It was
almost entirely made from salvaged materials.  It had Wichita’s
first aluminum siding, which had originated as fuel cans.  Uncle
Harry had made the front door by laminating together strips from the
frames of packing crates.  The warm blond wood paneling indoors
was also derived from packing crates.  Each room had built-in book
shelves and storage space.  It was unlike anyone else’s
house, because Granny and Harry used their own designs.  Windows,
for example, opened by lowering them into a pocket underneath.   More
than once Granny or Mama had to fish out one of those windows, before I
got the knack of getting them wedged in place before they slipped out
of reach.

Granny had two separate lawns.  On the north and east sides of the
house, shown in the picture above, and in the backyard to the south, it
was
bermuda grass, a spreading, invasive species many people consider to be
a pernicious weed.  It was drought resistant and never needed
watering.  It needed lots of mowing, and the runners had to be
pulled frequently to keep it from invading the flower beds and the lush
tree-shaded lawn on the west side of the house (shown in the photo
below).  Granny had an old rotary blade push mower, and I learned
how to use it at the cost of pulled muscles and blistered palms.

The special
lawn was bluegrass, fine-bladed and soft as velvet.  During summer
droughts, when the city water utility restricted car washing and lawn
watering, Granny would put out a sign saying, “private well” and set the sprinklers out on
her bluegrass.  In such times, the vacant lot across the street
would be yellow-brown and alive with grasshoppers and flies and little
else, but Granny’s side yard would have songbirds, hummingbirds, squirrels, butterflies,
snails, toads…. 

Spooky and I played in the sprinklers, chased the toads and
butterflies, and got used to living in a narrower territory.  I
don’t recall what we did with my bicycle, but I didn’t have it after we
moved to Wichita.  I guess Mama thought the city offered too many
dangers and ways for me to get into trouble.  Or maybe we just
couldn’t figure out a way to get it into the Chevy.

Mama had several “sweethearts” who found her through the Lonely Hearts
Club or were introduced to her by friends.  Some of the ones she’d
known in Halstead were still coming around, and there were new
ones.  

Jim Henley was a movie projectionist in a theater in North
Wichita.  He met mama through the Walker family who ran the
theater next door to our store in Halstead, where he had worked
briefly.  He became a friend and father figure to me for a few
months.  One day during that time I had an outing alone with Jim
while my mother was otherwise occupied.  He took me to breakfast
in a cafe near the theater where he worked, and then bought me a new
dress in a neighborhood shop.  I picked it out myself, which Mama
had never allowed me to do.  Her tastes ran to plaids, ruffles,
and bright colors.  My tastes were more conservative:  solid
colors, earth tones, and no ruffles. 
The dress Jim bought for me was a tweedy brown with a white peter pan
collar.  I loved it and when Mama saw it she expressed polite
thanks.

That day, I watched the Saturday matinee from the projection room and
operated the machinery.  I had already been introduced to some of
it in the Halstead theater.  Jim showed me the carbide electrodes
inside the big smelly old projectors and let me adjust the gap for
maximum brightness.  He showed me where to look in the corner of
the screen for the signal to switch reels, and let me kneel on a stool
so I could reach both switches to turn on one projector as I turned off
the other.  I learned how to splice a broken film, and a lot of
lore about the old celluloid films and why they were no longer in
use.  It was fun.  I missed Jim when Mama moved on to new
boyfriends.  I never knew what happened to their relationship, but
I do know that Mama was bothered by the similarity of his name, Jim
Henley, to that of my first step-father, the one who “disappeared”, Jim
Henry.

One of the men Mama dated that summer between sixth and seventh
grades (1955) took us to Lake Afton for a picnic.  My favorite
garb at the time was jeans with a sloppy men’s white dress shirt
hanging to my knees.  I had several of those white shirts, and at
the lake Mama insisted I wear one over my swim suit to prevent
sunburn.  It gave us both an unwarranted sense of security, and I
spent much more time in the sun than I should have.  I got burnt
right through the shirt, second degree burns.  This was in an era
when suntan lotion was nothing more than scented oil, moisturizer
essentially.  SPF hadn’t been heard of yet; sunscreen meant a
shadetree.

The only part of my body that didn’t blister was what was covered by my
skimpy swimsuit. a negative racoon mask under my sunglasses, the palms
of my hands and soles of my feet.  By the time we got home that
evening, I couldn’t stand the pressure of clothing on my shoulders or
legs.  Trying to sit in a chair or lie down was too painful. 
I spent that night and the following one, until my blisters broke and
started to peel, sitting up on the living room floor with nothing but
my bottom and the bottoms of my feet touching the floor.  I
listened to the radio and played solitaire on the floor, dozing off
occasionally and letting my head drop between my knees for a few winks
of sleep.

I made a couple of friends near my own age that summer, too.  Both
were a year or two older than I ( I was ten), but since I’d skipped a
grade we were all going to be in seventh grade that fall.  Dennis
Turner’s family had known my mother and Granny for most of their
lives.  They lived just around the corner and I could reach their
back yard by a path between Granny’s castor bean bush and the
moonflowers.  Dennis and I buried a coffee can back there and used
it to pass “secret messages” back and forth.

There was also a girl in the neighborhood whose family had just moved
in.  I knew her name before I met her.  I’d hear her mother
standing on their porch across the street at the end of our block,
yelling, “Martha Looouuuu….”   Mama said it would be polite
to go introduce myself and welcome her to the neighborhood. 
Martha’s father traveled as a highway construction foreman, and she had
left behind her first love, Don Carpenter, in the town they had last
lived in.  Her conversation was all about “the Carpenters” at
first.   Before school started in seventh grade, Martha, Dennis
and I were spending most of our time together and Dennis and I were
“going steady”, pledged to each other.  Our secret messages (which
our parents knew all about, of course, since the buried coffee can was
within clear view of windows in both houses) were love letters.

He wasn’t as attractive or sexy as Leroy Coy, whose bad-boy image
appealed to me.  Dennis wore heavy brown corduroy pants that his
mother bought in a size too big, for him to grow into.  To keep
them from falling down, he’d give the waistband a twist, so that his
pockets would end up fore and aft rather than at the sides.  Leroy
had done a lot of groping and puckered-up kissing in the dark back row
of the theater or behind bushes in the park.  Dennis’s kisses were
puckered up and swift, accompanied by shifty eyes making sure nobody
was watching.  Dennis’s main attraction for me was that he was there.  He was someone, and I was hungry for someone.

To be continued….
 

Solving this jigsaw puzzle and posting about this sweepstakes for Big Red makes me eligible for free Xanga Premium for life…