What Happened (Part 1)

  My first memory, then.  The first thing I can recall is riding our "hoppy-horse" on the front porch of the old house on 558 Loop Drive.  The front yard is as I will never see it again: a vast terrain of dirt with only a hint of green sprouting here and there.  I rock to and fro, the sturdy steel springs groaning and straining with each throw of my weight; I bounce up and down, and sometimes am airborne as horse, frame, and boy jump with the upward momentum.  I travel furiously, going nowhere, and survey the new kingdom I have arrived in.

This memory rises up like an island in a sea of mist, but later corroborative evidence and independent accounts give it some context.  It was evidently on or very near the first day we moved in; my impression, unverifiable, is that it was the very day.  We are the first people to live there.  Pop said (later) that it had been built by a man as a place for himself and his sweetheart to live in when they got married, but the relationship failed and he had to sell the house.  I wondered (much later) if that might have left some psychic residue to haunt our lives, having been made by love and abandoned in rue. 

So who were we?  There was Pop, a.k.a. Elthor Edgar Gustav Babel Jr., more sensibly called Buddy: a country boy of German ancestry, a Korean War veteran, a fisherman, bowler, and baseball player, sometime owner of a beer joint and now a truck driver for SMI, the local steel mill.  There was Mom, or Patricia Delores Babel, called Pat, of course: a licensed beautician, but not practicing, comparatively young and inexperienced next to her husband, but of a persistent will and enthusiastic nature, and determined to build a good home for her family.  There was Mike or Michael Wayne Babel as he was formally charged when Mom was particularly angry with him, born some eighteen months before me and always very definitely the senior partner in our relationship, with all the good and bad that that implies.  And there was me, B.B., Bryan Timothy Babel, hardly more aware than a gangling puppy of the big wide world and just as sensitively over-responsive to the love and anger of my masters, who were, as far as I could see, everybody.

A vintage "Hi-Prancer", like ours.

Stuff&Junk: Rubber Remembrances

Some we still have; some are only memories. Our squirrel monkey was green.

Lost in the Toybox: Disneykins Disney Castle

The Disneykins Disney Castle was one of the more extravagent toys of our youth. It was purchased via S&H Green Stamps (our parents probably wouldn't have spent real money on such an item). Be a bunch of wild and enthusiastic boys way under the age of ten, we began breaking and losing bits of it immediately. I don't think we ever had the patience to put the transparent castle together at all. The more spindly figures (like Captain Hook) soon had their legs snapped off by rough handling. I remember playing with them almost right away on the slab under the backyard water faucet, and probably losing quite a few then and there. At that age, a little toy going into the grass was just lost for good, and might as well have fallen into a black hole. One of my favorites was Jiminy Cricket, and I took him around quite a bit, once getting him jammed in the screen door at my grandmother's house. I bought a replacement for him years later. Today the only surviving original figure from the set is Dopey, Some of the scenery lasted longer and even today the Seven Dwarves' house and the plastic cave are still somewhere in the old toy box. It inspired a poem, "Glass Castle", about the fragility of childhood dreams and wishes.

Stuff&Junk: Lost in the Toy Box

Suff&Junk: Gone Games

Sometimes a few bits and pieces remain, sometimes only memories. Board games got treated very roughly in our family, especially in the early days, and gamepieces were often used as toys. There's really no excuse for what happened to the Hobbit and LOTR games, though.