What Happened (Part 11)

Weekday dressing was pretty casual, usually a pullover shirt and a pair of shorts.  Our clothes were kept in a little green dresser.  Mike and I shared the top drawer, John and Kenny the next, and the bottom was for Sunday shoes and belts.  The drawers were subdivided, with one kid’s clothes on the right and another’s on the left, with a common pile of socks and underwear to share in the middle. There was a taller set of dresser drawers in the corner of the room with our jeans and pants in the bottom; the rest was parental storage, not to be messed with.  Button shirts and everyday shoes (sneakers) were in the left side of the closet, with blankets, sheets and stuff in the right. We didn’t bother with shoes most of the time.  The house had smooth, polished wood floors inside and thick cool carpet grass outside.

[This was taken at Omi's house; That's our cousin Yvette standing next to Mike holding Kenny. Omi's little peach tree (never very good at making ripe peaches, but always a source of fallen green peaches and collectable stones, is behind us. Not sure about the other girl and the baby.]

 

Corkboard Memories: The Fall of It All, or Tree and Leaf

 

What Happened (Part 10)

 

After breakfast it was bath time.  We usually took baths two or three together at a time (when babies came along they got a wash in the kitchen sink, or in the small enamel tub that hung outside the back door).  Mom would spread a used towel from the dirty clothes as a makeshift bathmat, set the plug, and balance the hot and cold water.  A fresh towel was set on the closed toilet seat and our underwear (which we called panties for a long time, because that’s the term Mom used) was set on the tank, and she would leave us to it.  We’d shuck whatever we were wearing and jump in, pretty gradually if we thought it too hot or too cold.  There would be a fair amount of horseplay and splashing each other, and pretend drinking of bathwater out of bath toys like Wally Gator or Spouty Whale.  Then we’d push the plug down to drain the tub, and get out one by one, using the clean towel to dry off, it getting damper and damper with each use, of course.  Nobody wanted to be last.  Once we dried we slipped our underwear on and went to get dressed.  Mom would come in to clean when we were done, and too soppy a towel on the floor was sure to draw a reprimand.

Corkboard Memories: Thanksgiving

Corkboard Memories: Talking Turkey

 

What Happened (Part 9)

So let me describe a typical type of Weekday, let’s say a Monday.  I’ll cram it full of every day routine as well as incidents that would probably be spread out over the five days.

     A Monday morning would start with Pop already gone off to work the night before. We would be sleeping in our tangled heap, maybe even on the cooler floor if it had been a hot night.  Mom would come in at about 7:30 and rouse us with her signature four note whistle (“Whee-hoo-WHEEE-hooo!”) and telling us to come and get breakfast before she fed it to the hogs.  Up we’d scramble and race for the bathroom, where we stood all around the toilet at the same time and crossed our tinkle streams, sometimes pronouncing the Musketeers oath, “One for all and all for one!”  Then we’d all wash up, crowding in at the sink (it was a porcelain basin on metal legs at the time, not the cabinet model that replaced it later; it had one faceted leg you could twist), dry our hands, and thunder off to the kitchen, still in our pajamas.

     Breakfast was usually cereal, and cereal was an important business.  There could be oatmeal, or Malt-o-Meal, or scrambled eggs and toast, but cold cereal was our workhorse.  There were the rather grown-up varieties like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, or Rice Krispies, or Cheerios, tolerable with enough sugar and maybe sliced banana.  But more significant was the kids’ cereal, whatever sugary, showy brand gripped our attention at the time.  Kid cereal was a meal and entertainment, and sometimes a prize, to boot.  One vital reason we treasured our shopping trips with our parents on Saturday was to choose which cereal and its mascot would have our loyalty that week.  As we ate, the box would be passed around (with Mike as eldest, on down) and the cartoons and offers and advertisements were perused as intently as any newspaper by any adult.

     Most of the cereals we enjoyed are still around, in some incarnation or other.  Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes, Coco Puffs, and Trix are still being shilled by Lucky, Tony, Sonny, and the Trix Rabbit, if in slightly different cartoon form.  But there were some that fell by the wayside.  One of special significance only to me among my brothers (as far as I know) was Crispy Critters and its mascot, King Linus, a creation of animator Jay Ward for the cereal-selling show “King Linus the Lion-Hearted.”  Long after I forgot every episode of the cartoon I was haunted by the image of a crowned Lion (it turned up everywhere, in Christmas specials and valentine cards and in bank form) and a fondness for the name Linus.  It was only reinforced when I found out (years later) that my astrological sign was Leo.

If there was a prize in the box we would usually have to share it, but if anyone was seen to be particularly fond of a certain character or have strong affinities with it, it was generally conceded that it was his.  When empty, the box might be cut up if it had an interesting graphic or a game on the back.  Very rarely Mom consented to mail order box top offers; we got some Tony Tiger hats, complete with long tiger tails, that way.

Corkboard Memories: Messenger from Heaven

 

Corkboard Memories: The Harvest

 

What Happened (Part 8)

 

     I don’t want to give the impression that all my early life was nocturnal wanderings.  But those times stand out because they were some of the few when I was on my own.  Usually I was living the closely knit daily communal life of the Babel Boys, the situation that binds and connects us so closely that we have come to jokingly refer to it as “the hive mind,” so that with miles between us we still find ourselves experiencing the same moods and thoughts, and even craving the same foods. It has been said you are who you really are when you’re alone in the dark.  When I was alone in the dark I found myself to be mystical, with a sense of the secret life of things, possessed by dramatic narrative imperatives, and experiencing dreadful awe before the unknown and its possible revelations (you know--“skeered”).  A heady brew when you’re five or six.

     But daily life was naturally predicated and tempered by moving in a unit with my brothers; we moved like a herd or a flock, veering in the same direction as our moods infected one another, casting our plays and playings with each other’s characters, never feeling quite easy if one was temporarily displaced from the band. My ordinary life before I started to go to school could be divided into two modes of existence, each perceived as radically different from the other: Weekdays, and the Week-End. The Weekdays were analogous to the commonplace business of life; but the Week-End was equivalent to the holidays, when fun was in the air and anything was more than likely to happen.  This weekly cycle was our basic measure of time; the thought of waiting for anything for a month was hard to endure, and a year unthinkable.

What Happened (Part 7)

 

There was one voice in that chorus of screams I haven’t introduced yet, and that was my latest and last brother Kenny, Kenneth Ray Babel, just a toddler at the time, the literal “blue-eyed boy” of the family and the Benjamin of our tribe. His arrival marked the completion of the quartet of Babel Boys, but his indulged status as youngest and cutest kept him somewhat jealously out of the circle of the elder triad.  The main cast is now stable for some time to come, and at least for the duration of this chapter.

(In this picture I am holding a tractor and John has a Kozmic Kiddle. We wanted that toy for the spaceship, and had soon wrecked the little figure it came with.)

Memories Pinned to the Corkboard: Cornucopias

 

Stuff&Junk: Reminiscent of the Old House and Old Times