What Happened (Part 22)

 

Lunch is a very simple affair, usually sandwiches.  Mom puts all of the stuff on the table, and we each get a glass of ice water (tea is for supper, and soda is a rare treat). The usual suspects on a lunch table are chopped ham lunch meat, American cheese slices, pickles, tomatoes, mustard, Miracle Whip, peanut butter, jelly (peach or grape), and, if we are lucky, Lay’s potato chips.  Mom likes to put chips in her sandwich, and eventually we pick up the habit.  One of us is chosen to pray, and then we dig in.  The first round is a luxurious meat-and-cheese sandwich, each of us putting in orders for our individual variations and Mom making them for us.  Seconds, if we’re still hungry, is the less expensive peanut butter and jelly, full, or folded if we’re less ravenous. There is chatter and exuberance at the table, and even the occasional bit of taboo singing (“If you sing at the table, you’ll have a crazy wife!”).  We admonish each other to keep our “ables off the tables.”  When we’re done Mom clears the food away and puts the few dishes in the sink, and it is nap time.

From the Commonplace Book: J. R. R. Tolkien

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

Letter to his friend Robert Murray, S.J. (December 1953)

From the Commonplace Book: G. K. Chesterton

"There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys: and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing, as children mean playing, is the most serious thing in the world. And as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy: we do not have enough strength for play. This is the truth which everyone will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all; anyone who has played with bricks, anyone who has played with dolls, anyone who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned nothing."

--from "The Toy Theatre," in Tremendous Trifles (1909), by G. K. Chesterton.
 

From the Commonplace Book: Lafcadio Hearn

“Each heart, each brain in the billions of humanity,—even so surely as sorrow lives,—feels and thinks in some special way unlike any other; and goodness in each has its unlikeness to all other goodness,—and thus its own infinite preciousness; for however humble, however small, it is something all alone, and God never repeats his work. No heart-beat is cheap, no gentleness is despicable, no kindness is common; and Death, in removing a life—the simplest life ignored,—removes what never will reappear through the eternity of eternities,—since every being is the sum of a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others....” - Lafcadio Hearn, “Two Years in the French West Indies” (1890). 

What Happened (Part 21)

 

The doorway to the Kitchen is simply a ten foot opening; a metal threshold marks where the wood floor ends and the speckled linoleum begins. The way this room is now would startle my youngest sibling, I think, who never knew it so. It is bright, airy, clean, and uncluttered.  The walls and roof are a cheery canary yellow, the curtains over the sink and around the window looking out to the driveway have a rustic farm motif featuring roosters and coffee-mills, and the myriad cabinets and drawers gleam with copper colonial-style handles. The kitchen table set is an old Formica-topped model with metal tubular legs and a chrome edge banding its rounded rectangle.   The only other piece of furniture is the old high chair (metal of course, with a multi-colored teddy bear pattern on its vinyl back and seat) that sits under the golden sunburst Westclox.  There is an oven set in the wall, a stove and vent-a-hood set in the counter, and a refrigerator/freezer, standing next to the sink.

[Something like this.]

It is the gap between sink and refrigerator that most concerns the boys, and they inspect it first.  The only thing there is the heavy, wooden, round, almost yard-wide Chinese checker board on which Mom and her friend Maggie (Aunt Margaret? No.) sometimes play. Mike double checks the kitchen chairs to make sure I am not reproducing his ploy.  They look under the kitchen sink, but find only the pipes, a clutch of cleansers (scandalously unsecured by today’s standards, but somehow we never did drink bleach—we were sensible lads, Mom had lectured us about the dangers, and we policed our younger members) and far off around the corner under the countertop the gleam of the electric coffee urn, a working relic of Pop’s entrepreneurial days, hauled out at family gatherings when a single pot just won’t do. Attention is turned to the pantry. 

The pantry is a tall thin closet with four shelves for food, a space at the bottom for a plastic bin for potatoes, and a space to the side for the broom, scoop, ironing board, and the clothes pin bag. The top shelf is for spices and canning supplies, the next shelf is canned goods of a shorter nature like tomato sauce, the next is cereal and taller can goods, and the bottom is for coffee, crackers, and way in the back, liquor bottles.  The pantry is a popular hiding place because you can hide standing up and there is a crack under the door for light.  They fling open the door in expectation.  I am not there.

Bafflement reigns. Mike asks Kenny if he checked everywhere.  They go back to the start to look again, this time even searching places in our room, where it began.  Under the bed, behind the headboard, in the closet (which, although it opens with a rumble like thunder, can be eased open quietly with a practiced hand), behind the door jangling with belts hanging on the inside knob, all these places are examined.  Every room is investigated again, but I am not to be found.

They end up in the kitchen again, stumped, intrigued, and a little mad.  Finally they have to give the seldom-used cry of “Ally, ally, oxen free-o!”  They are astonished and appalled when I pop out of the cabinet under the oven, because this is the cubby for the trash can. Admittedly it was not then the foul hole it eventually became (the walls were clean and there was a lid on the can), but we are conditioned not to have anything to do with garbage, and no one imaged I would have the fortitude to do it. It is, in short, a victory won by playing against our accepted conceptual norms.  My triumph is greeted with the usual mix of admiration and aggravation, and then it is time for lunch.

What Happened (Part 20)

 

This is the Dining Room, and we are very lucky to have a picture of it contemporary of the time.  You can see the old dining room table and its six padded vinyl chairs; what you can’t see is the wavy pattern of four lines on the top that border its outer edge that are just right for tracing with four little fingers. In the corner is the china cabinet that houses the green-and-white farm patterned dishware, which I never remember ever being used except for the cups, when we had big family gatherings and there weren’t enough for coffee.  In the corner is a small record cabinet.  In the earliest times there was a monster stereo console/radio against the divider wall (the radio never worked, but had a fascinating control dial you could adjust in a sci-fi manner), later replaced by a portable with built-in speakers. 

Always and ever hanging on the divider wall was a plaster sculpture, painted to look like bronze, of Jesus standing at the door and knocking with a gigantic key. Some weird plants that were probably meant to be bushes but looked like cactus to us Texas boys are growing around the door frame and beside Him. Hanging directly over the table is a lamp on an adjustable cord.

The dining room is sort of optional space, an area enshrined to respectability, a formal gathering spot most often passed by on the way to rooms where things actually happened. They almost do pass, just glancing over to make sure no-one is behind the curtains, when John notices something and points it out to Kenny. They rush over to the table and angle their heads down. Mike is hiding under it, stretched across two chairs so his feet won’t show.  He emerges looking pissed and punches Kenny on the shoulder for daring to find him.  This leaves only me to hunt down, and just one other room where I could be hiding.

{That is Mike and me in the photo. Even at this late date I remember wanting Mike's balloon because it had ears and mine did not.]

Mom's Shirley Temple Doll

Well, this isn't Mom's Shirley Temple doll, but one just like it. It was the only thing she still had from her childhood. After she went off to marry Pop, Nanny, her mother, sold off everything she left behind. Nanny was never a sentimental person and practical in the extreme. That is the charitable interpretation, though it always seemed rather vindictive to me. Nanny had always hoped that Mom would be a little money-making machine like Miss Temple, hence the doll. It reminds me of the story Mom told us once. She never had many toys (they were rather poor) but she did have a set of paper dolls. Nanny gave them away to the daughter of one of the customers at her beauty shop to ingratiate herself with the client.

Shirley had to wait through the birth of four rambunctious boys until finally my sister Susan was born. During that time her dress and shoes were destroyed and lost, her curls got rather ratty, and her butt tattooed with crayon. In the past few years Susan had the Ideal doll cleaned and restored and supplied with a new outfit, and she now sits pristinely in a display case.