Derimacasi Cumbali

Short Story Collections by the Author

2011-03-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Short Story Collections by the Author

Texas writer Lad Moore’s latest book, “Riders of the Seven Hills,” is now available in a literary-trade soft cover edition from BeWrite Books. You may obtain copies directly from the publisher http://www.bewrite.net/ or at national booksellers, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and others. Joining “Tailwind” and “Odie Dodie,” Riders of the Seven Hills is the third collection of Lad’s stories featuring his life adventures, rites of passage, and tales of memorable characters he met worldwide. From the red clay of East Texas to the jungles of Indonesia, there is a tale for every fancy, as varied as “cottonmouths and cotton candy.”

The author resides in Bayou LeMarche, a rural artists' conclave in Texas' Big Bend, near the town of Lajitas.

The Early Horror Show

2011-02-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

Odd hissing sounds emanated from an otherwise silent Chieftain.

* * *

The deliverymen muttered unintelligible sounds to each other as they strained to position the huge walnut box onto the floor next to the fireplace. It was our first television—a hulking mountain called a Philco; bigger than our wringer washing machine. As if summoned to audience by the Wizard of Oz, our family sat in rigid formation on the sofa, like crows upon a telephone line.

“Wait!” Shouted my mother, leaping up to dash over to the TV and place carpet-covered floor protector disks under its cabinet legs. The deliverymen grimaced, obviously irritated by having to hold the dead weight a foot off the floor for what must have seemed like an eternity. Disks now in place, they set the giant down with a grunt.

The store’s technician plugged the set in, and we waited as a green light glowed from the center of the tube, eventually radiating out to fill the screen with shimmering and snowy images. The black and white picture was fuzzy and the sound seemed to be coming from a train tunnel. A sudden panic seized our family. Is this all there is to television?

“Turn the antenna a bit to the east and a little more angled,” one man said. “Ears should be pointing about ten o’clock and two o’clock.” The picture began to crystallize. We could see people in a living room setting. It was a program called “The Guiding Light”—something my mother was familiar with called a “soap opera.” The show was a clone of the long-popular radio program of the same name. I remember how Mom cried after the first fifteen-minute episode. She said that the actors did not “look” like her minds-eye portraits from the radio days. Her sadness soon passed and she accepted that Bill Bauer didn’t have to have blond hair, or that Trudy could have actually been that skinny. We were so thrilled over the advent of television that even soap operas had value. We all watched them religiously—even us kids, when not in school.

I quickly noticed that soap operas were devious. Unexplained things happened, like a cast member being killed but showing up a few months later like it didn’t happen. Such fiddling around with a character was just one of many examples of “script shifts.” Shifts were wildly-concocted events that writers dreamed up to lengthen a cast member’s life-expectancy, or to exchange set-props made obsolete by changing times. We never saw the crank telephone being removed from the wall, but suddenly there appeared a bakelite dial phone on the coffee table. I guess we weren’t supposed to notice that the men suddenly quit wearing spats, or that ladies’ hemlines had shifted skyward. Thus while the scenes were being subtly altered, the players seemed to stay eternally young. Unlike we the audience, the passage of soap opera time occurred at a trickle.

Other shows soon made the trip to television. I suppose we all went through some degree of Mom’s character-image agony as each new program emerged from radio’s darkness. Each family member soon had his or her favorite, and we scrawled the channels and show times beside our names on a tablet. Treaties emerged so that one person gave deference to another’s favorite show when conflicts arose. I endured The Guiding Light and Ted Mack so I could watch Gangbusters and the Lone Ranger; but we all had to stand down for Dad’s Gillette Friday Night Fights.

New and totally original programs were developed. Now there was something to watch from breakfast until the midnight Air Force fly-over and National Anthem signaled the end of the TV day. Our family spent almost all its evening hours in front of the hypnotic screen, soaking in all it offered. Saturday mornings at the downtown theatres no longer held me captive. I had serials to watch right at home. Indeed, even the popcorn made in our own pan rivaled what the Paramount lobby offered. And maybe best of all, I no longer had to endure sweltering nights clogged with swarming insects so my parents could enjoy the outdoor screen at the Capri Drive-In. The films they preferred were syrupy love stories where we were led to believe married couples only had single beds separated by lamp tables.

It is written that all good things must end. Out of nowhere there emerged a rumor more threatening than the scariest scenes in Flash Gordon’s battles with the villain Ming. Someone was proposing a terrifying possibility. The very words made our family cringe:

Pay Television!

I don’t know who first uttered those words, but suddenly everyone began talking about it. We heard that the practice had been invented by something called the “BBC” in England, which charged the public a “viewer license fee.” To us, it seemed completely unnatural for the two words to even be hooked together. “Pay” and “Television” was the world’s most obvious oxymoron, and completely un-American. Would we also be forced into afternoon tea, cricket, and funny pronunciations of our words? Would we have to fire Ike and hire a queen?

The concept became increasingly ominous as we began to hear more detailed rumors. It was said that a uniformed bobby would come to the house and install a little meter, like cab drivers used. Another version was that a metal coin box would be welded to the television like a newspaper rack, to be emptied once a month by armored car guards. Handfuls of quarters would need to be deposited into the slot before Roy Rogers would be permitted to mount Trigger. A month’s allowance might be required to find out if Superman would fall victim to stolen Kryptonite.

Then came the most frightful possibility of all: What if Dad, who controlled all family finances, decided that our budget could only afford The Friday Night Fights? He who held the purse would have command of the tuner.

The newspapers wrote about Pay TV being inevitable. Kids at school talked about it in cataclysmic terms. When we practiced duck and cover drills in the cafeteria, it seemed to me that the frenzied cold war risk of a Russian atom bomb should yield to the real threat—a condition of national urgency where basic TV freedoms were suddenly being held hostage to Cockney Channel Annihilation. How could our country have its priorities so misplaced? We should have the Brits ducking for cover because they thought of the dumb idea to start with.

The stress had risen to stellar heights when suddenly the rumors stopped. As if an earthen dam had been installed across a river, there was no more discussion about the looming catastrophe.
The mystery of what happened was never clear. It just ended. Free TV would continue.

I never knew for sure, but I figured that Ike arranged for the Brits to just shut up. After all, they still owed us a bunch of ships we loaned them in the war.

* * *

A Big Crush on a Little Rat

2010-09-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Simply taking my pulse would have unearthed my secret ailment.

* * *

We lived in Marshall, Texas when television was first introduced in our household. Before that, there was nothing that could keep me indoors. The lure of the Texas & Pacific Rail yards and the brick factory with its clay pits were my everyday haunts. And there was that long hot walk out to T&P Lake—a three-mile trip rewarded by a cool summer swim wearing nothing but underwear.

I remember our first television console well. It was half as big as the Frigidaire, had a round tube, and was capped off with an antenna that telescoped almost to the ceiling. It took minutes for the glow of the picture to change from dim to bright. Slowly the images would appear, snowy and sometimes shivery. Often times the picture that came up was of an Indian in headdress with lots of targets, grids, and numbers.

“Test pattern,” my dad explained. “The channel isn’t on yet.”

I had a strong curiosity about how the darn thing worked. I asked my dad.

“How can pictures scatter like gnats through the air and land in that box and become hooked up together in the right spot like a complicated puzzle?” I was thinking particularly of the puzzle of the redwood forest that took my mom six months to complete because the background patterns and colors were all alike.

“Photons, neurons, atoms, phosphorus, and gamma-charged ion electromagnetic fields—it’s all fairly simple.” I decided my dad didn’t know either, but he sure knew some expensive words.

There were few shows on, and while impressed with television’s magic, I longed for more programs I could enjoy. My dad liked the news shows and the Gillette Wednesday and Friday night fights. I suffered through the slugging, hoping the rapidly expanding menu would begin to favor young people. Soon they added a string of popular radio shows which had simply been converted over to television. It was then my dad told me that the Amos and Andy radio characters weren’t actually black people. Somehow I would rather not have known that.

In time, more and more programs and channels were added. Now there was even a log in the newspaper that told the lineup day by day. The family settled into a watching pattern. I had control from school’s-out until homework-time. Then my mom and dad took over. They often squabbled over what to watch. There was no way to settle the conflict peaceably other than to get a second television. After that, my parents went into separate watching rooms and abdicated all conversation until breakfast.

I was becoming an adolescent—maturing along with a host of young television stars who had grown up with me on-air. I awoke one day to find hair under my arms. Not much, and sort of cobwebby. I wondered if my TV friends were discovering theirs. Spin and Marty looked like they had even started to shave. I mentioned that to my dad.

“Don’t you even think of putting the first razor to your fuzz,” he said. “You do, and it will come back coarse and black like a shoe brush. A first shave promotes shaving thereafter and forever.”

But the fuzz was noticeably less manly than the crisp slick faces of Spin and Marty. I shaved for the first time when I was fourteen. I cut my face and neck in a dozen places and couldn’t hide the damage from my dad.

“Welcome to the first of twenty-seven thousand shaves. That’s once a day for an average lifetime.” He shook his head and went back to watching Ted Mack and the Amateur Hour—a rather boring “grownup” version of the Mickey Mouse Club.

As for the Mickey Mouse Club, no respectable young man, now shaving, would ever watch the Mouseketeers, other than for the Spin and Marty segment. The rest of the program was for pre-teens, and was in a word, silly. The two adult members of the troupe, Jimmie and Old Roy, were even sillier as they donned the famous rat’s ears and participated in hop-scotch and skip-rope routines.

Then it all suddenly changed. In a word, Annette.

Maybe Annette was only fourteen or fifteen, but she had the figure of a Coca-Cola bottle. No young man could escape noticing that among her peers on the stage, she was the only one with an emerging chest. That part about her is what spurred a love affair with America’s young adolescent boys. It was said by Disney that her fan mail averaged six-thousand panting letters a month. I was one of the six-thousand, and more than once. I yearned for an answer back—anything to indicate she saw something different in my gushing prose. Nothing came. Despite no communication from her, I had fallen deeply in love. It was not a boy-likes-girl kind of infatuation, but I believed it to be a love like mature adults must feel. I fully expected her to crash through the picture tube when she did the splits. I expected she would slide headlong into my arms and we would mount a winged white horse and gallop off amidst shooting stars, rainbows, and bluebirds. I noticed that if I moved about the room, her eyes followed me. When I watched her dance I could detect her chest jiggling a bit. My face turned red and my cheeks burned, as if I weren’t supposed to notice.

My dad always studied me curiously as he walked by the TV when he got home from work.

“Kinda old for that aren’t you?” In the same way a Playboy Magazine reader explains his passion by saying “It’s the stories,” I answered back, “It’s Spin and Marty time. They’re my age, and they’re detectives.”

At mid-year, mom and dad bought me a used Cushman motor scooter. Each day I raced home, downed my snack in one gulp, and sat in front of the dancing and singing TV Mice. The show always started with Jimmie and Roy leading the “Mouseketeer Roll Call.” Each cast member did a quick introduction cameo. My heart swelled when it came her turn and she announced Annette! The homogenized milk I had just consumed began to drool from the corner of my mouth. I was smitten. I would have even worn a pair of those cardboard ears except for the fear of being caught by my dad.

At times, it did seem sort of juvenile to be watching such a kiddie-themed show. But I continued to do so every afternoon until the day before school let out for Thanksgiving. That particular day I heard a loud commotion in the school cafeteria. I supposed it was a celebration marking the school holiday, but it continued well beyond that. I pushed my way into the crowd that had gathered around the water fountain to see what the fuss was about.

My friend Jerry Alexander was holding up a piece of paper. He turned it so we all could see. It proudly bore Mouseketeer ears as its letterhead.

He read the letter aloud. “Dear Jerry, Thank you for your sweet note. It was so thoughtful of you to remember that October 22 was my birthday. If you are ever at Disney Studios, I would love to meet you and give you a pair of closed-rehearsal tickets. Thank you for being a fan, and bye-bye for now-- Annette.

Seeing Jerry’s beaming face made me sick. The scooter ride home seemed longer than usual as I mulled over what had just happened. I took my time eating my pimento cheese sandwich and finishing my glass of milk. Turning the television on, I paused at the Mickey Mouse Club long enough to see her one last time. As I brushed her off with a sweep of my arm I thought…I bet your stupid publicist or fat old Roy wrote that letter.

Our breakup had come at the right time. Three clicks of the dial and I was able to join forces with Sky King, even though his show was in reruns. He was the Crime-Fighting-Cowboy-with-Cessna. He flew around in a plane called “Songbird” with his teenage niece Penny. No jump-rope and stage dancing here, these guys chased the real rats of the world.

Oh, and niece Penny? She had a figure like a Coca-Cola bottle!

* * *

The Early Horror Show

2010-09-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

Odd hissing sounds emanated from an otherwise silent Chieftain.

* * *

The deliverymen muttered unintelligible sounds to each other as they strained to position the huge walnut box onto the floor next to the fireplace. It was our first television—a hulking mountain called a Philco; bigger than our wringer washing machine. As if summoned to audience by the Wizard of Oz, our family sat in rigid formation on the sofa, like crows upon a telephone line.

“Wait!” Shouted my mother, leaping up to dash over to the TV and place carpet-covered floor protector disks under its cabinet legs. The deliverymen grimaced, obviously irritated by having to hold the dead weight a foot off the floor for what must have seemed like an eternity. Disks now in place, they set the giant down with a grunt.

The store’s technician plugged the set in, and we waited as a green light glowed from the center of the tube, eventually radiating out to fill the screen with shimmering and snowy images. The black and white picture was fuzzy and the sound seemed to be coming from a train tunnel. A sudden panic seized our family. Is this all there is to television?

“Turn the antenna a bit to the east and a little more angled,” one man said. “Ears should be pointing about ten o’clock and two o’clock.” The picture began to crystallize. We could see people in a living room setting. It was a program called “The Guiding Light”—something my mother was familiar with called a “soap opera.” The show was a clone of the long-popular radio program of the same name. I remember how Mom cried after the first fifteen-minute episode. She said that the actors did not “look” like her minds-eye portraits from the radio days. Her sadness soon passed and she accepted that Bill Bauer didn’t have to have blond hair, or that Trudy could have actually been that skinny. We were so thrilled over the advent of television that even soap operas had value. We all watched them religiously—even us kids, when not in school.

I quickly noticed that soap operas were devious. Unexplained things happened, like a cast member being killed but showing up a few months later like it didn’t happen. Such fiddling around with a character was just one of many examples of “script shifts.” Shifts were wildly-concocted events that writers dreamed up to lengthen a cast member’s life-expectancy, or to exchange set-props made obsolete by changing times. We never saw the crank telephone being removed from the wall, but suddenly there appeared a bakelite dial phone on the coffee table. I guess we weren’t supposed to notice that the men suddenly quit wearing spats, or that ladies’ hemlines had shifted skyward. Thus while the scenes were being subtly altered, the players seemed to stay eternally young. Unlike we the audience, the passage of soap opera time occurred at a trickle.

Other shows soon made the trip to television. I suppose we all went through some degree of Mom’s character-image agony as each new program emerged from radio’s darkness. Each family member soon had his or her favorite, and we scrawled the channels and show times beside our names on a tablet. Treaties emerged so that one person gave deference to another’s favorite show when conflicts arose. I endured The Guiding Light and Ted Mack so I could watch Gangbusters and the Lone Ranger; but we all had to stand down for Dad’s Gillette Friday Night Fights.

New and totally original programs were developed. Now there was something to watch from breakfast until the midnight Air Force fly-over and National Anthem signaled the end of the TV day. Our family spent almost all its evening hours in front of the hypnotic screen, soaking in all it offered. Saturday mornings at the downtown theatres no longer held me captive. I had serials to watch right at home. Indeed, even the popcorn made in our own pan rivaled what the Paramount lobby offered. And maybe best of all, I no longer had to endure sweltering nights clogged with swarming insects so my parents could enjoy the outdoor screen at the Capri Drive-In. The films they preferred were syrupy love stories where we were led to believe married couples only had single beds separated by lamp tables.

It is written that all good things must end. Out of nowhere there emerged a rumor more threatening than the scariest scenes in Flash Gordon’s battles with the villain Ming. Someone was proposing a terrifying possibility. The very words made our family cringe:

Pay Television!

I don’t know who first uttered those words, but suddenly everyone began talking about it. We heard that the practice had been invented by something called the “BBC” in England, which charged the public a “viewer license fee.” To us, it seemed completely unnatural for the two words to even be hooked together. “Pay” and “Television” was the world’s most obvious oxymoron, and completely un-American. Would we also be forced into afternoon tea, cricket, and funny pronunciations of our words? Would we have to fire Ike and hire a queen?

The concept became increasingly ominous as we began to hear more detailed rumors. It was said that a uniformed bobby would come to the house and install a little meter, like cab drivers used. Another version was that a metal coin box would be welded to the television like a newspaper rack, to be emptied once a month by armored car guards. Handfuls of quarters would need to be deposited into the slot before Roy Rogers would be permitted to mount Trigger. A month’s allowance might be required to find out if Superman would fall victim to stolen Kryptonite.

Then came the most frightful possibility of all: What if Dad, who controlled all family finances, decided that our budget could only afford The Friday Night Fights? He who held the purse would have command of the tuner.

The newspapers wrote about Pay TV being inevitable. Kids at school talked about it in cataclysmic terms. When we practiced duck and cover drills in the cafeteria, it seemed to me that the frenzied cold war risk of a Russian atom bomb should yield to the real threat—a condition of national urgency where basic TV freedoms were suddenly being held hostage to Cockney Channel Annihilation. How could our country have its priorities so misplaced? We should have the Brits ducking for cover because they thought of the dumb idea to start with.

The stress had risen to stellar heights when suddenly the rumors stopped. As if an earthen dam had been installed across a river, there was no more discussion about the looming catastrophe.
The mystery of what happened was never clear. It just ended. Free TV would continue.

I never knew for sure, but I figured that Ike arranged for the Brits to just shut up. After all, they still owed us a bunch of ships we loaned them in the war.

* * *

2010-02-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Two and Twenty Farthings

A cemetery is safe in the sunlight. But haints lift up after dusk.

* * *

From my porch I could see Hendry’s Grocery. It was a short two-block walk. Its battered screen door was meant to invite the outside air in while keeping the flies at bay. But years of passage had morphed its frame into a sort of an S-shaped warp, and even when latched, a house cat could easily pass through its flare. In many places the screen had been bulged into pockets by elbows and knees that pushed it open when arms were laden with grocery sacks. In some spots the screen was torn. Early on, Mr Hendry had patched it using scrap pieces of screen woven in like a repaired fishing net. But eventually he tired of what seemed to be a futile maintenance effort and just let the door fight its own battles. I suppose he figured that at least the door had retained its intended promotional value. Across its middle was an enameled metal bar proclaiming “Join the Swing to Pepsi!” Well, after all, the door did still swing.

I passed by Hendry’s on my frequent trips to the Greenwood Cemetery. I did not stop at the store on the way up East Avenue, but saved my visit for the return trips home—a sort of reward should I be successful in my forage.

The cemetery was home to three things I could reliably expect. First were the legions of grass burs we called “Goat Heads”—aggressive spheres of spines that clung to anything passing within their reach. In the same way a magnet draws thumbtacks, Goat Heads would leap onto my tennis shoes, my socks, and the legs of my jeans. Picking them off was tortuous, as the little thorns were arrayed like starbursts, with no safe place to grasp. They were murderous to bicycles—so much that I never ventured there with my balloon tires. The damage that stickers caused was never a blowout, but the more nagging slow death—enough nuisance to cause constant airing up of sagging rubber, but not enough to warrant hot-patches.

A Greenwood constant was its abundance of Magnolia pods. Each pod contained a number of bright red seeds about the size of a purple-hull pea. I would gather them in the fall to earn a few quarters from the neighborhood ladies who favored them for stringing into Christmas tree garlands. I had to act quick, rushing from tree to tree to beat the squirrels who considered the seeds their Thanksgiving bounty. For the ones that had not yet fallen, I dislodged them with a long cane pole as high as it would reach. In several days at Greenwood, I could harvest two or three nice coffee cans of beads. The ladies called them “Rubies from Heaven.” and held them in some sort of reverence.

My main quest, however, were the mammoth grasshoppers that seemed to favor the grounds and graves. They were black and yellow, with red racing stripes, and were as large as my prized Vicks pocket inhaler. A cricket box stuffed with these giants could bring as much as thirty cents—the ideal trotline bait I was told. I had sort of an auction going between Mr Liston and Mr Van Norden. One would always bid a few cents more than the other for the prized insects.

For grasshopper weaponry, I used a fly swatter. I would slap the insect enough to disorient it but not injure it. Then I would put it into my cricket box head first. Grasshoppers had a silent defense of their own. Once in my grasp, they would emit a coffee-colored squirt of what the old timers called “tobacco juice,” although I knew that it was actually a fluid far less salutary. The substance stained the fingers and had an unpleasant odor, but that was about it. The grasshoppers could bite too; although it was a rather lame effort. It felt like the pinch of tweezers when removing a splinter. No real damage caused.

Each time before leaving the cemetery bound for Hendry’s, I walked the short distance to a special spot. We Moore’s had a family plot in Greenwood. In it were relatives I had never known or couldn’t remember. Lee, my grandmother’s brother, Jeffrey, the still-birth son of my Uncle Archie, and Solen, my grandfather who had died at an early age of pneumonia. The grave markers were just simple metal signs supplied by the funeral home, about the size of a postcard. My uncle Jack pledged to provide some more stately markers “When we fill up the remaining spaces.”

Not far from our simple family grave site stood a granite and marble structure worthy of the architecture that marked the great edifices of our Nation’s Capital buildings. It was as large as our garage, with thick black glass windows adorned with gold metal vines and flowers. Its massive metal doors had the same green patina of the Statue of Liberty, with a keyhole large enough for a mouse to enter. Above its alcove was carved the name MOORE. It was just a “coincidence of surname,” I was told, for they were not family members.

In front of the structure were two iron benches, painted white and appearing to have been refreshed often. Between them was a fancy brass water faucet in the shape of a dolphin, which I used many times to quench my thirst and wash the grasshopper tobacco from my hands. Like the doors, it had also lost its brass luster and had acquired that pleasant green hue. Sitting on the bench in front of the word MOORE somehow made me sense a kingly heritage. We may not have been close family, but the Statue of Liberty tells us that all the nation’s Moores once huddled together on the same deck of the ship that brought us here.

I reached into my pocket and took an extra drag from my Vicks inhaler just to celebrate the moment.

* * *

The Papoose Men

2009-02-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

“The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.”
—Victor Hugo

* * *

The no-frills Hotel Washington was already past old when I first entered its lobby. It sat near the end of Marshall Texas’ Washington Street, its scaling decorative edifices speckled with the dispatches from hordes of pigeons. The birds were at home there because of their sponsors. Little old men, with backs bent from toil and trouble, called the hotel home. They were the distributors of stale bread and popcorn that kept the pigeons there. It was sustenance for the birds, and activity for the men who longed for a way to pass the days. The Washington was no longer the hotel originally built to catch the overflow patrons when its rival Ginocchio Hotel sold out, or to offer a choice for the less-affluent rail passengers. Still but a short walk from the Texas and Pacific Depot, it now had now become a budget residence-inn.

My newspaper job took me to the Washington as my first stop. I sold papers along a walking route that included most of the downtown area. It was not a throwing route, but was sell-on-demand. Some stores and businesses had monthly accounts, but even these had to be hand delivered inside, not tossed on doorsteps.

Many of the old men who hailed from the once-thriving Texas & Pacific shops and the Car Wheel Foundry inhabited the hotel. Some were disabled but could not qualify for long stays at the T&P Railroad Hospital, so instead they took up residence at the Washington. When I mingled among them there was an air of sadness—often I heard recitations and regrets over what once had been proud and gainful work with the railroad. They would describe those times as the best years of their life, paying a sort of paternal reverence to their employer. Each man could raise a tale about his time there, some happy, some dark.

One gentleman wearing an eye patch told me he was “deadly sure that a body or more” had been dumped into the molten iron vats in the wee hours of the early morning when supervision was sparse. “Settling union business,” he said. I expected him to end his tale with the classic pirate “aargh.”

Another fellow they called Old Man Abraham once told me about some women who worked at the shops called the “Loosies of the mid-hour.” He said it was common for men to pair up with the Loosies after midnight and seek out romantic interludes on the heaps of corn that were stored in the adjacent grain mill and elevator.

“I could slip down there before midnight and stash myself in the mill behind the stacks of old pallets and keep real quiet. I could hide and watch the spooning. Ten years ago you could have done that too,” he said. Then he showed a gaping smile revealing no more than four teeth, all the color and shape of acorn hulls. His tales caused my face to turn red so I began to avoid eye contact with him altogether. I admit that some curiosity did linger so I asked my uncle SB about spooning. He said I should tend to my geography book and leave “higher education” to grown ups. I doubted that anything like spooning took place at the Washington. I don’t even think I ever saw a female there. It seemed to be just a lodge for these old men who came to spend a while but stayed.

Behind the clerk’s counter there were room-key slots serving double-duty as repositories for the infrequent mail that arrived for tenants—their only link to elsewhere. Like the daily assemblage of pigeons, each mail delivery found the old men clustered around the counter with a watchful eye on their slots. The mail bag was quickly sorted, and most of them moved away in silence, empty-handed, and with brows a bit more furrowed. Mail call was for many the only activity for the day. It was followed by a slow houseshoe-shuffle to creaky wooden chairs—their bottoms worn slick by decades of quiet patronage. Even in the heat of summer, some of the men spread wool blankets or folded shawls across their chilled legs—legs white from years without sunlight and braided with trails of blue and purple veins.

In the lobby there were two tables for dominos, and the clacking of ivory was the only sound besides the beat of the Western Union wall clock. But even the dominos went silent if someone entered the hotel. All eyes would turn and plead for even the briefest of contact—perhaps nothing more than a “good morning” greeting or the arc of a wave. But visitors rarely did so. They came to the hotel out of chore. They brought the mail or delivered chicken and ham-salad sandwiches ordered daily from the drug store lunch counter. Meter-readers came once a month but never stepped inside. Other men with gurneys sometimes came on sadder missions; to retrieve a body that had failed morning muster. It seemed odd to me that there was no rear door for that purpose.
.
I didn’t sell many papers at the hotel because the old men had worked out a system where a few bought papers and passed them around to others like a family-style dinner. One would start with the sports pages then them in trade for the “A” section. The next day they reversed the order. It was also “dry” in there, meaning I never got a tip.

The hotel was my first newspaper stop so I arrived early, about the time the men began to stir. My other customers’ stores rarely opened until eight or nine, so I often wasted my first hour of the day soaking up the character and curiosity of the place.

Each morning there assembled two or three husky young black men that the tenants called “Porter Jim” or “Porter Sam” or Porter-whatever. Several of the residents could not climb the flights of stairs, so they mounted the backs of the porters who carried them downstairs piggy-back style. Instead of calling them porters, I dubbed them “Papoose Men” because they reminded me how Indians carried their young. They worked for tips, disappearing after the morning rides and reappearing in the late afternoon to repeat the process. I don’t know where they went during the day, or what they did for other work.

I thought it curious that these porters were so reliable in their service, because the old men had little to share, and the tips must have been meager. I asked one of the Papoose Men why he came day after day to help the old men. He paused for what seemed like a minute then answered in one word.

“Dignity.”

Long after my walking route ended and a few steel newspaper racks took my place, I would pass by and linger at the door of the old Washington. I saw fewer and fewer men now, and less and less mail. Then after a lengthy absence, I returned one day to find the hotel boarded up and silent. Even the pigeons had retreated to the rail yards where the mill elevator cars provided a more reliable supply of spilled grains.

That day I pressed my face against a crack in the planks that covered the windows, hoping for one last look at a history I had lived. I could see nothing inside except for a single shard of sunlight that lasered its way from somewhere above me onto the dust-covered lobby floor. It was like a spotlight focused upon an empty stage; a stage that once provided me memorable theatre—the ordinary, and yes, the extraordinary.

* * *

Story © Copyright 2009 by the author, Lad Moore. All rights reserved.
Image © Copyright by the photographer, Alexander Ritter, compensated for license.

The Untimely End of Washington

2008-10-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Finding unnerving things in familiar places.

* * *

By the time I was seven or eight, I was allowed to make the solo trip from the North Side of Marshall to the Texas and Pacific rail yard, a distance of perhaps a mile. My attraction to that spot was its constant opportunity for adventure.

I liked to wade among the pigeons at the grain mill and elevator across from the depot. There were always dozens of these birds cooing and clumsily wobbling about, looking for spillage. They would scatter to the left and right as I approached, but then circle in behind me as I passed. Even if startled enough to fly, they would only make one gliding pass around the structure and land again about where they had started. The sound of their wings was more of a whistle-burst than a flap.

I was fascinated with the tales of military pigeons being used to carry notes and messages long distances. I examined all the birds’ stick-like legs, searching for any tiny aluminum message-tubes, hoping some errant War Pigeon had stopped in our town long enough to forage. The excitement was high that I might seize such a secret message on its way to the front. The note might be from the enemy and I would be rewarded with a trip to shake the hand of the President himself.

“Local Boy Intercepts Enemy Invasion Plan—Hailed as War Hero by Commander-In-Chief”

Well, I found no such dispatches. I didn’t even see so much as one carrier pigeon candidate. I saw only the sameness of the bobbing iridescent blue-green heads and the pink legs void of aluminum tubes. I concluded that our pigeons were not part of the war effort, probably deemed unworthy by the military because all they did was eat and leave droppings. Even after the realization that Marshall’s pigeons had no vital mission for society, they were still curious to watch, and the soft murmurs they made were quite peaceful. Sometimes these same birds would migrate downtown and scurry around the benches at the Hotel Washington. Here, old gentlemen with strong odors of cigars and mothballs would toss grains of popcorn their way. The old men liked to tease the birds with a single kernel pitched into their midst, so as to create something of a gray-feathered calamity to serve as entertainment until the daily newspapers arrived.

In time I learned that our pigeons were not only unworthy of air-transport duty, but had no value whatsoever. The people who ran the grain elevator decided that the growing horde of wharf rats had to be dealt with, even at the peril of the birds. They introduced a poison-laced grain as bait, and soon the pigeon numbers declined then disappeared altogether. My later trips to the elevator found no birds. The sweet smell of grain was also gone and the scene had an unnerving lack of sounds. In the gutters and swales, what spilled grain there was had been abandoned in the elements to sour.

In 1940, the railroad built a passenger tunnel from the Ginocchio Hotel to the station. It went for some distance under the many rows of train tracks, and emerged at the passenger platform. It was a spacious tunnel, with walls of ceramic tile. There were framed advertisements here and there along the way, allowing for pause and consumption of whatever was being touted. Many were pitching new automobiles, some the local hotels, and one of Uncle Sam pointing at me and asking me to join up. I concluded he didn’t know I was too young but I was honored to have his invitation anyway. In the middle of the tunnel there was a ticket counter and a news stand, a last-minute troll for passengers too hurried to stop elsewhere. They also offered cigars and candy bars for the seasoned travelers who had learned that on-board treats were about double in price.

Our railroad tunnel contained the best echo this side of the Alps. I could whoop and get not one but a week’s worth of echoes before it dissolved into but a whisper. There was an unwritten taboo about such racket, and the ticket clerks sometimes would yell back the word “quiet!” which just became an echo itself. It was safest to make one’s whoops at the entrances, so there was opportunity for a clean escape if you might have to outrun a railway guard.

The tunnel ended at a steep stairway that led to the train platform and the REA freight building. REA was always a scene of hurried and noisy activity as boxes and crates were being hustled about on flatcars. I liked to read the labels of the crates headed off to Denver, Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Kansas City. These were places I would never likely visit but had visions about from hearing stories of the great cities of America. I thought…if I could catch the agent looking the other way, I could crawl inside a crate and then be unwrapped in say, Chicago. Then I realized what would likely become the headline:

“Shipment of Rat Poison Arrives with Texas Stowaway. Parents Enroute to Reclaim Corpse”

On Saturdays I used my twenty-five-cent allowance to spend the day at the Lynn Theatre. The Lynn was the more affordable venue, sans the fancy statues, patterned carpets, and velvet ropes that adorned the upscale Paramount. But the Lynn was preferred for other reasons. It had twice the serials, twice the cartoons, and always a double feature. After the first showing, it all rewound. No one came to chase me out, so I sometimes sat through half the second session. The admission price of nine cents left plenty of change for popcorn, a drink, and a Holloway All-Day, the sucker that took three or four matinees to consume. Seasoned All-Day fans knew to save the wax paper because it would be needed to rewrap the sucker as some point in its half-life. The tongue can only weather so much torture, even the sugary kind.

On this Saturday I emerged from the Lynn to find it was already dark. For once I didn’t have to shutter my eyes to adjust to the sudden shock of sunlight. Washington Street was moist from a rare summer rain and the glisten of headlights from passing cars made it look like a sheet of ice. A light breeze stirred the dry leaves on the trees and some of them startled me as they blew across my path. The rain had not been enough to soften their crispness, dried by weeks of summer drought.

I made my way down Washington with a growing apprehension. Most of the streetlights had bulbs missing, casualties of rock-tossing vandals. Twice I stumbled and nearly fell as my toe caught uneven joints in the concrete sidewalk. Then a cat ran across my path. Was it black, or just black from night? I preferred the latter. It wasn’t a time to admit to a true black cat.

Washington Street ended at the Ginocchio Hotel, next to the entrance to the tunnel. I found the row of stores beneath the hotel canopy shuttered and dark. There were lights in the Hotel itself, reassuring me that there was still some life form somewhere. It’s odd how the immediate circumstances had erased any desire to whoop into the tunnel opening. Just the opposite; my concern was how to walk the distance without my shoe taps giving me away to whatever lurked in those cold sweaty confines. For once I questioned the sensibility of shoe taps. My uncle told me that taps doubled a shoe’s heel life, and that their smart clack on the concrete added style and class to one’s gait. But here they were, disclosing my presence like someone patting the metal rim of a snare drum. I stopped and unlaced my shoes. I tied the laces together and swung the shoes around my neck so my arms and hands would be unencumbered for mortal combat.

I walked in inches, listening intently for any sounds. There was only the measured beat of water dripping from somewhere deep in the cavern. My imagination flew back to the Flash Gordon serial I had watched only an hour ago. Featured in the film was Gordon’s archenemy Ming, a demon who wore a black cape having a funnel neckline. But the apparitions I feared most from that same serial were the Clay Men. These characters were molded into the walls of the caves, unseen until it was too late. Never mind that these tunnel walls were tile. I knew that tile was clay, and that was that.

With now soggy socks, I neared the ticket booth and notions stand which marked the halfway point. In the dim light I could see that everything was closed for the day. I thought…aren’t there any night trains running anymore? I was sure that trains didn’t just pull over and park on the shoulder at night.

Ten steps later I stopped cold. I heard footsteps. In the echo I couldn’t tell if they were from behind or in front of me. If behind, I must quicken my pace, but if in front, I would only be hastening a confrontation. I listened. They were in front of me! It was the heavy clunk of hard boots. No night train disembarking here. No reason anyone would be coming down here from the tracks. My heart began to beat louder than the man’s boots. I pressed myself up against the tiled wall at a place where a large pipe passed down. I tried to hold my breath and close my eyes. But I cheated with one eye opened to a small slit. It would be better to see the blow coming.

Suddenly I saw the man silhouetted against the light from the REA docks. He was a hulk of a figure, his arms swinging low like those of an ape. I closed my eyes and tightened them down as if turning a vice. His boots stopped right in front of me. Suddenly I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was as large as a baseball mitt.

“Laddie!” A voice said sternly, rolling its vowels and consonants down the tunnel like a bowling ball.

I opened my eyes to stare into those of my Uncle SB. I collapsed into his tummy.

“We got worried. Mommie Moore has supper ready and it’s not like you to be out after dark. Get them shoes on and let’s go home before everything gets cold. We got fried bologna and good homemade chili.”

As we walked toward the stairs I heard noises behind me. It sounded like something wet and squishy was moving about in the darkness.

Clay men were mushing out from the walls—likely sore over missing their own supper.

A Leave From Absence

2006-05-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a pet’s name doesn’t sink in, doesn’t take. I read once that pets, especially dogs, can best learn their name if it contains two distinct syllables. Perhaps thus was spawned Fi-do and Fi-fi. So when we tagged our animal-shelter survivor as “Cosmo Topper Puppy Moore,” his moniker was doomed from the beginning. He learned the “Puppy” part, and the rest of his label seemed to fall on peanut-buttered ears. So “Puppy” it became.

Puppy was epileptic. We didn’t know dogs could be, but yes, the recurring seizures are not unlike those of their human friends. But he lived beyond his odds, finally giving in to the toll at age fifteen. Owners all know that the loss of a pet exacts a predictable reaction:

“That’s it,” I said. “No more dogs. I never want another. I can’t go through that pain again.” A bear hug from my wife Kay signaled that she felt the same.

For eight years, we were satisfied with our lone housecat, “Read-‘Em-a-Clipping News Carver Moore.” Knowing that cats only answer to kitty-kitty—and only if they choose to—we had deliberately splurged on his name.

One Saturday afternoon, at a large outdoor bazaar near Dallas, we saw signs directing visitors to “Pet Island.” I thought… petting zoo? Let’s check that out. Instead, it was a pet marketplace, where vendors and breeders came together in a truer sort of “flea” market. It had a festival atmosphere, complete with clowns and characters dressed in stuffed-animal attire. There was Winnie the Poo, Tigger, some sports-team mascots, and a couple of gigantic pullets flapping about, unable to take wing. I also recognized the celebrity Smokey Bear, apparently on fire-holiday thanks to recent rains. All these frolicking critters were handing out animal crackers to the children.

“It’s just Disney-like hypnosis—a marketing gimmick for the kids out here,” I muttered cynically.

We strolled past pens and containers with boas, miniature goats, and pot-bellied pigs—the “desperation” choices for pet lovers, or at least intended for folks more adventurous than me. Then I saw the picket fence, with an ivy-covered gate labeled “Man’s-Best-Friend Resort.” My thoughts raced back to Puppy Moore, and I tarried at the entrance. Just out of sight, I could hear the joyful mingle of excited yelps and shrieks of joy from small children. It would be a mistake to enter here.

Kay touched my arm softly, beckoning me on with welled eyes. We moved through the gate together, as if facing up to some intentionally delayed appointment.

This was not ordinary puppy-mill territory. AKC professional kennels and regal-sounding breeder farms dotted both sides of a cedar-shavings walkway. It was a red-carpet welcome. No hawking of wares, no carnival hucksterism. Instead, it was a best-behavior collection of well-groomed and coiffed animals—with masters to match.

“The Rocking-A Kennel” caught my eye. Their breed line was the Australian Shepherd. For me it was a first introduction, as I had never met an “Aussie.” From the rack, I browsed their pamphlets about the coloration differences; blue, and red merle. With faces less sharp than Lassie’s, the adults nonetheless showed strains of Collie or maybe Border Collie, but with the odd ending of a bobbed-tail. I was impressed with what appeared to be a perfect blend of strength and poise. I was also mystified by their eyes—one gold and one blue.

The parents of the litter were being presented to the public in royalty fashion. They were lounged on a spread of artificial turf, almost engulfed by an amphitheatre of trophies and ribbons.

“Sire Tommie-On-Cudgegong and Dame Rachel Wurnshire-Heather,” the sign said. So much for simple two-syllable names, I thought. “Cosmo Topper Puppy Moore” suddenly seemed quite sensible.

Next to this pedigree-castle sat a child’s playpen. Inside were the princes and princesses of the Crown. As we leaned into the enclosure, our faces must have looked like Halloween lanterns beaming from above. As each of the four puppies stared up with cocked heads, one scrambled toward us from the farthest corner. He reared up on hind legs and strained toward my nose with all his power. As he got close, I swear I heard something of a whisper from him…”Pick me!” There. I heard it again. “Pick me,” the voice said, this time with emphasis.

I plucked him from the playpen and held him to my chest. He was the size of a child’s football, mostly fur, with a red tongue darting in and out. His whimper spoke louder than any car-salesman’s wail. There was no putting him back. I paid the price without even haggling—shooing away the checkbook sentinel who had so rudely reminded me that my first house payment wasn’t this much.

On the ride home, we agreed to call him “Quigley,” after the character in the Australian-setting television show. From that first day, he has validated the wisdom of our selection many times. I have marveled at his innate kindness and intelligence, his remarkable obedience, and his penchant for wanting to “herd” anything that moves, including the occasional errant dust-bunny.

Raising pets, like rearing children, is the great educator. Profiting from experience, Kay and I had agreed on certain strict house-pet rules. Quickly it became evident that our concerns had been unnecessary. His potty and furniture training tasks were mastered so quickly that our home soon became free range.

We have learned that the more time we spend with Quigley, the more he is able to reveal his intelligence. We were especially struck by his ability to accurately identify each of his four rubber chew-toys. They are the same size and shape, differing only in their colors.

“Get your red one,” I say, showing off to friends.

“Now go find your black one.” It works every time.

My friends all maintain that dogs are color blind. My Internet searches have supported that notion. I don’t claim to understand it. All I know is when I say, “Quigley, go get your yellow one,” he does. So I just accept it as a wonderful gift and constantly search the pet stores for new colors to add to his palette.

I have never read a book about Aussies. I have learned about Quigley by observing and interacting. I can cup his face in my palms, lock his eyes with mine, and see far into his soul. I can sense in those moments he is returning the favor. In times of laughter his wag signals that he gets the joke. In distress or sorrow his nuzzle assures us he understands. If we leave the house without him, he welcomes us back with frenzied murmurs and frantic smooches. Competing for those special rushes of attention, my wife and I may be heard to whisper…

“Pick me.”

* * *

© Copyright 2006 by the author, Lad Moore
"Quigley" (The Quig) is now eight, and is my constant companion on the farm and woods trails.

birthright

2006-05-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

My father’s work as a daredevil aviator and soldier of fortune called him to strange places around the world. His cable address, Tailwind, best summed up his spirit, and best portrayed how I remember him. He was forever rushing away, and my recollections of him are limited to the six short years we lived together.

My favorite picture of my dad is the one in front of the Great Pyramids, wearing a fez and a crisp khaki uniform with an abundance of pockets on it. In the photo I can see a frozen swirl of dust behind him, and can almost hear the sound of the wind squeaking across the hot sand. I know that the smile on his face is fleeting—not lasting beyond the click of the camera shutter. I know that because in all my memories of him, I never recall him smiling or laughing. He was a terribly serious man, and his life was as hurried as his death at age 41.

In the time we lived and traveled together, I sailed the world on a freighter, visited dozens of exotic ports of call, and completed shipboard studies under the tutelage of a self-proclaimed Russian Prince. We lived in many lands, among them Burma, India, and Indonesia. Despite those countries’ differences, there was a strange sameness to them all. I found that the land and people were similarly humble, and Americans were viewed with an awe that was almost reverent. That awe is seemingly lost today, as Americans have somehow managed to become objects of scorn in lands that were once hospitable.

When I left to journey with my father to Asia, the Ladies Circle at our church gave me a Scofield Bible to take along. The church bulletin noted the event with the words, “May God’s hand go with this young man as he travels to far-off Bandung, where there is no Presbyterian Church.” The bulletin was right about the scarcity of organized religion, but we held our own services on Sunday evenings anyway. We met on the veranda of our home, a white stucco house with an orange tile roof in a dense mango grove. Many of the families of pilots who flew with my father came to the service, and there was no particular leader.

Like all other aspects of life in Indonesia, my religious exposure was crude and sometimes a little off the mark. Often we just held prayer and then watched westerns—films rented from a subscription service in the States. Other times we read scriptures together then adjourned for a sat¾ barbecue, a peanut-sauce kabob of ox meat and vegetables. The Baptists who came sometimes complained that the services were more celebratory than worshipful.

In my years of travel, I saw many of the great treasures of our world and its numerous natural and man-made wonders. But nothing I saw made my heart beat more furiously than the day we returned to New York Harbor. As the ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty, I recall standing on the deck and thanking God for my safe passage, then whispering the Pledge of Allegiance through the lump that almost blocked my airway. The cool spray of salt water crashing off the ship’s bow was like a fresh baptism to me. I had been away so long that familiar sights were like first-time discoveries. I thought…my how that statue must have looked to the hopeful immigrants who made this trip before me.

I was fourteen when my father died, and once again I returned to the quiet streets and neighborhoods of Marshall, Texas. I found the comforting things still there—the fireflies at night, the red glow in the sky from the rooftop sign on the Hotel Marshall, and the pew at First Presbyterian with our family name on it. It came to me that coming home is the best part of being away.

Despite the pressures and doubts we now feel so keenly, being an American is still the reward from our founders who proclaimed we were “One Nation Under God.”

There’s a saying that describes just how we Americans are blessed:

“We started life on third base, and we didn’t hit a triple.”

* * *

Image used by license. Image (C) by Sax, Dreamstime

Of Dixie Cups

2006-04-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

Nickels were seldom—hard wages of toil.
Held as trophies; buffed upon shirtsleeves.
Never risked for marble gaming,
Always spent with careful pause.

Held to my eye—closer—closer still,
This tiny coin could hide the sun.
If tossed toward sky to roll and tumble,
Returned as chief, or buffalo.

Tempt me now the nickel cup—
this silky cream creation?
An elixir crafted for summer heat
To heal and chill my thistled throat.

The treat is spent, the cardboard clean.
This lid has masked exciting finds.
Now show me stars and prairie gods,
I save the heroes all.

I place them with my arrow points
And books of stamps vast worlds away.
Treasure troves beneath the bed,
The place where all my secrets live.

Among these faces I hold ten aside.
Each likeness same—this Shelley Winters.
I think my mama looked like she.

Best as I recalled.

Something to Be Said

2006-03-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

I love small towns. They make me feel so far removed from the awful events of Iraq and world terror. Small towns give me recess from anguish—I suppose because the pace is slow and the volume low.

Yesterday I prepared three manuscripts to mail internationally. Two were going to Canada, and one to the United Kingdom. All three required a return envelope with International Reply Coupons. I went to the local post office to obtain the coupons and finish the mailings.

US Post Office, Woodlawn TX, Population 283

The local postmistress greeted me with a wide arching wave—a colloquial howdy. She was eating a Snickers candy bar while Judge Judy screamed at a defendant on the television.

“International what? I don’t recall ever having such,” she said. “What in creation would you do with one?”

I explained their purpose.

“Guess we’ve never had a call for one,” she said. You better try over to the Jefferson office. But mind you they close at four.” My watch read 3:20 PM.

US Post Office, Jefferson TX, Population 1,864

I arrived at 3:49--breathing hard from trotting through the parking lot with my parcels.

The clerk was a stout woman of about fifty, and she began to drum her fingers on the counter as I explained what I needed. Her level of attentiveness seemed compromised as she examined me over the rims of her glasses.

“I’ve heard of those,” she said. She turned to another clerk in the adjacent cubicle.

“Carl! Don’t we have those foreign return things?” I could see that Carl’s wheels were turning.

“I think they’re those yellow slips in the safe.” Carl had a curious task of his own. He was artistically arranging a row of stamps on a tubular package big enough to contain a set of water skis.

“Get one of them out and show it to him.” Although Carl was mostly obscured by the large tube, one arm ventured out and pointed toward the safe.

The woman disappeared through a plastic hanging curtain—the kind that lift trucks part and pass through. She returned a few minutes later, rubbing the coupon on her sleeve so as to slick it up.

“Is this it? This old thing? Look at all those funny words on it. Is that French, or what?” She turned away, shouting over the partition that was plastered with faded wanted posters.

“Carl! This thing is marked $1.05. Is that an old price? Is that what we still charge?

She looked down at me reassuringly, with the kindness of a doting aunt.

“I think foreign postage may have gone up a smidgen,” she warned, trying to prepare me for the dime or quarter hike that Carl was likely contemplating.

“Sell it for the $1.05 if he wants it, I don’t know the price.”

With the water ski box now on the outbound conveyor, Carl took over the woman’s counter position.

“Okay, next customer," he said, straining on his tiptoes to see over my head. He motioned me to the side, waving his hand briskly as if fanning a campfire.“Oh! Sorry,” I said, feeling a bit humbled. I moved to the far end of the counter amidst furrowed frowns and curious stares from the patrons.

“How many of these do you want?” The woman asked.“I’ll need three of them,” I said. Once again she disappeared behind the lift truck curtain. “No, wait,” I shouted. “Better give me six, so next time I won’t have to drive over here. They don’t have them in Woodlawn.”
She emerged from the safe room, once again buffing the coupons on her sleeve.

“I guess they’ve been locked up in there all this time, but I could only find two. I suppose you can have them both, and then we’ll be done with them.” I took her remark to mean there would be no restocking of the safe.

I carefully thought about which two of the packages should get the coupons. I decided that the third recipient would have to be happy with cash, and I placed a dollar and a nickel inside the one destined for the UK. Maybe the person opening the package would note my Woodlawn return address and somehow forgive my decision.

I chose the UK destination because I know that Tony Blair and those folks are among our only remaining friends.

* * *
(C) Copyright 2006 by the author. Illustration by license from the photographer, Bradley I. Marlow

Brothers Grim

2006-03-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

There’s a mother’s wish as each child is born.

"It’s more than a wish, it’s a prayer," Mama once said. “As my boys grow up Lord, please make everything all right.”

”Mo” Maurice, 1915-1956

“Mother said there was something special about being a Texan—something rich. She was right—I made good. I followed my aviator dreams, soldier-of-fortune-style. I made more money in one month flying airplanes in Burma and Indonesia than most people made in a year. My cable address was "Tailwind"—so named for my adventurous spirit.

I made my circle of intrigue complete when I married Annie, a Chinese airline stewardess I met over a 12-hour joust with vodka gimlets. We were quite the stir when we returned to East Texas on visits.

One Sunday Annie wore a jade green dress to church. It had tiny silver dragons embroidered all over it, and was slit way up past her thigh on one side. Preacher Langston at First Presbyterian politely asked us not to come back.

Eventually Annie took me for everything—while I wasn't looking. I was distracted by a different dragon—a quart of booze a day. That Amber River drowned me at age 41. It's funny—I always worried about dying in a crumpled cockpit in a rice field. Mama warned me about liquor, but I got hooked from the beginning.”

"Boots" Mitch Bonham, 1918-1962

“When I got out of the Navy I chased after the sawdust that coursed my veins. I wanted to be a showman. I started with two trained bears and ended up with one of the largest circuses in the South. Doctors kept telling me my hobbling back pain was just a calcium deposit. It wasn't.

In '62, I rode a rented Cadillac to Showmen's Rest. I guess I squandered my deathbed words by saying how "the show must go on." I said it because the words seemed so noble—a ringmaster's epitaph. As my family evaporated in that haze, I could tell they wanted to hear something else but by then my words had trailed off.

Well, the circus didn't go on. It folded. I knew my greedy sons-a-bitchin’ partners couldn't run it. They never understood. They thought the circus was only about the money thing.”

"Penny" Eddie Branch Jr., 1920-1980

“I read someplace that if a person got tagged with the name "Jr." he would spend the rest of his life chasing a ghost. I got tired of such an elusive legacy at age fifteen and ran away from home.

Then I lied about my age and sneaked into the Army. I was stationed in Germany and married a woman I met in a bar. For my honeymoon, I went AWOL and stayed drunk for fifteen days. One night the MP’s spotted me going into a liquor store and I got grabbed. I was shipped off to Fort Leavenworth Army prison. It was there they discovered my true age, and I got a dishonorable discharge for all my sins. I have no idea what happened to Jeanette, my German bride.

I ended up back home only to figure out I was really meant to roam. I left again and my friend Lootie Rainwater went with me. We hopped on and off trains heading no place in particular.

One wet morning his hand slipped from mine and he fell to the track. The train cut off his leg.

After that, Lootie and I drank together every day for the next twenty-four years. We took our naps in New Orleans' gutters—marinating in sweet-and-sour slime. We eventually hocked Lootie's wooden leg for four pints and forgot what pawn we left it in. After that Lootie just propped himself against me until he died.

You know what? All we ever wanted was to find our river of gold. It would be a happy stream—where honey poured, not Ancient Age.”

“Clipper” Archie Wilbur, 1926-1960

“I was little in more than name. I was the youngest and smallest—some said puny. Maybe that is what attracted me to the Marine Corps, where attainment of rank is the great equalizer.

When I mustered out I saved enough money to start my own business. I bought a Standard Coffee route and made deliveries from Marshall, Texas to near Little Rock. I got tired of the road and went to work as a repairman at the local Pontiac dealer. I learned everything about body shop work and opened my own place. It did good.

When I was 34 I returned from a two-week vacation in Arkansas. My wife and I were looking over snapshots from the trip. Suddenly something like a giant vise grabbed my chest. I felt my eyes bulging out of their sockets as I crumpled to the floor.

Therefore, since I've now experienced something everybody wants to know about, here's the secret: Death is a feeling just like when TV signs off at night. There is the National Anthem and an Air Force fly-over. Then there is that annoying hissing noise coming from a snowy screen.

I hope you suckers ain’t counting on more than that, because that’s all there is.”

***

The Time I Might’ve Got Croaked

2006-03-02T14:14:00.000-08:00

All cotton ain’t candy.

There was ample lore surrounding Caddo Lake in deep East Texas. The dark glades and the mossy tapestries draped from the trees made it humbling, and oddly a bit reverent. Some of the folks there believed that to be “saved,” in the non-spiritual sense, it was necessary to remove the “City” from the “Boy”. There were many acceptable ways to do that, including bloodletting by pond leeches, or wading thigh-deep through Alligator Pass in the dark of the moon. Oh—and there was one other way.

My friend Turk Henry was a river rat of the sixth degree, having been raised by fifth-generation Caddo people, and having actually attended Karnack public schools. Karnack Texas was the celebrated home of Lady Bird Johnson, even before she was anybody but T.J. Taylor’s daughter. T.J. operated a general store in Karnack, with a no-nonsense advertisement above the door that proclaimed him “Dealer in Everything”. Other than T.J.’s store, the only other asterisk on Karnack’s dot on the map belonged to its Army Ammunition Depot, which probably placed the town on every Soviet spy map as well.
Turk’s life was the river, and his sport was to harvest its bullfrogs. Slay Henry, Turk’s dad, kept a number of flat bottom boats resting on the bank under the house. Warped and bent from countless forays against cypress knees, each boat had been given a name, so that Slay could properly identify each member of his little fleet. “In case they get stole,” he said. Of the four boats, “Old Yellaw” was Turk’s favorite, because of its “shaller draft.”

One day the two of us were sitting in Old Yellaw, which was beached beside the house. Turk’s dad stepped out on the porch, and sensing that we might be bored, offered up an idea.

“Turk, take the City Boy gigging. Them Pine Island swamp gasses puts off a certain-teed tonic of purification.” With that, he spat tobacco into the water and mumbled his way back into the house. Except for the “City Boy” label, I was delighted with the suggestion. Being invited to go with Turk on a frog gig was like being asked to the prom by the head twirler.

“Be here at eleven tomorrow night,” Turk said. He too spat into the water as he went inside.

The next night, I showed up at the agreed hour wearing dark clothes and new knee-high rubber boots as instructed. Turk had someone with him, and they were loading things into “Yellaw.”

“First things first.” Turk said. He pointed me to a chair that was glowing yellow from the oil lantern hanging above it. I sat in it, feeling a bit like a courtroom spectator.

“This here is Boze Smitherman,” Turk said, pointing to the stranger. “Boze always gigs with me. He’s the oarsman.” I gave Boze the traditional Southern chin-bob, that head-motion that replaces spoken greetings. He gave me the chin-bob back. It meant that we were now lifelong friends.

Turk began. “Okay, Frog 101. Two things you gotta learn.” As Turk spoke, Boze moved back into the darkness, and resumed his preparations.

Turk continued. “Dead silence is the rule. Frogs have little Doppler radar units on both sides of their head. They are little acoustic membranes shaped like kettledrum covers, and they are so sensitive they can tell if you are even thinking about making noise. Secondly, frogs are equipped with little shooters. They squirt when you grab them, and can shoot their stream at very precise angles—your eye, or worse, your mouth. And guess what? It ain’t river water they’re squirting.”

Having been trained in the two essential lessons for the night, we piled into old Yellaw and pushed off. Our job descriptions were simple. Turk did the gigging from the prow; I did the sacking in the middle seat, and Boze skulled the boat from the rear. As we moved down the channel into Pine Island Slough, both of them warned me one last time about noise. There was to be nothing but whispered conversation beyond this point. As we slid silently through the darkness, I held tightly to the burlap sack, choking its neck as if it already contained a mess of bullfrogs.

We tacked left and right across the slough. Boze seemed to know the perfect route to avoid the random cypress knees. The sounds of midnight became increasingly loud as we navigated through Pine Island, and surrounding us on all sides were the hoarse grrroats of big bullfrogs. Like a choir director, Turk seemed to sense which frog’s sound belonged where.

“Big one over here,” he whispered, gesturing a few degrees to the right. Boze adjusted the direction and we headed straight to the bank. Suddenly, Turk’s flashlight broke the ink of night, and my eyes transfixed on its beam. With a smooth jab, we had our first frog. The handoff went smoothly, and I stuffed the big bullfrog into the sack.

Boze turned the boat to the left, following Turk’s extended arm. “Double-ups,” he whispered. Frog-101 had not explained “double-ups,” but I figured I might need both hands. Turk made two quick thrusts with the gig, and produced two especially large frogs. I was impressed.

The shore was becoming thick with cypress and overhanging bayberry bushes. As we passed underneath vines and brush, Spanish moss flowed over me, trailing across my face and arms like parting cobweb curtains. I began to worry about ticks, because Spanish moss is said to be a favorite breeding ground for deer ticks. Mosquitoes were feasting on my arms and neck, but I did not dare slap at them for fear of making a sound. Just as we passed beneath a large river birch, I heard a mushy thud. It was a dead sort of sound, like somebody dumped a shovel of wet sand into the boat.

“Shhhh!” Whispered Boze. “Keep your boots along the side of the boat, so you won’t kick the rib.”

“Wasn’t me,” I whispered back.

Turk turned his light to the bottom of the boat, first checking the gunwale ribs, then the keel line on the floor. Had we breached the bottom on a cypress knee? Suddenly Turk’s light froze on an object that looked like a radiator hose from a ’57 Chevy. In that soft yellow light, even I knew what was lying there. An old rule of the river flew through my brain: “Any fat object dropping into your boat at midnight is most assuredly a Cottonmouth Moccasin.” To my dismay, he was heading for sanctuary under my burlap sack.

“Moccasin!” I shouted. In more panic than reason, I tossed the burlap sack overboard. The snake immediately coiled in revenge for my having removed his intended refuge. My rubber boots were now only inches away, and certainly a foot shorter than I wish I had bought. Questions were cascading through my brain. Does light blind a snake like it does a frog? Is it true they can strike three times their length? When you slash and suck out the poison, what if you have a cavity in your tooth? I began to regret skipping my last dental appointment with Dr Pierpoint.

Suddenly the world’s tardy bell went off. Turk began beating at the snake with the frog gig, and Boze likewise with his boat paddle. They were flailing the boat bottom like fan blades. We were rocking and pitching wildly, and the flashlight rolled back and forth across the floor like a dance-hall strobe.

Then, with a lucky stab, Turk speared the snake. It coiled quickly around the gig, and I was able to grab the flashlight. Turk heaved the snake-wrapped gig toward the lake. It sailed away like a track-meet javelin. Turk grabbed the light from my hand and shined it around the inside of the boat.

“Look for another one,” he said. “Sometimes at night they twist around each other like black licorice.” I never liked licorice, but only now realized why.

Satisfied that nobody had been bitten and the snake was a loner, Boze pushed us back into the main part of the slough.

The journey back seemed to take hours, and I spent it in prayers of thanks. Like a pulsating star, the dim light of Pine Island Pier soon cut through the night. Its glow represented the warmest welcome I ever recall. I knew that just past the pier was Turk’s house, safe above the water on its ten-foot stilts.

Yep, there’s lots of religion in the swamp.

* * *

© Copyright 2005 by the author, Lad Moore
Illustration (C) Copyright by the artist, Jim Jurica. Used by license.

Freezer Burn

2006-02-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

Ours was a tight little group, huddled together by like circumstance. Our employer had made the decision to open a branch manufacturing plant in a small Georgia city. Ten of us were picked to do the start-up, each bringing a specific expertise to the new location. Among the group were three special friends. There was Hal, who would run the maintenance shop, James the Customer Service expert, and Rick the Accountant.

I respected them all, but especially Rick. More than once he displayed his command of the books, often pulling long hours to close out month-end results. He was classic stereotype accountant---bespectacled, plastic pocket protector, and an annoying practice of using a jumbo paper clip as his necktie clasp. His appearance may have been comedic, but his prowess with numbers was without equal. The crew lovingly referred to his ability to polish financial statements as “Magic Beans.” He could walk the accounting tightrope without a net, knowing exactly how to win without cheating.

In the tradition of the old barn-raisings of the colonial past, all of us showed up to help one another when the moving vans arrived. Like a colony of ants, we unpacked boxes, set up furniture, and put the new household together in a fury of muscle power. It was both a ritual of welcoming and sharing, and a good reason to break out a cooler of beer when the task was over.

Rick’s arrival was no different. Eight of us showed up to greet the van. It was a full load, owing to the fact that Rick’s wife Mollie was an interior decorator. The house was filled with period pieces of museum quality and accessories handpicked from her buying trips. While we unloaded and unpacked, Rick busied himself with handyman chores. It was truly out of character to see Rick with tools in his hand. He didn’t fit the image of someone who knew a bolt from a screw. But there he was, wearing a nail apron filled with the essentials—hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches, and the like.

On a trip through the kitchen, I saw Rick on the floor, half his body hidden under the kitchen sink counter.

“What’s up?” I asked. I could hear some clanking of tools, and Rick uttering some four-letter words.

“Icemaker,” he muttered. “There’s no connection pipe down here. I’m going to have to tap into the cold water line and put in a valve.”

“Maybe you need Hal,” I offered, thinking to myself that this was more of a job for someone with maintenance skills.

“Nope, doing just fine,” he said, “Just save a cold beer for me. We’re gonna be able to freshen that chest with some new ice real soon.”

The crew went on with its work. Several times we passed through the kitchen, noting that Rick’s jeans had slipped down to the point that his rear end was all smile. It was shiny with sweat.

We were finished. Mollie unpacked some Ritz crackers and a jar of cheese spread, and the crew assembled in the den to attack the beer cooler. The early arrivals got the chairs and the rest of us sat on the fireplace hearth. The sofa was piled high with lampshade boxes.

Rick joined us, wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Ice real soon,” he announced.

Hal wanted the technical details. “What sort of valve was that you put on?”

“One of those clamp-on kind—you know, the type that has a prong that pierces the pipe as you tighten it up. I tied it in on 3/8-inch copper.”

“3/8-inch copper on a water line?” Hal asked. “That’s odd, cold water lines are normally half-inch.

“3/8” said Rick, “3/8 valve with a rubber gasket. It’s not leaking a drop.”

One of the guys wanted to watch a NASCAR race, so we connected the TV at the most convenient cable outlet. Maybe an hour and two six-packs passed before IT happened.

In a mighty explosion, the house shuddered on its foundation. A tremendous fireball shot out across the back yard, and dense black smoke poured out of the kitchen into the den. But as abruptly as it blew, it was over. There was no lingering fire or aftershock. Hal and I stuck our heads around the corner of the den. The refrigerator and part of the kitchen wall lay in the back yard, and the freezer door was missing altogether. Inside, the kitchen wallpaper and curtains were crispy black. A gentle breeze from outside rippled through the charred opening.

The rest of the crew came into the kitchen, all wondering what had happened, yet happy that no one was even slightly injured. Molly’s mouth dropped open when she saw her prized Jenn Air lying warped and crumpled in the azalea bed.

Hal did the investigation. Given the path of destruction, it seemed likely that the explosion came from behind the refrigerator. A dangling icemaker line was all that remained of that section of the wall. Under the sink, Hal was closing a valve with a wrench. In so doing, he made the discovery:

“Rick my man,” he said, “3/8-inch is usually natural gas, not water. You tapped into the counter-top burner line. The freezer compartment got packed with gas, and the icemaker motor provided the spark.”

Among the crowd in the kitchen, widening grins began to replace concerned frowns. Rick’s face was as red as the now-near azaleas.

He made us swear on the Bible we would never tell this story. I said I wouldn’t.

I reckon I backslid.

# # #

(C) Copyright 2003 by the author, Lad Moore. All rights reserved.
Image used by license. (C) Jenny Solomon, Photographer.

Breakfast Date

2006-02-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Breakfast Date

Pipe music sprayed from a yellow grate above me,
painted so from years of bacon mist.
Sounds played hastily so I would not linger.
Hands overfilled my coffee cup—the napkin dam breached.
Those detergent-poor fingers—ringed with chrome
to masquerade scars from flame’s saliva.
Red hands connecting arms with wadded hairs—
Seared so from years of eggs over easy.
Beyond scarred elbows I could not see—
Do abused arms end beyond chambray sleeves?
My eyes not rising above my chest—they are fixed on menu lines
that speak so eloquently of Pigs Inside Blankets.

Coffee stirred with pen swirl like rings of summer typhoons.
Waterspouts reaching for truth beneath grounds,
finding but Lennox China as its dead-end tale.
An arm bumped my chair—streaming coffee beside the ribbon of my tie.
'Twas but a hurried man—mud caked boots stamping mosaic prints
in paint that was Friday’s catsup.

No. Miss Helen would not be here by this hour—Nor any other tick of twelve.
I am vacant. Like those times I waited before—when my answer machine lied.

* * *

"Breakfast Date" is a winner of Hawkeye Publishing's Wordhammer Award
(C) Copyright 2001 by the author, Lad Moore

The Bottom of the Top

2006-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Fifty years have passed, but my mind’s eye has archived such
scenes as these on ageless film.

* * *

For a time long ago, I was part of the Great American Show, with its shimmer of beaded costumes and array of crimson smiles. My memory still replays a kaleidoscope of those summer days of pomp and glitter—a curious time when shrieks of joy from small children could be followed by tears of dismay when it came time for the final bow.

I am not prepared for what sits before me in this weedy brown pasture—these hulks of silence that once shouted out such grandeur. It is the circus bone yard—a parking lot for the last parade of the last season. It is a place where truths are exposed, as if the darkest mysteries have suddenly been flooded by sunlight. In this field, all the splash and splendor of a grand thing have been unclothed to reveal common undergarments of grey. I taste the cruelty of a sadness I never sought—much like one’s discovery that the secret of magic lies in deceit, or that bright paint is often used to mask rot.

The memory of wet hay mingled with cotton candy can still kindle my senses and liven my heartbeat. That memory is blasphemed as I stroll among the carcasses of these once-proud wagons. I sense disbelief—even anger at how this place could own the last day of the Circus Summer. The words on these handsome billboards are chalky and faded, but still they manage to murmur what they once shouted. They were the playbill headlines—“Liveliest Show under the Big Top!” -- “See Jumbo! Largest Pachyderm in Captivity!” Now the place I stand on is stripped of life, save as a flourishing kingdom for wasps and serpents. Inside me swells a protest that such things did not fulfill their promise of infinity. As a child, I believed that circuses would always come—nothing could possibly empty the seats or dispel the glee of people who would wait for months for the show to choose their town. I look around me for those impatient throngs. I see none. There is not so much as an old watchman here to protest this bit of rotting canvas I take.

I close my eyes and listen. That sound! Is it the distant shrill of bleacher butchers barking their wares of cones and popcorn? No, sadly, ‘tis but the tireless Oklahoma wind, twisting through these caverns of steel. When these things were last put away, did someone know their fate? Did someone foretell of this decaying place where once such shiny caravans assembled? Yea, what came of the startling animal sounds—so strange and exotic, yet once such comfort in the sameness of lonely nights in unfamiliar towns?

What is parked here was once much more than these rotted tires and decayed trappings. It once wore a kingly mantle or bowed with a proud curtsy as it moved across the country. It was the delight of all generations who ever witnessed its majesty. Small children cupped their eyes and strained to see to the canvas rooftop, where the daring took flight on narrow trapeze bars. Tiny mouths hung open as a fearless man held court before a pride of snarling cats—each intent on removing his mastery at the first mistake.

Like those vanished sights and sounds, my spangled friends are also gone away, each at home in Showmen’s Rest. There’s a special granite marker there—the ringmaster’s final wave—it reads “Dun Rovin’.” I nod my approval, and leave in silence. A single tear falls, leaving its starburst relief on my dusty boot. I stare at it. Even the boot mark awakens a memory—it has formed the shape of the high wire umbrella.

This field will finally consume what has been placed here, and so too the memories of those once wide-eyed children barely one generation past. Their offspring now sit in robotic trances, servants to their electronic games. Meanwhile, the circus will not be coming to town.

* * *

Editor’s note: The author once trouped with a touring circus in the days when all such shows were under canvas.

© Copyright 2006 by the author, Lad Moore. All rights reserved. Lad’s two collections of short stories, Tailwind, and
Odie Dodie, are available in literary quality paperback through major booksellers, and at Amazon.Com on the Internet.

Start 2006 With a Grin

2005-12-31T09:42:00.000-08:00

A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Citizenship

My friend from Sweden relocated to America and was anxious to begin the process of US citizenship. We traveled into the city, needing to obtain some legal papers from her native country. Near our destination, we stopped to ask for directions. The clerk at the convenience store was smiling and helpful.

“Can you tell us how to get to the Swedish Embassy?” I asked.

Politely and with assurance, the clerk replied: “Which one? There are two of them."

"Two Swedish Embassies? My friend asked, obviously perplexed.

"Yes, Hun," the clerk answered, "But here in Houston they don’t call them Swedish Embassies—they're called Embassy Suites.”

The Tale of Brassie McIe

2005-11-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

“Austere perseverance, harsh and continuous—rarely fails of its purpose, for its
silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.” –Wolfgang von Goethe

It was 1920—a time of “Roaring” plenty for some, but not for all. On what is now the site of a renowned golf course near Austin, Texas, local legend tells of Silas McIe, a poverty-stricken farmer who toiled his land to wring out meager crops of cotton and beans. With a gimpy mule, Silas plowed his acres endlessly, removing the prolific rocks and stones to make way for the blades of the harrow. It was ruthless and disappointing work. The more he dug, the more stones he dislodged. To add insult to his never-ending task, the rocks seemed to re-emerge overnight, and the infrequent dashing rains always revealed more.

The people of the nearby town of Manor thought Silas strange, living alone as he did in the clapboard shack on the edge of the usually dry creek. The house was a weather-forgiving place, its roof nothing more than heavy mesquite thatch and its windows long abandoned of panes. The only proof of life was his candlelight at night, and the always-present wisps of smoke that danced from a crooked chimney pipe.

Unshakable determination was a hallmark of the McIe mystique, and considerable money changed hands when farmers around Manor bet on the success or failure of his crops. Some years he fooled them all, bringing in 20 bales of cotton or more. Other years they saw no crop at all. But there was one thing that they could count on. Every Saturday would be another “Brassie McIe Day”—the nickname given to Silas by his observers.

After good daylight on Saturdays, a number of people from Manor always traveled to the McIe farm, parking their wagons as close to the gate as possible. Silas’crude-lettered sign, “No Trespassing-Even with Permission” blocked any intrusion beyond the gate. Some thought the words were humorous--others believed them ominous, even frightening. For years, the ladies of Manor said old Silas walked the grounds with a shotgun. But “Brassie Day” proved that the “weapon” was not a shotgun at all.

Brassie Day always stirred a festive picnic atmosphere. Town folk sat on wagon sideboards and wooden benches they brought to the site. Families brought covered lunches and the men stuffed extra pouches of their favorite tobacco into their overalls pockets. Folks settled in for a long day, and waited patiently for Brassie to emerge and his “oddity pastime” to begin.

As dependable as daybreak, Brassie always showed. He strode across the field, dressed in knickers and a crumpled cap, with a single golf-iron in his hand. With each swing of the club, a small stone would whiz away, often sounding like the whir of a locust as it sailed through the air. He never missed—one swing, one stone.

It would have been foolish to bet against his aim. The rocks always landed in the creek bed, precisely at the north edge, and all within a ten-foot circle. In time, given his accuracy, the pile of stones formed a mound as high as a man’s waist. It remains there today—a monument to the passionate perseverance of Brassie McIe.

The tale goes on to say that on Saturday August 24, 1929, spectators did not see Brassie at his usual time. After a two-hour wait, two men from town ventured beyond his gate and walked to the little house. After no answer at the door, they went inside. Brassie was there, sitting at a rough-hewn table, with his knickers and hat. His eyes were open but he did not see.

On the wall over the fireplace was a hand-rubbed mesquite plank with forks of deer antlers attached to each end. The antlers served as a kind of cradle for Brassie’s golf iron. The club was crudely made, fashioned from a heavy steel rod. Its grip was wrapped with deer hide worn slick by oily sweat. The clubface was hammered with dimples and grooved from countless encounters with stone.

Affixed to the plank was said to be an inscription, engraved on a shiny copper sheath. It read:

“Oh golf, thou hath stolen my soul.”

* * *
© Copyright 2005 by the author, Lad Moore

Fallen Leaves

2005-11-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

Your Dad Misses You...

Lad Moore III--1965--1999

Fall and the holidays were his favorite time of year. When fortunes brought him home for the Thanksgivings of his last years, it was like reliving the times of his boyhood. The scenes were scripted--Macy's Parade as background noise, Mom in her apron fussing in the kitchen, and a really bad Detroit Lions game on TV. The air would be fresh and crisp, and much of the fall color would still be visible in the leaves that danced around the yard. At halftime we were never too old to go outside and throw the football a few times, but nothing like the days of his youth when he and his brother allowed me to be "all-time quarterback". They cut me this honor because as the years went by, I could not keep up with their deep routes and never was much good at catching the ball. My youngest son would fight to the end against his larger brother, often riding him piggyback into the endzone--that invisible line next to the azalia bed. Sometimes the front of his jeans were moist--a little dribble rather than breaking huddle to go inside to the bathroom. Game over, Lad III would irritate his mother by "testing" the turkey before it was time. He was after the crispy part of the golden skin of an always-perfect bird. This was mom's little irritant--which carried a penalty of a soft pat on the offending hand. At precise timing to the "Amen" of the blessing, Lad claimed one of the drumsticks. He needn't have rushed, because nobody ever fought him over it. After all, who wants to contend with those little sword-like splines when staring at a Butterball breast still bubbling its juices?

After the meal came the second game of a double-header--just in time to ease the stress of an overfilled paunch. Most often Texas played A&M. Mostly A&M lost--unless you count the halftime band performance.

Today I approach very different Thanksgivings. Lad III is gone, as is the Texas/A&M game on TV. My youngest usually can't make it here--there are job and mile issues. Maybe the Lions still play that day--I don't know. But my yard will be empty at halftime. That is, except for the leaves--still full of color, and still scurrying in circles in the crisp fall air.

The Nine Lives of the Inanimate

2005-11-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

I should have kept my Tupperware glasses, even though they were dishwasher-warped and the kids had chewed on their rims—turning the edges into a sort of makeshift dental floss.

* * *

The Channel 12 weatherman said today was the first day of summer. In a sort of impromptu celebratory toast with my cran-apple juice, I raised my glass in tribute. It struck the edge of the kitchen cabinet and slipped from my grasp. The glass soared like a rocket toward my brick floor, despite my flailing for it on its way down. It more than just broke—it imploded—like how they collapse old hotels with dynamite. It was playful glass—the kind that scatters on impact like summer rain on the freshly waxed hood of a car. Pieces scampered to the safety of the braided rug, and others raced for the darkness under the dishwasher vent-thing. More agile fragments mounted dust-bunnies and rode them out of the room.

I swept the kitchen, using the same grid-pattern used to ensure the integrity of archeological digs. Then I vacuumed every square inch, and beat the fiber out of my braided rug with my husband’s tennis racket. Lastly, I mopped—including Q-tipping the baseboards. I made sure the infected sponge head was hermetically bagged and tossed, which was a heroic act of sacrifice in itself. I had to fight a nagging temptation to just rinse off the sponge and give it to my husband for scrubbing out the pickup bed. He would never know, and hey—it’s just a truck for God’s sake. In the end I conceded to honesty. It’s only $2.00, and sometimes the Dollar Store has them 2 for $3.29 with a coupon.

On Sunday I located a surviving sliver of juice glass with the naked heel of my foot. I had fretted one might show itself, but cast aside my fears. After all, the statute of limitations for orphaned glass had comfortably passed—signaling it was safe to go barefoot again. And Muffy had done reconnaissance for me when he went to his food bowl at least six times without even the hint of a limp.

I could feel the glass when I caressed the spot with a loving finger, but I couldn’t see or grasp it. Its pesky little tip retreated like a taunting turtle. Doctors lie when they say that glass will work itself out. It only works itself near. Surgery was clearly indicated.

I poked and probed the spot with a needle until my self-inflicted wounds dwarfed the original injury. Multiple epithets ended the operation without confirming if success had been achieved.

It is now Labor Day. The spot of my summer surgery has hardened into a kernel the size and color of a pencil eraser. It is resistant to even the most aggressive of emery boards. It remains just rough enough to provide the leadership for the first tear in my panty hose.

And it is always first in line to announce that my newest shoes should have been a half-size larger.

# # #