BEAUMONT was a mere 742 miles distant away across the State from El Paso (I was later to live in Connecticut, where my claims of distances in my former abode were largely greeted with disdain, disbelief or scorn) - airline miles that is!- almost the same as Beaumont to Chicago (the road miles are even longer: 953 if you drive - which is how most of us go nowadays..). The land was similar - indeed, almost identical to that of Florida where I am now resident. Hot, swampy, humid air - it rained every morning at six o'clock (regular as rain as the saying has it). There were 'gators, and Palm trees, qumquat bushes, and Cajuns (my new playmates - bye bye Julius...), and mosquitoes in hordes, and sloughs and snakes, and rain (did I mention that?). In two years in El Paso, it never rained once; in Beaumont it rained every day to the tune of nearly 60 inches a year.

A new school chum showed me in a book that only India somewhere exceeded the rain in Beaumont. Sheesh!

We moved into 2490 Liberty Street, only slightly awash, and I was immediately enrolled in Averill Elementary School, a short walking distance away. My home room teacher (I was to learn) was known as "Hatchet Face Hildebrand" - a Geography teacher by training - and I didn't care what the rest of my redneck pals thought, I thought she was great and she told us about Greece, and Rome and the Hellespont and how to find them on maps. Wow! She was no Ms Turkentine, but she would do!

No one knew of my criminal career in West Texas, or my overdue appearance in School Court. I had outfoxed them all!

But best of all was a very pretty, young, redhaired teacher - Mz Somebody - and she taught something called "Nature." The walls of her classroom were lined with glass cases and from behind the glass stuffed owls and critters too numerous to mention looked out on us. I was enthralled with those cases and their animals. Sometimes I would stay behind after class, and just look at them...

Mz Redhead gave a long lecture once on Pericles and how he had a long bun-shaped head with a special war-helmet therefor, and he founded Athens, among other outstanding achievements. (I don't quite know why she was lecturing on Ancient Greece now that I think on it - other than that Naturalists and Scientists (I was later to learn) are often given that which no one else can - or will! - do).

Then we had to write an "essay" on Pericles for her. And which I did.

The next day when class assembled, she seemed in rather an emotional state, and told the class that the "new boy" had written an essay, as required, and she wanted to read some of it to them. I squirmed down in my seat. It was no use... she read the better part of my composition to my classmates. At the end she stood and said that alone among all the papers she had received, the "new boy" was to get an A+++ as his composition "was brilliant."

Then she came down the aisle and took my hand and said "We are going to see Mizz Fanny." By then I already knew that Mizz Fanny was the Principal of Averill. And with no further ado, Mizz Redhead led me down the gloomy old hall to the Principal's Office.

She introduced me to Mizz Fanny and gave a short encomium about my wonderful composition. Mz Fanny was rather old and quite fat and she wore her hair up in circular knots on top of her head - each knot a tighter loop than the one below. She then rose from behind her desk and came over to me and gave me a great big hug and welcomed me to her school and complimented me upon my essay. (It was all very like being kissed by a big, old, fat Aunt I had back up in Colorado...).

But like Tom Jones, not all my school days were so golden. There was 'Rithmetic - ever my Achilles' tendon. It was to turn out that often in my peripatetic educational career, largely gained in the Lonestar cities, that I would have taken one subject twice, let us say (in two different cities) and missed another altogether. A most spotty record and sorry state of affairs.

Thus, I found myself in my new 'Rithmetic Class. It was all rather strange and (as usual!) I was "new boy on the block" - my perpetual role in life, it seems. The class was studying some dark art called "multiplication tables" - though there were no tables visible in the room, which only heightened the mystery of it all. In El Paso, we had covered Addition and Subtraction. For all that I knew, that was it. Nor had we required tables to aid us in this achievement. What was this "Multiplication Tables" thing? I scrunched down in my seat and tried to catch on.

The particular "phase" of Multiplication Tables was called "Six-tum" as near as I could decipher. I had no inkling what it meant. To play, the teacher who sat up front, would hold a flash card in her lap. On this card was emblazoned, say, a "6" and an "x" alongside it. Immediately beneath, was a "5" . Beneath this latter cabbalistic icon was a short line. The teacher would designate some pupil and he or she would dutifully parrot back: "30." If the parrot-back was wrong or not even forthcoming - the teacher turned the card around and Mirableu! - there on the back was printed "30." I had no inkling by what magic all this was worked. Of course, when it came my turn, I blew it. One card after another. Isolated snickers grew into a universal subdued laugh as it dawned on my peers what a dummy they had in their midst! Thus, we went through the "5 tum" tables, then the "4 tum" tables, and the "3 tum" tables. I had not got a single one right. Oh, by the way, the mysterious "tum" is (was back then, anyhow) East Texanese for "time" as in "4 tums 4" equals 16. I had not quite got a grasp on East-Texspeak yet though, so this drawled "tum" was as much a part of the mystery as all the rest. Halfway through my "2 tums" (and not a one right yet!), the teacher lay down the cards in her lap, and said direct to me, "Tell me, Bernard, since you are new to our class (snicker, snicker in background), just how far have you gone in learning your tums tables at your other school?"

Now I'm for it, I thought! Everyone's luck runs out someday! Dang! I was to break my pick it seemed on Third Grade 'Rithmetic in an obscure South Texas town and school. Seizing, however, the moment for all it was worth, and pledging myself to I knew not what dark commitment, I drew myself up and said. "Yes, Maa'm! Mz Jones, Maa'm! And I know my 'one tum' tables! (I had no idea what I was saying, really, but I had to turn this unparalleled disaster around some way).

For a moment, there was a stunned silence - then the class broke out in a roar of laughter! At first, I thought they were laughing with me! I had carried the day! I knew not how or what - but I still had some standing. Then all too quickly it dawned on me they were laughing at me! And so was Mz Jones! A great laughter was had by all. When it subsided, I was told to resume my seat, which I did - very red-faced you understand, and greatly humbled withal.

(I honestly think this one experience here lies at the root of my lifelong distaste and ineptitude for "number." At least for the sensible use and employment of it. Any of it! I will discuss the philosophical fine points with the best of ya - like there are as many even numbers as even numbers plus odd numbers - in an infinite series (unknown to most), and whether or no "number" is "invented" or "discovered" by the human mind, etc. Love that stuff! But whenever I use numbers to get answers, my early struggles with the "Tums Tables" memories of that long ago day in 'Rithmetic Class wipe everything else out...).

We cannot leave Averill School behind without a nod to Orville. Orville was eighteen years old and he was still in third grade. (The rule in Texas in those days was simple: you "stayed behind" till you could "do the work." Period. Be damned to your image, your ego, your later night sweats, twitches and all the rest).

Orville shaved! And he towered over the rest of us. Like a sort of Gulliver, we Lilliputians guided Orville daily out at recess and fought tooth and claw over "whose side" this lumbering giant would be on - sometimes using up the whole recess time in protracted squabbling. Sort of the way Congress operates... Orville's father was a garbage man (many of you probably know this better as "sanitary engineer") Same thing. Same smells. Like Orville's waders. His rubber waders. You see, Orville got up every morning at 4 a.m. to go out on the truck and help his father. In the course of his duties he waded around in garbage juice in the truck bed and this came in time to permeate his waders.

Then he would come to school, you see. With his waders still on. And in time they sort of rotted (and why not?). And when "Hatchet Face Hildebrand" left the room now and then on urgent business of one kind or another, pandemonium would break out. Spit balls flew through the air, girl's pigtails were pulled and dipped in inkwells, and ... Orville would sit in his set way in the back row and break off little bits of rotten rubber from his waders and fling them good-naturedly into the fray! If one were "hit" or even touched by an Orville-ball, it was assumed that all was up, and services would be the following week. At the same time, it was some kind of honor to have been so-hit with an Orville-smelly-ball, and an even greater honor to acquire one, and keep it against some dire future time when renewed hostilities might break out and the "big guns must be rolled up to the line" etc.

Then one day we had an "IQ Test." All must take it: no exceptions. A lot of questions and answers and then (get this!), we exchanged papers and "graded" each other, while the teacher read off the "correct" answers! (I guess Stanford-Binet was yet in its infancy or whatever. In East Texas they do things differently. Always).

Anyhow - I got Orville's paper to grade! My smug self-satisfaction knew no limits as we ran down the list of "correct" answers. As we say today, Orville was 100% nerd and that is all there is to it. Take for instance one question recalled from memory. It went something like this (I must perforce paraphrase, dear reader!).

"Milk is good for you. Milk comes from the friendly cow (why were all cows always "friendly" in our Readers? - no matter: let us move along here). Milk is healthy. Milk is cool. Milk is refreshing for boys and girls".

Now the question:

"What would be a good drink to take on a picnic?"

And this nerd had pencilled in: "limin aide!"

I was horrified! Can anyone really be that dumb? That dense? The teacher intoned: "Number 17 is... Milk!"

Did anyone really need to be convinced that was the answer? Jeezul! My Dad was right after all: this was a land of crackers and rednecks... (And so my early Texas school days finally ground down - and we moved away, ultimately to New England, and ultimately as well, to marriage, a family and jobs in the distant Big Apple...). Then, many decades later - I woke one night from a deep and troubled sleep in my suburban Fairfield County home - now a family man, a man of substance moreover, with an important job (in spite of myself) on Mad Avenue. I sat bolt upright in bed - troubled dreams fleeing down the misty halls of that-which-is-never-to-be-again. My wife Jean turned on the light. "'What is the matter?" she said.

"I don't rightly know", I said. "I was having this dream about when I grew up in Texas you see, and you know what? Orville was right! Orville was right - he has been right all these many years! Dammit! Orville was right, I tell you, and Ms Hildebrand was wrong. They were all wrong! All of them! Why, whoever heard of taking milk on a picnic? "Limin aide" is right! Of course! How come I never saw all this before? Why didn't Ms Hildebrand see? Orville was right after all!

My wife looked at me - sighed - and turned out the light. "I think sometimes - but only sometimes, " she said, "you work too hard is all, Bernard. You need a rest. We all need a rest. Perhaps next week we should run up to the Cape (Cod) with the children and stay a day or two."

I thought: "Fine by me!" - and made a mental note to take a quart of "limin aide" along with us in the back seat...

My constant companion became one Carl Pleasance. Carl was "Cajun extraction" and lived with his older sister and Mother a few blocks away. We were always together and soon a pattern developed: Carl leading the way home and me following as survivor of an endless number of scrapes and adventures. I fell out of trees, I got stung by bees, I was a walking, talking disaster on the way to happen - and Carl, my faithful "Sancho," always ran ahead to tell my parents what to expect. It got so my Dad was always blaming Carl - but that was unfair: Carl was merely a reporter of these untoward affairs: I managed to get into trouble all by myself - a lifetime skill that has diminished but little with time. These escapades ranged from the ridiculous to more serious incidents: for instance, once we found a large pile of fairly fresh cow manure that a truck had dumped by someone's sidewalk for them to spread on their lawn.

We decided to ride our bicycles up and over the pile. Somehow, Carl, who was lighter and smaller than I, managed to zip up and over. But when my turn came, my front wheel bogged down in the pile halfway up, and I flew over the handlebars to land headfirst in the cow pies...

Then we joined the Cub Scouts. A daytime hike stressed we were to "cook our lunch" in the wilds, so Carl brought a pound of bacon and I brought a fry pan. We made our campfire, scout fashion, and were frying away, when I managed to upset the fry pan and poured boiling bacon fat all over my hand (the scar tissue yet shows faintly through the liver spots and other deficiencies of age here on my very hand). Boy - that smarted! My Dad grumbled and shook his newspaper in the other room... "It's that dratted Carl again...".

But matters took an uglier turn one day when Carl and I were zipping down the street on our bikes and did not see a tiny open ditch left by roadworkers clear across the street. Our bike wheels dropped into the ditch and we both went flying over our handlebars (again!) - Carl to land relatively unhurt on hands and knees - I to land front-teeth-first into the ground and break my two front incisors in sort of an inverted "V". Bummer! When I spoke it came out as a lisping sort of whistle...

We walked our bikes home to report the "news." My parents went bonkers. Carl was banished from the premises and bid never to return. My puffed and swollen face was washed and wiped and then in tears Mom told me that "Now you can never go to West Point!" I had no idea what or where West Point was, nor for that matter, that I had been ultimately scheduled to go there. In fact this was never fully explained then or thereafter...since ours was anything but a military family, and no one had ever been in the Service, and it was all the more mysterious when I found out where and what West Point was. I came to the private conclusion that I had somehow despoiled my manhood in some disgraceful way, and would never qualify as an "officer and a gentleman" - neither of which sentences seemed too bad to me anyhow. But my parents carried on and on about disfigurement, a lifetime of dentition troubles and woe which loomed before me - a ruined smile - and the like. For the time being it was the inability to eat corn on the cob or bite an apple that most concerned me.

The dentist restored some sanity. Using celluloid jackets or "caps" he (and a host of others who followed in time) were able to cap the stumps just fine. Every few months they would wear out (or fall out) and I would get new ones. This state of affairs would be up, the dentists said, "when the boy is eighteen," for then his jaw will be fully formed and permanent teeth may be installed. (But this would be quite costly. My Pop so-noted). Well, when I became 18, other matters loomed - such as being drafted into Uncle Sam's Army and sent ultimately to Germany - where ("All in due time, My Pretties! All in due time!") preliminary adult caps were installed one day by an Army dentist out in a dusty, open field station, to the accompaniment of his foot-treadle-driven dill... Thus, though I failed to 'make the cut' for Uncle Sam's splendid military establishment, by 'coming in at the hawse hole' or up through the ranks (to mix my service metaphors a bit here), I did manage to get the Feds to foot the bill for permanent twin incisor replacements.

How ya gonna lose?

And eventually Carl and I were reunited. All's well that ends well.

Once a few years ago, I had occasion to call down that way and I tried to locate him. He had removed it seems to New Orleans where he operated a large art gallery. The day I called he was gone, but I spoke to a delightful young lady - who identified herself as "his daughter." I never heard more - the waters closed long ago. I hope he - and his gallery and his daughter - came to no ill end in the recent watery disasters in "N' Leans."...

There were, of course, playground incidents that left lasting impress on me. (I never really understood this until late in life here - despite I read my Freud and the Viennese psychologists all in due course, and at one time was deeply involved with a venture to commercialize learning programs in behavioral psychology). One never really "escapes" the incidents of childhood. One (with luck perhaps) only seems to "forget" them in the press of the demanding "middle years." - to find them surfacing nighttimes and (all!) other times when older... Once, in fact, a lopsided "fight" between me and four of my "pals" in a vacant lot across from our house - they all armed with sharp Spanish Bayonet dagger leaves, I well recall, stripped from the giant plant at the corner of our house - so brought down my Mother's fury on me that I see now I never really recovered (nor forgave her, which is to my failing, not hers) over all the intervening years, though decades followed decades in my productive years where this never once returned to consciousness. But now nightly it does. Regularly. Remorselessly. Stay young: growing old (like death itself) isn't all it's cracked up to be...!

I remember their names. There was Max Cheeseman, and Charlie Vanderholdt (and his little brother, Jimmy) and Felix Burroughs, and Harry Lipschitz (poor guy!), and others. Their dads let them go barefooted, but I could not (hookworm, my Cooler-Climate Mom said). They could drink softdrinks anytime anywhere (a widespread regionalism in the humid Southern States...): Max's father even set up a booth in front of their home where they sold softdrinks (Nehi, Dr. Pepper, Cream Soda - you're likely unfamiliar with the flavors) to one another and passersby, and "hung out" all day. (I was forbidden to hang out there or drink such poisons: cavities, said my Cooler-Head Mom). They formed a club over Max Cheeseman's garage. They smoked stolen cigarettes in there and did all kinds of "funny things" they would not tell about. But they denied me (and Carl) membership and wouldn't let us into their club...

So I said "screw them" - or the equivalent. I was a "new boy" and not "one of them." I played with Cajuns, and had to "take naps" and "wear shoes." I couldn't drink soda! It wasn't so bad. Once, I found a slough way out on edge of town (I rode my bike everywhere). It was drying up, and the surface was a flutter with fins and ripples and churning, broiling movement. Entrapped fish! (Here comes the fish part again, Martha!). I pedaled home and got a bunch of empty mason jars and put them in my "bike basket." And rode back out to the slough. I waded right in - be damned to the cottonmouths and 'gators (we had them all , you see). And I grabbed left and right and came up with "Sunnies" and Bluegills, and Bass, and catfish and tadpoles and all kinds of critters! I stuffed them in my mason jars!

Then I pedaled like hell for home again! There, in the backyard, was a concrete "fish pool" that the landlord had once installed - but was in sad and unused neglect at this time. None of your trendy "koi pool" thing as these realtors all trying to con me with today - just a big (maybe 15 feet long, and maybe 3 feet deep!) concrete "tank" in the ground. I set the hose running into it and emptied my mason jars therein. Half the dense-packed denizens there in, gasped their last in the oxygen-deprived waters - but the other half made it (thank you, Mr. Darwin, for the elegant insight to how "survival" explains it all...).

In time my colony of expatriates grew and prospered. I built brick chambers along one side at the bottom for shelter (like row houses sort of...). My fondest memory is how you could walk up to this pool, later, and throw in crickets and grasshoppers and other hapless insects, and BAM! - there before your eyes would be a swirl and splash and the insect would be gone!

Later, I added turtles. They were everywhere around in ditches and the swampy land.. And I had a large, floating board on which they could crawl out and sun themselves...

Once I came back and the turtles all had masses of bubbles at their rear ends. They just lay sort of dopey and lethargic on the board. Just all these frothy bubbles you see. Then once a very long time later, I learned that Cheeseman and the others had come into our yard when I was gone, and they had run their pocketknife blades up the rear ends of my turtles. (Yeah! I know - say it again if you like: real sickos!). I told my parents. Nothing ever happened. Way it is - was - is all.

Gloria Jackson had long pigtails and lived a couple blocks away. And she liked bugs and animals and things, which gave her heightened visibility since most of her gender did not. And everywhere around us, there were lots of rabbits. So we decided - she and I - that we would "catch" one for a pet.

Sounds like a plan, no?

LOL!

So we set up all these wooden apple crates we got out back of the market and lugged home, with sticks propping them up at a 45-degree angle you see... said stick attached to a string you could yank from some distance away... You know the classic "trap" of the cartoons. We put carrots under the boxes, propped up on their sticks. There were strings to the carrots, too, in case the rabbit should come when we were not on watch.

Never worked - but we were always refining our scheme and figuring out new angles. Kept us off the streets and out of the bars, as they say. Just forever on watch in the vacant lots. Waiting. Waiting. For the rabbits that never came. Gloria was good troops: I wish her well.

Once, old Sport (more anon) and Carl and I "jumped": an old mother 'possum out in the woods. She had her whole litter aboard, and they all hung by their tiny tails to her larger tail - carried horizontally aloft along her back. (It was to be many years into the future that I was to ride the old Lexington Avenue IRT downtown every day, a straphanger one among many, eyes closed, dreaming how like we all were in the end to the tiny possums in the Texas of my youth...) But now Mama 'Possum suddenly keeled over at Sport's incessant barking, and rolled over on her side. Dead! The flies actually crawled across her open eyeballs! Never a twitch she made! Her passengers took off in every direction. "Playing 'possum" calls for a fine touch, I saw. It is not for everyone...

Carl and I restrained old Sport, and watched from the brush. Soon, she shook herself and looked around! She got up again and as if on signal, her brood instantly returned from under the grass and leaves and climbed back aboard! Then off they went!

Later, we came across two old Blacks with a shotgun. When asked, we told them about our having seen a 'possum a short while before. Their very eyes lit up! And off they went in search of her. But I know they never found her: she was "long gone" as they say down that way. The Blacks loved 'possum... you know that old East Texas song about the 'possum hunter and how he cooked his catch... "...done to a golden brown, laid with sweet 'taters roun' and roun'..." Don't know it? Well, the loss is yours, not mine.

The perceived wisdom of most White folks down that way and in that time was "...you don't want to eat 'possum, you know, as they dig in graveyards and break into the coffins..." As with all such admonishments, this likely had the effect of just leaving more of a good thing for the less fastidious... What I know anyway?

Not far from us was a sawmill. All day long, a great "Sque-e-e-e-ak! Then a drawn out groan followed by a loud PLONK!" marked activities in the millpond there, where a giant crane first lifted, and then dropped Kerplunk! - the giant East Texas "Piney" logs. Endlessly. My Dad never got used to the sound...

But we had a fishing hole over in that pond that was out of this world. You could drop in "doughball" bait (anyone here remember doughballs? Damn! First you had to go buy a vial of asofetida (anyone here remember asofetida?) from the druggist. On the way back home you got a can of chicken guts from the butcher. Then you mixed the two together and some flour from the kitchen and let it sit out in the sun a few days. Then you rolled balls of it up and stuck it on the hooks. These dried overnight and you were set! Drop them in any East Texas waterhole in those days and the fish came a-runnin!...! Damn!) and instantly you would have a fat perch on your line. Once I took my Dad over to see this discovery and we had to jump from log to log along the edge of the pond and all. Pop didn't like it and thought I would do better not hanging around the sawmill pond (with Carl) and better play closer to home with the other boys....

Times we would go down to the Gulf beaches, too. And it was all horrific sand-flies and tarballs from the offshore drilling and tankers and once a great shark fin came up right next to me wading a bit off shore. No one else saw it so of course it is unrecorded elsewhere but just here now for first time. Sour Lake, Tyler, Orange, Port Aransas - think I wasn't there long ago? Think again!

Then the oil well blew! One night. Not far from us. Huge roar - and flames in the nighttime sky. I believe it was out in the original old Spindletop Field but I may be wrong. It was only about five miles away. No matter - some field around Beaumont. My Dad says, “Lets go see. We piled into the (company) Buick and away we drove. A young roughneck (worker in oil fields) named McCarthy showed up at the site and he had a couple of other screwballs with him and they were using a new way to snuff well fires. He suited up in a sort of asbestos Moon Suit and walked right up and into that wall of fire, and tossed a container of nitroglycerin into the well! Way to go, Man! The resultant explosion (a doozy) temporarily blew out the fire you see -and in this interim a huge iron cap was dragged into place over the wellhead.

Then all's ya gotta do, is go up to the front office and present your bill. But its not for the squeamish or slow-learners, this capping wells. No Sir! Like dying, you got to get it right the first time: there's no way to practice! Eventually McCarthy amassed a fortune and later built the world-famous Shamrock Hotel at Houston - now gone under the knacker's hammer, as I believe.... (But not before many years later, when on a business trip to Houston myself (I was slated to go out on one of the drilling platforms and write a story about life there - but it got aborted). My first wife, Jean, went with me, however, and we really lived it up while we lay around on the expense account waiting for my New York client to get his act together. Had a ground floor suite and all - opened direct onto the famous super-size swimming pool. A halcyon time, you see - for right after our return, Jean died of botched lung surgery (was inveterate smoker...). But of all these affairs, later...

So they put this fire out, and the borehole shot saltwater into the air for hundreds of feet for many days after that. But no fire. A sign by the road in those days said: "We'll trade you a barrel of oil for a barrel of fresh water" ... so hard come by was fresh drinking water in the fields in those days. My dad only hunched over the wheel and said, "Berna! Texas is a hellhole - and no place to be raising kids!"

Grin!

Some days later, at school, a chum showed up with a basketball-sized green rock with a long scratch in it. His story was that his dad was the geologist out at the field where the well had blown, and this rock, blown sky-high out of same, was thought to be the one that the drill bit hit and caused a spark that set off the explosion. That Earth held vast challenges and secrets in her bowels was never more apparent - and intriguing - to me than that time in Averill School show-and-tell.

Sport was my first dog. A stray. Sort of a large, short-haired Fox Terrier type. Wise in the ways of the world, as well he might have been, for these were the Depression Years... and Sport came to me via the Hobo Jungle out at the edge of town. Sport had been living with the Hobos and one of them gave him to a friend of mine. (We often visited the hobos as kids. They lived in barrels and culverts and cooked in cans over open fires and told stories and showed us how to grab onto the ladders of slowly rolling rail stock and stuff like that. They were a good lot generally, and no one ever heard of anyone being "molested" in those days....). Anyhow, my friend's mother said, "No way," and gave Sport instead ...to me! His first act around his new digs was to become Official Hobo Greeter. Let me explain:

Half the country was out of work in those days. Hoover (I think it was) had signed an emergency bill of some kind that let unemployed young men "ride the rods" (freight trains) down to the Southern and western States in search of work. As long as they stayed out of trouble, the railroad "bulls" (cops) were not to hassle them. A typical sight in East Texas back then was a long line of boxcars with huddled figures all along the catwalks on top "rolling down that Seaboard Line" - and not a few brave souls snugged in over the "rods" below (brake rods which ran the length of the cars under their floors right above the tracks). Ever hear Hank Snow's "Wabash Cannonball?" No? Loss is yours not mine. A chorus therein celebrates "...ridin' the rods and the brake bands"...

Anyhow, they rarely caused any trouble at all - save for endless importuning for "handouts" and free meals at the door! Mom and Della (our black cook) always fed them. Sometimes they picked up leaves or raked the lawn but mostly Mom just fed them and sent them on their way. But Sport knew the most of them you see, since he had lately lived among them! And I had soon taught him to "shake hands." (That pup was bright as paint, he was!). So now he sat on the front door walk and shook hands with every itinerant that passed by. LOL! My dad of course, was fit to be tied as he looked out the window to behold Sport extending his paw to first one then another would-be diner...

Can you read "Hobo Scratch?" Hobo Scratch is cabalistic icons and weird symbols, done in blue carpenter's chalk, on telephone poles and back gate posts. It was the lingua franca of the Hobos: how they left indications along the way for their brethern who followed: you can get meal here with work; you can get meal here no work; you can sleep in garage one night only; etc. - and of course: Caveat Canem!" And so on. I hadn't thought of Hobo Scratch for years. Bet it is all washed off the posts now. Damn - even the posts are gone, too. A different day...

Sport tried Pop's patience in other ways, too. Outside our dining room was an open porch overhung by tree limbs. Our trees were full of anoles ("chameleons" everyone called them back then, but they weren't and they are not. Florida here has them, too). But Texas was alive with them! And Sport was fascinated with them! But they were always beyond his reach. So all he could do was follow them back and forth along the tree limbs as they ran along overhead. You would see him patiently sitting - watching - and his head turned slowly from side to side - kind of like the old joke shots of someone watching a tennis match - as he watched the anoles run back and forth. Trouble was that this silent tableau was what Pop looked out on every time we sat down to eat! We would get through about the meat course, (we ate courses back then, but of course, (sorry! no pun intended) Mom had kitchen help to bring the dishes in and out...). Everyone did back then.

And then Pop would explode. "Berna! That dratted dog is driving me nuts! He just sits there looking from side to side all the time and all these damnable lizards and mosquitoes - and everything down here!" I told you Pop conceived of Texas as some kind of special Hell to try the mettle of honest businessmen. It was very different from Colorado. I'll never forget once when we had one of our heaviest rains early-on after we had moved in. The entire backyard was awash, but soon the water drained off - and Pop was standing at the window surveying his newly (rented) kingdom. Then he gave a low growl: "I'll be darned (Pop never swore). Come and look at this will you! You will not believe it!" We all ran to the windows: as the water drained away, the backyard had become miraculously dotted with myriads of little clay towers - about 8 to 10 inches high say - each tower made of round, packed, little clay balls about the size of marbles. Sort of like an aerial view of Medieval England maybe - when all the Norman Towers of the invaders dotted the landscape...

But no Normans occupied these mud castles! No siree! From the top of each peeped forth an East Texas crawdaddy - a miniature lobster no less - waving its tiny claws in the damp air. "My God, said Pop, whatever is to become of us in this land?"

The moral is - and I believe somehow my parents never saw this - is that if you are Coloradoans, you cannot raise children as Coloradoans in Texas - they will grow up despite all you do - to be Texans, or a sub-species perhaps thereof - sort of hybrid "neither fish nor fowl" types. And this I have come to understand after all these years, lies at the root of much of my "angst".... Sigh.

Uncle Wilson took care of our yard. A great big, old Black man with a fuzz top of greying hair. He always wore "blue duckin's" (what most of you know as bib overalls). The straps were worn and frayed and "buttoned" over his shoulders with the most astounding catches made of nails and kitchen matches, all twisted up with wire... He wore an old pair of Pop's golf shoes, and he had cut out big gaps in the leather here and there for his bunions and toes. He was perpetually engaged on a stepladder trimming the arbor vitae hedges around our place. He called everyone , black or white, "brother-in-law" - and we kids and shorter adults were called "little brothers-in-law." He was a kindly old man and told us many things about bugs, and arbor vitae, and dogs, and ghosts, and what Della kept inside her "cunjur" bag which she wore around her neck... (a matchstick for dipping snuff - on the sulfur end!, a chicken foot, dirt from a graveyard somewhere, - you know - anything to keep off the witches...). He was always hungry, Uncle Wilson was. We would go in the house and Della would give us cookies, warning, "Don' y'all's let that rascally black man out there touch yore cookies!" As soon as we walked out though, Wilson would come down from his ladder and hail us, "Hey - Little Brother-in-Law - an' what you got in yore hand dere for pore ol' Uncle Wilson?" When we opened our hands, a big black one would appear with fingers the size of bananas and Uncle asking if he couldn't maybe have a bite - or even the whole cookie?

He always won! LOL! He usually nibbled it in great delight, all the while mumbling beneath his breath, "Don' gets nuthin' up to Powell's but air puddin' mos' times!"

Della lived out back in a one room shelter built off the garage. All the maids and cooks down the block lived out back of their respective employers.. In front of most of their shacks, sitting on open fire pits, were large, black, open, iron kettles - rather like the ones used to boil Missionaries in the cartoons of yore. Every Monday morning, to hoorahing and hoopla, these kettles were fired up and your family wash was done in them! I remember well the smoke and shared bon homminie that reigned up and down the backyards. Of course, we were exceptions, and Della lorded it over her peers, since we had a Savage Washing Machine, courtesy of GMAC, pop's employer. Not many people know this now (few knew it then!), but General Motors once "sold" washing machines and refrigerators, as well as cars! It all came under the times-sales (finance) operations of GMAC, and the products were shown in their showrooms, you see.

But back to Della and her backyard quarters. She was courted by a number of suitors - including Uncle Wilson. Pop got tired of the ever-noisier rendezvous and hoorahing out back every night, so once he went out to Della's quarters and nailed the window in back shut by driving big 8-penny nails down through the sash right into the sill. It was where (he said) "All those black bucks are coming and going out there!" All went well for several nights, then the noise broke out again. Next morning, Pop went out to see what was up. The window was wide open!

"Della!, he said. "What is this? How did this window get opened! I nailed it shut the other day!" Never at a loss for words, Della came right back. "Oh! Mr. Powell - de rats done that!" (The window you see had old-fashioned sash weights hanging in slots alongside the sash - all exposed as there was no sheathing on the inside). The garage, true, was full of rats. And it was Della's contention that the rats came out at night and hung on the sash weights in their slots till their combined weight pulled the nails out and the window just 'natcherly' slid up and open - so the rats could be on their merry nocturnal way! LOL!

She had a son - "Junius" - probably about my age. But this was Segregationist America make no bones about it, and so there was no chance at all that we could ever play together. But Junius was allowed to play "out back" and he had "rights" to scoot up and down the cement ribbons that formed our two tire-track driveway. This he did ceaselessly and monotonously while Dad tried to read his paper indoors. LOL. Junius' scooter was a piece of work: he had made it from an abandoned roller skate of my sister's: taking it apart and putting one set of wheels on one end of a short 2x4 and the other set of wheels on the other end. Then he nailed another 2x4 upright at one end with a "tee" for a handle and he was in business! Della had no electricity, only "coal oil" for light (kerosene to the most of you). Every day Junius took a mason jar and scooted all the way down to the grocery store where he bought 15 cents worth of coal oil for the night.

Yes, it was a different world back then - South Texas 70 years ago. But that is how it actually was, and I for one see nothing gained in pretending it to have been otherwise, or to try and "PC" it all with euphemisms and "let's pretends" and other nonsense and lies.

And once, I crawled up into an "attic" area over this same rickety quarters (a place where I was expressly forbidden to go or "play"). And I managed to step on a nail upright in a board and drive it deep into my foot. (Carl, being in temporary eclipse at the time, was not present for this fiasco). For fiasco and contretemps all rolled in one it surely became. The dread word in those days was "lockjaw"... and my parents were immediately concerned that I had so-innoculated myself. So nothing would do but off to the doctor and tetanus shots. But let me explain: tetanus shots in those days were no "small deal" like they are now. For back then, the "carrier" or "medium" or whatever it is called, was horse serum. And a great many people, including me, have horrific reactions to the protein bases of other species - including horses! It was almost axiomatic that you would go into some kind of tizzy - mild or severe - and naturally I opted out for the latter. In fact, I think I was near to or in anaphylactic shock for a bit. I swole up with hives like you never saw - eyes shut tight - and put to bed in my parent's bed (an indication of the serious turn events had taken...). And itch! Wowee! (Years later, on Induction, I grew apprehensive when the sergeants led us in to get our tetanus shots... But this time, it was more or less a piece of cake since the "carrier" had been improved, and animal serums no longer used. I think I got that right. There was a period I think where they used the whites from chicken eggs - which was an improvement - but today, just a bit of stiffness and soreness seems to mark injections of anti-toxin here for most of us. Viva Scientae!)

After a day or so, and Mother's care in great gobs, my eyes opened up a bit and the first thing I remember is old Mitchell - the Blackman who took care of the rather fancy, formal gardens for the large house across the street - and old Mitchell was standing there at the foot of my bed, with his hat in one hand and a big bunch of posies in the other - for the "lil' white genl'man." Uncle Wilson never made it into my sick chamber, however, preferring to lurk outside till "lil' bro-in-law" could make his appearance on his own again, complete with appropriate handful of Della's cookies. As soon as I was declared fit for muster, of course, I was turned out. And put back again on Milk of Magnesia. My Mother had an absolute horror of something she called "irregularity" - and every night we had Milk of Magnesia ladled down our craws by the tablespoonful. That, and the constant resort to enemas in between (since she always suspected the magnesia was "not working") - has left me with a lifelong history of "nervous stomach" or whatever you want to call it. (It took me all these years to figure out where this all came from.) I don't really "blame" her (nor do I necessarily "forgive" her, either). Once, long ago, I read about this Dr. Spock who was the Guru of Mommies back then - and it was his Freudian hangups, I guess - passed along to his rapt followers - that kept so many of us in the rising generation more or less permanently in bowel cramps - and boosted the sales, no doubt, of Ex-Lax, Feen-A-Mint, the aforesaid (detested!) Phillips Milk-of-Magnesia and other nostrums of Depression Years Mommidom. ('S'cuse it, please... Gotta run!.. Be right back. Don't go away! .Grin!)

Another friend of mine was Bobbie Dubois - and he lived just a few doors away. Bobbie's folks were well-off (many East Texans, especially those of the "old line" families, had inherited land and were busy drilling wells and cashing in on the Great Oil Boom thereabouts. The Depression was not for everyone...). Bobbie's father was a coon-hunter, and he kept an assorted pack of Blue Ticks and Red Bones out back, along with some captive 'coons in a cage. A morning with Bobbie in his backyard was sure to be lots of fun - and almost always this was followed by an invitation to "have lunch" with Bobbie. So the two of us would sit down in this huge formal dining room they had, a cloth and silver on the table, and we two little boys would be served by the Dubois' Cook (in cap and apron!) and Mr. Dubois black-suited chauffer and general helper and factotum about the place - from silver chafing dishes and gravy boats! When I was growing up there, there were still "touches" of the Antebellum Old South down here to be had at times - and this was one of them. I'm sure these are just the things of memory now... And sometimes this same chauffer would take us in the big touring car on an afternoon fishing trip. The two of us sitting in the back seat, and he up front, black cap and all - driving. In such fashion we managed to visit fishing holes far more distant than those to which we had to walk. Nor did it end there. He would set up our poles, even bait our hooks (showing us the proper way to spit on the bait - a requirement in Texas, you see), even checking ahead through the reeds and grasses and the purple-flowered masses of Water Hyacinth for "cottonmouths" and 'gators who might be lying in wait... T'was fishing in grand style, it was!

And so the days wound down, and then one night Pop came home - to announce that we were (you guessed it!) moving again! Transferred we were - this time north to Fort Worth (or Cow Town, as the Texans all affectionately know it!). Mom waved her wand, the dishes did their magic act. And the bogs and swamps, the Deep Pineys, and oil-drenched cotton fields of East Texas were to know us no more...