Mind Jungle

An early memory from the early 1940s, or even the late 1930s, is at Mom and Pop’s house. It was not Alfred’s house from which we just moved and which they sold and moved away in 1923. It may have been the house they rented on Baker Court at what? Fountain Avenue? when they returned to Panama City, now gone and existing only in my crevices. As much as the house itself, my memories include as a tiny boy, arriving there after midnight from Pensacola with my father. The house never being locked, going in and to bed in what may, not many years earlier, have been his bedroom before he and my mother married, my waking the next morning alone and him gone to work, panicking until I heard Mom stirring in the kitchen. When I walked into the kitchen she looked surprised at me and said, “I thought I heard someone come in during the night,” and fixed breakfast for me. I remember Pop lighting fireworks, roman candles, in the front yard there on the Fourth of July about 1939 or 1940. I remember Mom teaching me and Ann, my first cousin whom Mom and Pop adopted, to “pick eggs” in the chicken coop out back, quickly to scoot the hen off her nest so she didn’t peck and crack her eggs. There was the double garage out back where the huge oak tree still stands, a two story garage with a garage apartment above, empty except for an ancient dictaphone from Pop’s business days; and Pop’s two cars, the 1936 Plymouth business coupe of which my sharpest memory is the dash with one large round instrument

and the 1937 Chevrolet coach (2-door sedan) both cars with “A” gasoline ration stickers on the windshields. The mind wanders, doesn’t it — all that has been remembered here before, and isn’t where I was going at all. Why did they have two cars when Mom couldn’t drive, never drove a car in her life? Asked, my mother said it was so they could have two “A” coupons and buy more gasoline during the War when gas was rationed. I don’t know. My mother was not a fan of her in-laws, for family reasons that go way back to Bluff Springs and I'm not going there this morning.

More likely it was the house at 1040 E. Caroline, a cement block house with a flat roof, that Pop himself built and where I spent many Sunday afternoons after church, “spending the day” to play with Ann. What I remember is Ann sitting in Pop’s lap, it was her domain, she never suffered me to sit there, while Pop read aloud about Mowgli. I don’t remember how my mind got onto Rudyard Kipling this morning, starting that memory spiral; it may have been reflecting that I remember Pop when he was younger than the age I am now, and then back into the years. But Mowgli the Jungle Boy, lost in the Indian jungle and raised by wolves, his brothers wolf cubs. His mortal enemy Shere Khan the tiger. And then to Cub Scouts, our pack at Cove School, where the Jungle Book formed a background of our moral code, and our ranking was wolf cub, bear cub, lion cub.

With Kipling my mind never stops wandering as I watch Warren Middlemas, my intellectual hero of the Cove School years, standing and reciting, “‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.” What year was that? To my shame by comparison, I’d memorized something much easier, “In School-Days,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. But this is my best memory of Cove School. This, and Gail singing “Til it wilted, I wore it, I'll always adore it, My sweet little Alice blue gown.” But Kipling —

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.

Honestly, as wandering as a dream, I don’t know why the mind does this to me, takes me on such adventures — no matter: the blog is for me alone.