dining room

On a walk last week, Robert and I stopped in front of the Massalina Drive house my parents built in 1937 and where I grew up. The current owner saw us down front, invited us in and showed us through the house, my first time in since summer 1963 when we moved to Japan. I snapped a pic of my favorite bedroom upstairs, but wish I’d taken a shot of the dining room. Looking out two windows into the back yard, it was the place of togetherness all my growing up years, five people gathered for the family meal twice a day. Dinner, the noon meal, varied depending on season and activities, but breakfast and supper without fail, and you had to arrive with your hair combed and your face washed, and you had to be in your chair before the blessing or you could not sit down. A quick learner, I never missed a meal. Gina and Walt will remember differently, and for them it would have dropped first to four when I went to college, then to three when Gina went, but five people until I went away to university on my 18th birthday. 

In that house the dining room has most of the memories, good and bad, happy and painful, mostly just usual family stuff. I set the table there hundreds of times, maybe thousands, and cleared up after. Labor Day 1941, my mother called me into the dining room, told me, “Bubba, you’re starting school tomorrow, what do you want them to call you?” a memory shared many times, including on this blog and from various pulpits and practically every time someone asks, “Why do they call you ‘Carroll’?” 

I never expected it, but walking into the dining room was like entering a chill tomb filled with ghosts, even corpses, my personal trauma room where many times over the years my father said to me things that still hurt if I go there. Only my brother and sister would understand, and it's nobody else's business.

“Happy’s dead” we were abruptly told at supper one night and I lost my appetite and had to leave the table.

Squinting tears of fury from an exchange with my father one morning, and before ever lifting my spoon, I threw myself back from the breakfast table, grabbed my books, and stomped off to Bay High, slamming the front door with all force. The long walk round Massalina Bayou, across 4th Steet Bridge, and out Harrison Avenue was calming, but the stomach rumbled through morning classes. 

On the top shelf of that very same built-in glass front dining room cabinet, hiding behind the center bar, was a bottle of Seagram’s Seven all my growing up years. I never knew of it to be touched except a couple of times when I was home alone and made myself a whiskey eggnog. I was fifteen or sixteen. That secret must never, ever be told. 

Outside the dining room window was a little oak tree where mornings during breakfast  we watched a red-headed woodpecker drill for bugs. 

My father’s new 1941 Chevrolet truck was parked in the back yard right outside the dining room window for a while. A boy loves a truck. One evening in 1942 or early 1943 I watched sadly as a stranger cranked it up and drove it away. I didn’t know why it was sold: the War was on and everything was changing, including my father would be at sea instead of in his fish business, and the truck was no longer needed by anyone but me.

My dining room memory of watching that truck leave stirred again this morning when Linda showed me a pic on Ray Wishart’s FB page. When the war was over and my father returned home and to the fish business, he needed a new truck. For a couple of years he got along with surplus army ambulances that he converted to meet his business needs, a 1937 Chevrolet and a 1937 GMC, but he had an order in with his BayHi classmate Bubber Nelson for a new Chevrolet truck. New vehicles were in great demand and short supply for several years after the War, and no truck came available. 

Desperately needing a truck, in 1947 my father went to W&W Motors and bought a new Dodge truck from Karl Wiselogel. I was twelve, had learned to drive our car, and the evening my father brought the truck home I wanted to drive it. No, but by the time I was 14 I was driving it to the Commercial Bank every Saturday morning to make the weekly cash and check deposits after my father did his weekly financial “checking up” with his truck drivers. It’s another story, may have been told here before, but my memory is of parking that enormous Dodge truck across from the bank in the first block of Beach Drive west of Harrison Avenue, entering the side door of the bank, and standing in line with the money pouch containing several thousand dollars, wearing the knee-high rubber boots that we wore around the fish-house, smelling fishy to high heaven. But I was the man, baby, and that monster parked outside was my truck, baby.

In 1948 my father needed another new truck. He ordered both a Dodge and a Chevrolet and told Mr. Nelson and Mr. Wiselogel that he would take whichever one came first. It was my first time finding out that either prayer doesn’t always work or you don’t always get what you pray for, because it was the Dodge. I'd thought I had the situation under control with my fervent prayers for the Chevrolet. One of those beautiful new postwar Chevrolet trucks. 

But our new 1948 red, postwar Dodge truck was fine. And any boy is happy in a new truck. And though it was much bigger it was the same model as the Dodge truck pictured on Ray’s FB page this morning.

The worst of the bad news was that my father’s shift from Chevrolet to Dodge meant that in spite of my mother's hopes and my prayers he traded in our 1942 Chevrolet Fleetline (featured on Ray’s FB page yesterday) not for the new two-tone 1948 Buick Super of my highest hopes, prayers and dreams, but for the green 1948 Dodge sedan that was my mother’s 36th birthday present, and that was given to me to take to college my senior year at Gainesville, and with which Linda and I started out married life. 

From those days I remember a commercial slogan, “Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?” 

You bet, and still so. And my umpteenth Buick is parked outside in the driveway, in my line of sight this very moment.

TW 

The Dodge truck pic belongs to Ray Wishart. Thanks, RevRay!