chew COPENHAGEN

Clear sky, Orion & friends over a calm Bay this morning, 62°F 88% wind at zero, cool but not chilly this 20171102, can hardly believe that Keep the X in XMas is next month. 

Often not successful though I avoid opening email before blogging, but the little flag in the upper RH corner of my computer screen flashed, notifying me of an email from a friend whose notes I always open instantly. A link to old photographs, 

including some from days I recall and some from days before I was. “Grand Canyon 1914” makes the soles of my feet tingle, would you sit there? Would you drive up to the edge and park your car there?

Another, “Oranges for 1¢ 1942” signs on the front of a grocery store - - we never heard of a supermarket in those days and it was several years before Kelley’s SuperMarket We Doze But Never Close on Beck Avenue in StAndrews - - advertising grapefruit 5¢ and oranges 1¢ each. I knew those days, I was there and knew, seems cheap, but who had a nickel. I remember the delicious extravagance when we each had half a grapefruit for breakfast and the grapefruit knife was passed around so you could cut each section loose - - 

The Great Depression was about to clear through the WW2 economic surge, but those may have been the days when my father’s job brought home $7 a week. He'd have been working either at the Standard Oil filling station that was where Tarpon Dock fish market is today and where we stopped the evening of Walt’s third birthday, July 24, 1942 to get our puppy whom Walt named Happy Birthday, Happy for Short; or at the ice plant that was down Mercer Avenue at the Bay, behind and south what is now Paul Brent Gallery. I remember going there to the ice plant with Mama, me a little tow-headed boy standing behind Mama in the back seat of our black 1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe Coach, to pick him up after work. 

New, that car cost $700, and I remember my father’s astonishment when he traded it, the new 1942 Chevrolet Fleetline Aerosedan cost $1100. I recall the day, my surprise, when Mama, Gina, Walt, and Mom my beloved grandmother, picked me up in the new car after class at Cove School that day: I stood at the north door of Cove School and looked and looked and looked for the 1935 Chevrolet until Gina hollered “Bubba!!” and I spotted the new blue car; December 1941 or January 1942, after Pearl Harbor, and I was in Miss Violet Hayward’s first grade. Six years old and innocent as a flower, I thought she was MissHayWood.

The first day of class MissHayWood held a yardstick out and told me to kick it, in order to determine whether I was right-or-left-handed. I had been both, maybe mainly left-handed until that morning when I kicked at the yardstick with my right foot and so was ruled right-handed forever. When MissHayWood would catch me at the blackboard writing with my left hand, she would rush to me, gently take my chalk, and put it in my right hand. Never unkindly but nevertheless the time of a different sort of certainty.

What those cheap groceries invariably bring to mind is the pause in class each day when the teacher would bring in half-pints of milk, ice cold in cartons, and saltine crackers. Everyone who had paid 11¢ or maybe it was a dime, was handed a carton of milk and a saltine. But not Bubba, not ever, not even once! I always said I'd forgot to bring my money, and that was usually so, but the whole truth is that I’d never asked, because there was never an extra dime at our house in those years, and I knew that if I asked for money there would be a sharp word from my father, a word, words, and what we three always called “a talk.” I got talks and Walt got talks I don’t remember whether Gina got talks. Much dreaded, always to be avoided or evaded, our father’s talks were interminable.

Thanks, Norm, I loved the pictures. It’s okay that they stirred that cubby of my brain this morning!

DThos+ 

somewhere in the 1930s and 1940s