IT SEEMED LIKE HOURS By Fred Strong

That little guy is standing on the corner because he missed the school bus. It pulled away just as he came out of the house. He ran after it waving his arms, but it didn’t stop. Oh boy! Oh boy! What can he do? It’s too far to walk all the way to the school at Richfield Center. There wouldn’t be anyone coming along to take him there. They would be going in the other direction.

He couldn’t go home. His father would not be understanding. He would be blamed for not being on time. And he had heard stories from his brothers about “the woodshed.” How his father said, “this is going to hurt me more than it does you,” while cutting a switch. His father said he never told a lie. But boy, that was a whopper!

He could just play down by the creek all day. No, that would just make it worse. And his brothers would tell.

And this was the day Marjorie was going to sit with him at recess and show him how to do fractions. Marjorie Baumgerger, with long brown curls just like Shirley Temple. They said she was his girlfriend. But how could that be? He doesn’t even like girls!

As he sat there on the grass he thought about things at school. Like the time he broke his nose. See, they were playing Pom Pom Pull Away ,If You Don’t Come I’ll Pull You Away. See, he was watching over his shoulder at the guy chasing him. He was running as fast as he could. Then he turned his head – and right there was the school house wall. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back. His nose! It was bleeding! They picked him up and put him, a blubbering mess, under the pump and washed him off. “Run across the street to Mrs. Wilson’s house. She has the switchboard in her front room. She can call his mother. I think the ring is two longs and a short on the party line. She will know.” The party line, where everyone listens in to hear the news. And soon it was Junior was hurt at school.

He thought about other times. Like when the music teacher left his false teeth on the top of the piano. The guys found them and went around going “clack-clack” with the teeth. Until teacher caught them and took the teeth away and put them in his pocket. That was funny.

About the time he almost got hurt again. See there was a bucket of dried corn cobs to use for kindling in the stove. The guys were throwing them at each other. He was minding his own business sitting on the steps, when he saw something coming at him. He ducked, and hit his head on a sharp corner. It made a cut just above his eye. Boy! That could have been worse.

Maybe he should look in his lunch bucket and maybe have a sandwich. Oh. Bologny sandwiches again. He sat there and started crying. It may have been ten minutes but it seemed like hours. Hey! There comes the school cbus! Mr. Green missed him and came back for him!

Now the sky was blue. The birds were singing. His life wasn’t ended after all!

Tomorrow he would not be late for the school bus!

Memories – part 1 by CMR

If you’ve ever been to New England in the spring, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The sweet scent of lilacs floating through the air; trees and shrubs clothed in emerald green cloaks; the sparkling freshness one feels after a warm spring rain – all of these things, and more, bring me back to my birthplace –Worcester, Massachusetts.

My mother and father had been married about eighteen months when I was born. It was May, 1936. I was born into a world of great hope. The depression of ’29 was over, FDR was in the whitehouse, and jobs were plentiful “if you wanted to work hard”. These were my father’s words. The apartment was small, but comfortable. My mother was ecstatic. She now had her little “princess” and spent her days dressing me up, taking me on outings, and showing off her new prized possession. I don’t think my father was very happy about all the attention my mother was bestowing on me. After all, how was one going to “get ahead” if one wasted one’s time on frivolity.

Mother was beautiful, talented, and a dreamer. Father was handsome, industrious, and definitely a pragmatist. As I read Thoreau, I think how alike my father and he were.

I’m sure my love of poetry came from mother reciting Mother Goose Rhymes and poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. She was a wonderful pianist and could play anything if you could “just hum a little”. Mother loved to bake, and I am reminded of the sweet smell of chocolate éclairs that often emanated from our kitchen.

Although I don’t really remember much about my infancy, one thing I do remember – sitting up in my carriage as mother chatted with a neighbor. I was peering over the cream-colored, wicker side of the buggy waiting to be pushed. I kept straining forward, making unintelligible sounds I wanted to GO-O-O! Then, around age three, my brother was born!

World War II had ended several months before I presented myself to the world on the day of the Winter solstice. It was 5:45 a.m. My mother had temporarily moved from her home town of Riverton to Port St. George when she began to “show.” What a disgrace to her family that this 20 year old was running around with a married man and now found herself pregnant. My grandmother obsessed over the horror of what the neighbors and everyone else with whom she came into contact, including fellow Roman Catholics, the Bond Bread man, the mailman and the man who sold vegetables from a horse drawn cart each summer, would say or think.

The parish priest had referred my mother and her situation to a home for unwed girls in Port St. George. There she met Rita Maloney, who became her lifelong friend and she took up knitting which became one of her lifelong passions. At the first sign of labor pains, my mother and Rita were driven to the nearby hospital. My grandmother left Riverton by Greyhound Bus. Despite her difficulties with English, she finally found her way to St. Mary’s Hospital. And she found me there, pink, carrying 7 lbs and 4 oz, and wearing a pair of big, blue-green eyes.

Abortion was illegal in those days, not that it would have been an option for anyone living in a very Roman Catholic community. Nor had anyone in Riverton dreamed that within two decades, pills, created and designed to prevent conception, would be available. Mysteriously, no one opted for adoption either. But there was a price to pay for bringing what was then referred to as an illegitimate child to the unwed mother’s family.

I was told the tale that I was my grandmother’s child and my mother was my sister. One day when I was 11, my best friend’s mother, Mrs. Vashon determined to explain to me the mathematical reasons why the woman I thought was my mother could not have been my mother. She was too old to have given birth to me, said Mrs. V. Forty-five year old women, she explained, did not and could not give birth. I stopped her before she got further into any additional graphic explanation with the equivalent to, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!” Arlene Vashon’s mother never brought up this subject again.

This ancient brass sprinkler hooked up to a hose sends its cooling spray into the inferno of superheated noon air of an August Minnesota day and saves my life and lives of thousands of youngsters across the Midwest who have lawn sprinklers.

In 1924, when the mercury is hovering around 110 degrees in the shade and air conditioning a futuristic dream, we do what we have to do to lower our body temperatures and avoid fatal heat strokes and death by dehydration.

In a state that advertises 10,000 lakes, why not cool off by immersion? To qualify as a “lake” in Minnesota a body of water must be at least ten acres. That’s 435,600 square feet. Northfield’s three “lakes” are puddles.Mothers are too busy with five kids to herd them several blocks to this swimming hole.

A brass ring with spray holes is cooler and cleaner than a mud bottomed lake.

Here is a photo of me at three in my one-piece summer undergarment buttoned half way up the front and hanging limp and soaked over my tiny frame, cooled and refreshed by bravely running through the spray. I am testing the temperature of the water with my right hand.

The big boy running toward the brass ring is probably Orville Heffernan. We stay out of his way. He is not a bully, but sometimes he doesn’t understand his ability to inflict pain innocently.

The Heffernans raise chickens. They eat roast chicken every Sunday. We get to watch Mrs. Heffernan grab a fat hen by the neck and chop off its head with a large hatchet, release the dead bird and see it run around their back yard spouting blood from the stump of its neck. We wonder how a headless chicken can entertain us with its dance of death. It’s a mystery.

Then it’s back to our crabgrass and dandelion yard and its faithful, cool brass sprinkler.

My mother sang. She sang when she worked, she sang in the car, she sang silly songs and story songs for her children, and she sang us to sleep.

When she was in the one room school house she had attended, she had sung bass in the choir. Really! One year they went to the state choral competition.

Her voice was deep as the night and as rich as the cream that rose to the top of the milk she drew from the cow when she pulled at the teats and sang songs in rhythm with the sound of the milk squirting into the bucket.

If my memory serves me, the first song I can remember hearing was a lullaby titled (I think) The Sheeps and the Shoats. Not grammatically titled, but memorable. The first two lines of this song were, probably, the first song lyrics I learned.

“Oh, the sheeps and the shoats am a goin’ to the pasture.
Said the sheeps to the shoats, “Can’t you walk a little faster.

I would sing that part with my mother, then she would finish it and I could go to sleep.

She sang the traditional lullabies, as well; All The Pretty Little Horses, Hush Little Baby, Rock-a-Bye Baby, etc., and sweet and slow songs, such as, Sleep, Kentucky Babe. But, she also sang us story songs.

I don’t remember how old I was when she first sang Little Joe, the Wrangler to me or Little Redwing. I remember crying at both of these songs and my brother, Orville, comforting me.

Mother almost always sang when she cooked. I have no idea of how many songs she knew, but her tastes were eclectic and she had a song, with an appropriate rhythm, for almost any dish being made. All of us, including my father, loved to hear her sing, and, as soon as we began to learn the words, she encouraged us to sing along. So, she would be peeling potatoes, one of my brothers shelling peas, another putting coal in the stove, and my sister setting the table, and mother would be singing St. Louis Blues, or Stardust, or Love Letters In The Sand. (I know many people who think that last song was written in the 50s, since both Fats Domino and Pat Boone recorded it then, but, it was first recorded in the 1930s, which is when my mother learned it.)

She sang songs I’ve never heard anywhere else, Put On An Old Pair Of Shoes (a depression ditty), and ‘Tis Autumn (also, I think, out of the 30s). And, of course, Brother Can You Spare A Dime. She also sang show tunes; Irving Berlin, Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the blues. Bessie Smith had nothing on my mother, she could wail with the best of them.

And there were also the silly songs. Alexander’s Ragtime Band, The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze and, Don’t Go In The Lion’s Cage Tonight. When she was a teenager, in the late 1920s, parodies of songs were quite popular. She did a wonderful parody of Silver Threads Among The Gold. One of my favorites was, She Was Only A Bootlegger’s Daughter, and she sang an amazing song that was a combination of lines from at least ten songs that started with Oh, Columbia, The Gem Of The Ocean, and included The Little Brown Church In The Dale, and, Mrs. Jinks of Madison Square. It took me years to learn that one.

We never attended church, but my mother was a deeply spiritual person, so she also sang songs of faith; traditional hymns such as The Old Rugged Cross, and the wonderful spirituals like All God’s Children. We learned these songs, too.

My mother also read. She loved books, fiction and nonfiction, and was interested in, virtually, everything. She shared this love of books and the love of knowledge, for its own sake, with all four of her children.

One of my earliest memories is of the four of us gathered around our mother while she read to us. We didn’t hear childrens’ books, that I remember. The first title I can recall was Smokey by Will James, a great writer of western stories about, not just the cowboys, but, also, the horses they rode. We had a horse named Satan, and I had been ‘riding’ him with one of my brothers since I could remember, so I felt a great affinity for our equine friends.

When I was around f my mother read a series of western novels to us, and, to this day, I wish I could find them again. They were written around two cowboy friends, and the only clear memory I have of these books is how good they were. One of the men was from Mexico and his name was Don Saturnino, an opportunity for mother to explain what saturnine meant. How we all enjoyed them.

By the time she was reading these books, we were aged four, seven, nine, and eleven, and we still loved to hear our mother read to us. The three older children were already reading on their own, but that didn’t matter. Nothing was better than hearing our mother’s rich, mellow voice bring the stories and people to life.

We didn’t always have a radio. We didn’t have a television until nineteen-fifty-six. We couldn’t afford the movies very often. We didn’t have much by way of money.

But, we had a mother who sang to us. We had a mother who read to us. We had the richest of lives.