An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (10 page)

BOOK: An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood
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***

 

You see, the Tracy Drive sledding slope leveled off in Mr. Ayres’ backyard.
Mr. Ayres was a retired Army officer who was the most restless man I ever knew. (I’d go on to become best friends with his son, Tom, but that wouldn’t be until ninth grade, some years off.)
During one of his restless phases, Mr. Ayres decided to dig a giant pit around the creek that fed into the bottom of his yard and build a pond nearly 3 feet deep. The sides of the pound were rounded mounds of earth that made for natural ramps.
So busy was I watching Gray writhing in pain, I didn’t realize I was headed straight for the pond.
I hit the natural ramp on the side and went flying high into the air. I must have soared 3 feet above the pond for a moment or two before I and my plastic toboggan landed in the center of the hard ice.
As the ice began to crack, I did my best to balance myself with hopes of keeping afloat, but I and my plastic toboggan soon plunged through. I was immersed from head to toe.
Oddly, the water felt very warm — at first.
I finally got onto my feet and was dancing around in the muck on the floor of the pond. Every kid on the hill stopped what he or she was doing to look at me.
Sopping wet and weighted down by water that was quickly beginning to freeze, I had to navigate my way up the steep Tracy Drive hill to make it home.
My boots and pants swooshed as I walked past Gray. He was not yet on his feet, and he must have had the wind knocked out of him pretty good, because — much to my delight — he was unable to mock me with his obnoxious laugh.
Though I was numb and nearly frozen solid by the time I made it to the top of Tracy and back over the other side of the hill to my home, my unplanned dip in the pond was entirely worthwhile.
Vengeance was sweet.

 

 

Praying for a White Christmas
 

The snow started coming down hard a few hours after we'd arrived.
It was Christmas Eve 1976. We were 20 miles from home, visiting my mother's sister at her home in the country.
Earlier that evening, my mother, father, grandmother and sisters had piled into the station wagon to begin our trek.
I was 14 then. My sisters and I were getting older — growing up. Only our youngest sister still believed in Santa Claus.
Teenagers don’t much enjoy being stuck in a car together and the annoyance was clear.
My father was in an unpleasant mood. His mother had died on New Year’s Day a few years earlier. He’d lost his father when he was only 3.
The merriness of Christmas, which had come so easily when we were tots, was absent.
Fortunately, when we arrived, there was a festive spirit in the air and holiday cookies — they always lifted my spirits.
My mother had three sisters and two brothers. They had 26 children among them. My young cousins filled the house with excitement and joy.
I joined my father and uncles, who talked about typical subjects — football, automobile tires and the weather.
I joined my mother and my aunts, who laughed aloud as they related stories about their children or their father or long-lost relatives.
Then the snow began.
It came on thick and fast and my father, worried, soon urged us to get our things and get in the car.
By the time we got onto the highway, the roads were blanketed and few cars were out. The thick snow deadened the sound of the tires.
It was as though we were in a sleigh gliding silently through the snow-covered countryside.
The snow brought calm over us. Snow always does that.
We humans like to think we have more control over our world than we do. The fact is we have very little control over most things.
The snow makes us remember this. The snow makes us realize how small we really are —

how small our worries often are.
My father turned on the radio and tuned in old-time radio broadcasts that one Pittsburgh station still plays every Christmas.
Don Ameche and Frances Langford were performing "The Bickersons," a 1940s show in which a married couple got into hilarious arguments.
I remember one line in which the wife asked if he'd had breakfast and he said he just ate the oatmeal on the stove. "That isn't oatmeal!" she said. "I'm wallpapering."
We laughed heartily at the performance — my father’s booming laugh most prominent of all.
I felt the way families must have felt back in the 1940s. They joined together in front of the radio while performers painted vivid pictures in their imagination.
It took nearly 90 minutes to make our journey home, but we didn’t mind.

 

We enjoyed the old radio shows for a while. We coaxed our grandmother into telling us stories of what Christmas was like when she was a child. My mother got us to sing Christmas carols.
The snow gave us humility. Once humbled, the confinement that had agitated us on the drive to my aunt's house had allowed a serenity we forgot was possible.
As our economy sputters, our families struggle and our politicians seek to reshape our institutions, humility is what we need most.
Here’s a great place to start:
"God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
And so it is that I pray for a white Christmas every year.
(The prayer mentioned is often attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.)

 

The Dog that Ran Away

 

 

We got her as a puppy in the summer of 1971, six weeks after my youngest sister Jennifer was born.

 

Getting our mother and father to finally allow us to have a puppy was no small doing. Despite repeated pleas, my sisters and I were unable to wear them down — until our lucky break.

 

The mother of Ginger, the Collie/Irish Setter mutt that lived next door that my mother and father both loved, had had another litter. Ginger was gentle and playful and well liked by everyone in the neighborhood. Two other neighbors, reasoning that Ginger’s half siblings would be as gentle and playful as she, decided to drive to the country to pick out puppies of their own. We persuaded my father — then and now, the world’s biggest dog lover — to go with them, and, much to our surprise, he did.

 

My sister Kris and I waited for hours for him to return. It was after 11 p.m. when he finally pulled into the driveway. We rushed outside to greet him. Our puppy was tucked under his arm, her snout covered by his large hand. He carried her into the basement and set her down on the carpet.

 

She had brown fur with white speckles — part Collie, a touch of Irish Setter and goodness knows what else. She stumbled about, barely able to stay on her feet. My father kicked off his work boots by the door and, as she climbed inside one of them, we laughed loudly.

 

Sleeping was impossible. We placed her in a box with a small blanket to keep her comfortable, but stayed near her all night. It was summer, after all — no school — so we were granted permission.

 

For several days, my sisters and I couldn’t agree on what to name her.  We got her a collar, with and the proper registration tags on it, the collar jingled as she attempted to run across the floor.

 

“Why not name her Jingles?” my father said, jokingly.

 

And so we did.

 

***

 

We had no idea how lucky we were to have a puppy — no idea that middle-class pet ownership was then a relatively new phenomenon in the ‘70s.

 

Throughout much of American history, according to
LiveScience.com
, only the wealthy kept pets as companions. Poorer folks who had dogs tended to live on farms, as many Americans did; they needed dogs to herd cattle and protect the homestead.

 

Many people in cities couldn’t afford dogs — particularly during the Depression. Cramped city neighborhoods offered few opportunities for dogs to run freely in any event.

 

After World War II, as Americans became more affluent and moved to the suburbs, many families had enough excess dough to care for pets — and large suburban yards in which pets could roam.

 

By the early ‘70s, the family dog was fairly common — though most mothers weren’t too keen about the concept.

 

My mother worked tirelessly to keep our house clean and orderly. Six kids running in and out of the house were forever tracking in dirt. The last thing she wanted in her house was dog hair, and Collie mutts did her share of shedding.

 

To be sure, during the hot summer months, Jingles shed persistently. Even during the winter, our mother would discover a strand of dog hair in the unlikeliest place — in the most distant bedroom on the third floor of our house, where Jingles was never permitted to go!

 

Despite our efforts to brush Jingles — and there were few things she loved more than being brushed with a metal comb — our mother banished her to the downstairs family room by day, and Jingles had to sleep out in the garage at night.

 

I built a fine bed for her, though, out of plywood and 2-by-4s. I designed it to keep her off the cold floor and to surround her with carpeted walls to keep her warm on the coldest nights. My sisters made pillows for her. We set a thick blanket on the floor of her bed and she enjoyed many a good night’s sleep there.

 

Though my mother permitted Jingles to join us in the basement family room, she often changed her mind. After finding a strand of dog hair somewhere in the house, she’d immediately banish Jingles back to the garage.

 

Jingles would do anything to get back into the house. Open the basement door a crack and she’d slip through like a gust of wind, then dash behind our old brown couch, which looked just like the one in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

 

She’d spend hours there on her back, snoozing, perfectly content, and our mother never knew she was there until she let loose her occasional doggie gas — boy, could Jingles clear out a room.

 

Once she’d discovered Jingles was there, my mother would peel the couch away from the wall and banish Jingles to the garage yet again.

 

Though in the end, our mother would show Jingles more love and compassion than any of us could.

 

***

 

The ‘70s was the era of the rough-and-tumble dog — not your overly pampered pets that are commonplace today.

 

There was a clear line of demarcation between man and beast. Dogs were dogs and humans were humans — there was no obsession over pets.

 

There were no doggie psychiatrists, funerals, eulogies or graveyards. There was no doggie bottled water — I’m not making that one up — or doggie gourmet meals.

 

Yet all are common now.

 

There were no microchips to implant under dogs’ skin so they could be quickly located if they ever ran off.

 

According to the American Pet Products Association, Americans spent nearly $50 billion on pets last year. Nearly $20 billion was spent on dog grub alone — including the expensive "gourmet" stuff that no dogs ate when I was a kid.

 

Jingles dined daily on a can of Ken-L Ration — stinky hamburger-looking stuff that she happily devoured nonetheless.

 

We set her water bowl by the door, but sometimes she preferred the fresh stuff — right out of our downstairs toilet.

 

The only time she ate “people” food was when my father cooked one hamburger too many — which he did
every
Saturday night for 25 years or more.

 

Catholic families, you see, had to forsake meat on Fridays then. Saturday was time for some beef. Hamburger being cheap, it was the preferred Saturday dinner of fathers throughout our neighborhood and parish — and probably the entire country then.

 

Every Saturday, my father set the cast-iron skillet on the stove and proceeded to burn — nearly to crisps — 10 burgers or more.

 

After we’d each forced down one — smothered in ketchup and mustard and covered in pickles, it wasn’t too bad — he’d always have a few left over. He’d ask us who wanted another. Nobody did.

 

This would cause him to grumble, as he did every Saturday Jingles was with us.

 

“Ah, hell, I hate to give hamburger meat to the dog.”

 

He thought this way despite the fact that he was and is, as I mentioned earlier, the world’s biggest dog lover.

 

***

 

My father’s point of view on dogs is understandable, though. The ‘70s was the era of Lassie and Old Yeller. Not only were dogs not pampered by humans, they were forever risking their lives to get humans out of scrapes.

 

Lassie dragged people out of burning houses. Old Yeller got rabies fighting a rabid wolf to protect his family.

 

Jingles never needed to save our family from a bad guy or burning house, but she was still a dog of her times.

 

She’d grow to be medium-size — not big enough to be burdensome, but certainly not wimpy like one of your pure-bred mini-dogs.

 

She loved to chase a ball or stick — until she didn’t feel like retrieving it anymore.

 

She loved to be chased, too. She’d rip through the yard, cutting left and right, as a half-dozen kids, on a dare, dove to grab her, though no kid ever did.

 

One thing that really made her stand out was her bark. Jingles howled like a coyote.

 

“Arrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy!”

 

She’d point her snout at the sky and howl long and hard as strangers approached. I researched her bark once and learned that howling is the way some dogs announce that they are present and that “this is my area.”

 

It is a warning to strangers to cease and desist — though only strangers would do so when Jingles barked.

 

In later years, as the shrubs my father planted near the front porch grew thick and high, she’d dig a spot in the cool clay beneath them and spend many a summer’s day there; as people approached the house, they’d hear the shrubs howl like a coyote, but see no dog.

BOOK: An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood
6.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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