Playing the Cat Whistle

My mom, my two brothers, two sisters and myself had made the big time. The oldest of us had good jobs and we even were paying on a little house in Atlanta. We boys were in our late teens, early 20's (as the oldest I had left our little town and gone to work in Atlanta right out of the 11th grade, finishing high school at night, the advance guard of the Breeds who invaded Atlanta). My sisters were around 16 and 10 at the time of this story.

It seems that Ginny, the older of my two sisters, had an unexpected talent. One early evening when she was about to go on a date (and her preparing for a date was always an ordeal with only one bathroom and three brothers in the house -- Hours! Days! Years! she would stay in that bathroom!), she and her new beau were about to go out the door. Like all of us at that tender teen age, extreme self-consciousness was the norm. She had made it safely thus far -- her brothers behaving themselves with reasonable decorum. It was the cat that did her in.

The cat had decided it needed to go out at the exact time that Ginny and her date were making their desperate escape from her family's penetrating gaze. Ginny picked it up wrong-end forward and turned for all three to go. As the cat's butt arc swung round and past Ginny's young man, it let out a loud high toot. Of course, we three boys fell all over ourselves. From then on, we let the news be known far and wide. Our sister had hidden talent -- she was the only one we knew who could play the Cat Whistle. Of course, I would never tell anyone about that today.

The Art of the Empty Hand

My Uncle Jay, a driver for Safety Cabs in our rural Georgia town, ("Ride safely with Safety, dial 3545" went their radio jingle) gave me my first hand weapon: a sap made of a chunk of lead sitting atop a spring all neatly bound in leather and finished with a wrist loop. It was right after my dad deserted our family.

I suppose my being the oldest of the five kids singled me out for this honor. "You might need this," Uncle Jay said, showing me how to use it. I kept it under my pillow at night. My mom found out about it and took it from me. I think she is the only one who could have done that.

Maybe that is part of what prompted me later to learn the art of the empty hand (kara-te) on Okinawa: If you have nothing, nothing can be taken from you. Well, there you have it. Dad. No dad. Sap. No sap. The art of the empty hand. As they taught us in Sunday School: "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

The Fine Art of Rock Sniffing

When I was a boy in a little southern town, Bobby Page, whose Daddy drove a Pepsi-Cola truck, taught me the fine art of rock sniffing. I saw him doing it and asked about it. He said get your own rock. I've been getting my own rock ever since. Nosing around the Grand Canyon helps me sniff deep time. You want to know about this? I utter the words of my teacher: 

Get your own rock.

Dreamy Kid

This story is a joke on myself, but then all our stories might be that if we look at them with the right eyes. I was in the fourth grade at Dawson Street School, just a few blocks from the house where I was staying with my grandmother and grandfather (my father was often between jobs and my grandparents would take us in).

This particular morning, I dressed to go to school. It was a cold morning and we walked to school in those days so I made sure I wore a sweater. I meandered along with the other kids cracking ice in the puddles with my feet and with rocks and sticks as I went. When I entered my class room, I went to the back to the cloak room (that's what we called it in those days though no one I knew wore a cloak) and began to take off my sweater. To my surprised horror, I had forgotten to put on a shirt. I was a dreamy kid and still am. I hastily buttoned my sweater back up and took my seat. Saved! No one had noticed. The bell rang and the school day began.

Then there was the fateful knock at the door. All eyes turned in that direction. The teacher opened it and one of the sixth graders stood there and handed an item to the teacher saying in a loud voice I was sure could be heard all the way over in Alabama, "Richard forgot to put on his shirt!" Laughter everywhere as my true state of consciousness was revealed. No place to hide. The walk back to the cloak room with my shirt helped me later to understand the Stations of the Cross.

Ratatouille

My mother carried a mortal fear of mice since, according to her report, she was chased as a little girl by a little boy with a dead mouse. I heard her scream one pre-dawn morning (she rose early and went to work across town, Atlanta, before her five grown and growing children went to their jobs or to school). I rushed into the kitchen where she stood atop the table. "A rat!" she said, looking fearfully toward the water heater. With me blocking the approach of her nemesis, she left the kitchen and shut its door.

It WAS a rat. A large one, which had to be removed from the kitchen or my mom would never return. I stood there barefoot, in my skivvies. I got a broom and poked the rat huddled in the corner behind the water heater which prompted it to charge straight toward my unprotected feet. I did a flat-footed straight up and back jump for the safety of a kitchen chair seat.

The chair went out from under me and I fell on my back on the rat. We both let out a yell, both scrambling wildly to make our escape. We each did.

My mom caught the trolley to her job. I resumed my early morning action as older brother, part of which was to play John Phillip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever at high volume so as to gently and tenderly awaken my brothers and sisters to the dewy morn.

If Blame Be Needed

You can blame this, if blame be needed, on my sister Ginny who put it in my head that I should write an autobiography. For the family if no one else. She seems to think I have led an interesting life. I’ll say this: I never allowed myself to get bored for longer than a few minutes. Life is full of opportunity for exploration.

Eufaula

It was 1949. I was eleven. Mama got on the bus with us five children, the youngest a baby in her arms. We left Georgia, went across the time-zone Chattahoochee River which at that time ran free, undammed. Into the future, an hour and a lifetime ahead. Daddy was trying again at a new job as a bread truck driver in a little Alabama town. He would try for three more years at which point he would desert us, leaving us in a slum house with broken windows back in Georgia from whence we came. The new-to-us Alabama rental had no furniture when we arrived. A fire was built in the grate of the chimney in the living room. That first night we slept on pallets on the floor. Bit-by-bit we put a new life together in that town.