Collecting Thoughts

This will serve no purpose for anyone but myself.  From time to time I’ve thought it would be interesting (to me) to write down as much as I can remember about my life.  Now is the time to exit if you’re not interested in a boring retrospective of an unaccomplished, un-public, un-cool, uncle, father, husband, son, brother, and grandfather.  This is the first installment of what could be a painfully (for anyone who reads it) long and tedious, trite, telling of a tantalizingly mundane life.

I remember I was born October 7, 1952.  First lie.  I don’t remember it, but that is the date I’ve been told that I entered this world.  I trust that my parents and others haven’t been lying to me all these years so that is the date I am sticking with.

My entrance into the world began with me showing my opinion of the those around me.  I was born breech (my poor mother), which means my rear end took a breath in this world before my lungs did.  The doctor probably thought I was pretty ugly until the rest of me arrived and then it was confirmed.

OK, my first actual memory is when I was about two years old and was hospitalized for surgery on my eye.  I had been born with something called convergent strabismus, or esotropia.  That’s “cross eyed” to you.  My recollection of the experience is broken into vignettes of events that occurred while hospitalized.  I remember my parents talking to a nurse while I was standing at the foot of the hospital crib, and I could see people moving in the hallway outside my room.  My crib was by the door, to the left as you entered the room.  My room was always dark.  I don’t know if they ever turned on the lghts, the only light seemed to come from the hallway.  Across the room was anothe crib with another child in it.  Later, I would learn it was a young girl but that’s all I know about her.

My memory tells me it was during this hospital stay that I heard music playing, and for some reason I think it must have been, for whenever I hear a few old old songs my mind seems to go back to my hospital experience.  Perhaps music helps trigger memories for you, I know it does for me.  The song I most associate with my stay in the hospital is Slim Whitman’s “I Remember You”.  I never knew who sang the song until I was an adult.

There was a patch on the eye that had the surgery and I’m told the staff put restraints on my arms so I couldn’t remove the bandages.  I don’t remember coming home, but I do remember seeing a picture of me, taken at Christmas, with my brand new pedal car.  It was blue and white.  I didn’t know it was mine until I had children of my own and I saw the picture and was told it had been given to me.  Naturally, it is long gone.

Memories don’t necessarily come in sequence so I can’t give an accurate sequence for these events, most which are again, vignettes, of when I was really really young.

I remember listening to “I’ve Been Painting My Wagon Green” over and over again on our record player.  Somewhere, I believe I have a copy of that song, though not the actual record I used to listen to.  After listening to it as an adult, I wondered in amazement that my parents hadn’t unplugged the record player after the first thirty times I listened to it.  There is also a photograph of me listening to the record.

We lived in a tiny two bedroom house with an attached garage that had a “breezeway” in between the house and the garage.  For those who might wonder what a breezeway is, it is essentially an enclosed porch between the two structures where Danny K. got spanked by his mother.  They had been visiting from next door and the time came when she wanted to leave, but Danny didn’t.  Once they exited the back room to the breezeway and the door was shut, there came some muffled reprimand and the sound of flesh on flesh.  Either my mother or I opened the door, because of the disturbance, and saw Danny, squirming with his pants around his ankles while his mother slapped his naked buttocks.  I knew then I never wanted to get spanked that way and was always grateful my parents let me keep a layer of clothing between me and their hands.

The address was, and still is, 163 Post Avenue, Greece, NY.  The house is still standing and is now graced with an addition that is almost twice the size of the original structure.  Our house was to the left of the driveway and was the first house built on the street.  My parents were buying it on a “land contract” from the owner, something they warned us never to do.  I don’t think a conventional mortgage is much different if the term is 30 years or so.

The front of the house had a small uncovered concrete porch with a step or two up to it.  The milk man would leave us milk in glass bottles with cardboard tops.  I don’t know how often, but probably twice a week.  Whenever he would come around all the kids in the neighborhood would chase after him and beg for ice.  Sometimes he would give us some.  He must have had a lot of patience.

As you enter the house the living room was on the right and left.  Straight ahead was the doorway to the kitchen/dining area with the dining table in full view.  On the left side of the living room there was a door on the right side of the east wall.  That was my room.  If you walked through the doorway leading to the kitchen and turned left a short hallway was in front of you with a bathroom on the right and Dale and Randy’s bedroom straight ahead.  Also, there was a door to the attic crawl space in the ceiling just outside the bathroom.

I remember the time Randy came out of the bathroom with a strange look on his face.  We were all watching TV.  My parents asked him why he was looking so strange.  He said there was a rat in the bathroom.  Queenie, our terrier/something, was called in and sent to the bathroom to dispatch the rat.  I heard growling, barking, thumping, squealing and then the bathroom door was opened and Queenie trotted out with a big dead rat in her mouth.  The bathroom was splattered with blood everywhere.  I hoped she hadn’t been bitten, and I don’t think she had, it was all rat blood.  I was glad we had Queenie.

I don’t remember much about Queenie, except that I liked her and thought she was the best dog in the world.  My parents seemed to like her as well, so she must have been a pretty good dog.  A day came when Queenie disappeared.  She was quite old at the time.  We never found her.

In the cooler months of the year my father would have to light the stove in our living room so we would have heat.  It was always fun to watch him strike a match, open the cast iron door, and drop the lit match into the bottom where it would ignite the gas and we would have heat.  Sometimes, he would let me drop the match, but I had two older brothers and they probably had more opportunities to start the fire than I did.

Speaking of older brothers, they were Dale and Randy, in that order.  I also had two younger brother back then (1950′s) Jerry, who is three years younger than me, and Kevin, who was pretty much a baby when we lived there and probably one reason why we had to move.  We shared a bedroom, maybe even a bed, for all I know.  Dale and Randy had the other bedroom.  My parents slept on a pull out couch or a roll away bed or something in the living room.  I don’t think I ever remember seeing them in bed because I went to bed before them and got up after they did.

My father sometimes worked two jobs, my mother also worked at some apple peeling factory (keep in mind this is from a 6 or 7 year old’s perspective).  Most of the time mom was a homemaker.  Too many kids to work, there were no such things as day care, and babysitters were few and far between.

One of my father’s jobs was with the local General Motors division, which at that time was called Rochester Products.  At the time of this writing (2007) it is called Delphi, or Delphi Automotive Systems, after going through several name changes and finally being “spun off” from General Motors.  He worked there for 35 or 37 years, I can’t remember.  Whichever, it was too long to be there.

His other job, and the one I thought was fun, was at a gas station, “Norms” Gulf station.  It was on the corner of Dewey Avenue and Latta Road, in Rochester, NY.  It has been replaced by blacktop and a bank drive through station.  When we would visit Norm always had a drawer with lollipops and he would let us have whichever flavor we wanted.  My favorite was Root Beer.  He also had the Coke machines that you would reach down into to get your bottle (glass of course) of Coke.

It seemed like it was always summer and summer was never the humid oppressing beast we experience now.  My brothers would play baseball and I mostly didn’t because I was too young.  The one time I remember they let me play, I got smashed in the nose by a pitch.  My nose bled profusely and I’ve never cared for baseball since then.

We had a tree on the far west side of our yard that was good for climbing.  Sometimes we would get into a dispute with the neighbor about who owned the tree.  He was an alcoholic, so I think it was more the booze than property line encroachment that spurred his tirades towards us.

One year, in the late summer as we kids were playing up and down the streets, I stepped into his driveway and it collapsed underneath me.  I wasn’t a heavy child, its just that there was some kind of erosion going on under his driveway that no one knew about.  I’m not sure what the liquid was that I was floundering in (probably sewage, who knows?) but I was having a difficult time and feared I would drown.  My two older brothers were just out of reaching distance and one of them, Dale, made the comment that he didn’t want to get to close because he also might fall in.  Somehow, no thanks to my brothers, I managed to find a secure shoreline to the little pond I had made, and dragged myself out of what I thought was quicksand.  The highway department came out the next day and fixed the problem with the driveway, but they didn’t fix the problem with my brothers.

Possibly to be continued with more stories, winter, bunk beds, bee stings, snakes, snapping turtles, blood suckers, and whatever else I can remember . . .