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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2018 15:27:06 GMT -5
I don't know if I'll post much here. But I have had a bit of a writing bug lately. So we'll see. Anyway...this came out today.
The pasture seemed enormous. It wasn’t. Just about three acres. But when you’re four foot nothing that’s a lot of room to ramble. Mingo and I would go out hunting. It was best in the snow because you could track the critters.
It wasn’t overgrown then. The horses kept it down even though it really was pretty poor fodder. There was grass. But also a lot of alkali and a ton of milkweed and snake-grass. And while you’d think that it would be a great place to play ball the horses left landmines that made that a messy endeavor.
At the end of the pasture was the goldmine. The SIGN! The pasture butted against the interstate. Dad joked that he wanted to put a gate in and cut those miles off his drive to work. And at the end was The Sign, advertising The Ramda Inn to the entire world. Or at least that part of the world driving through southern Idaho.
I don’t know how old I was when I first climbed to the top of The Sign. I’m sure that Bob helped me because he was like a damn squirrel when it came to climbing. Kite in the tree…send Bob up to get it. Antenna lead come undone…Bob will climb the antenna and reconnect it. I’m sure that he helped me climb The Sign.
It went up forever. Wooden cross-beams on each end. Great for tennis shoes to grip. Equally great for splinters in your hands. And at the top you would sit precariously on a two by six with the metal of the sign nailed too it. Frigid cold in the winter. Drinking in the summer sun so it seemed it would scorch your legs. You could see for miles. Watching the semi-trucks traveling the interstate and blowing their horns at us as we pumped our arms up and down. Setting the walkie-talkies to channel 19 hoping they’d talk to us for a few minutes. Maybe one would be Uncle Hugh…though he occasionally would stop his truck on the road and hop the fence to have a cup of coffee and talk to Dad for a few minutes.
Nobody ever fell. We pulled a lot of splinters out of hands and arms and knees. And we ripped some pants and shirts. But nothing was ever quite like sitting on the top of the Ramada Inn sign with the breeze on your face and the sun on your legs listening to the semi’s honk at you as they flew by.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 25, 2018 22:35:34 GMT -5
I'm not really sure when I first entered the store. I'm sure it was with Mom. Both she and Dad were big readers. I got at least that much from them. I remember a big brown paper grocery sack full of paperbacks to go to the store for trade. A slightly smaller volume of paperbacks would magically come back to replace them.
Once upon a time it had clearly been a house. A smallish bungalow. Then it became a magic cave full of amazing delights. The best stuff was toward the back and around the corner. I don't recall how many bookcases. No less than two. Probably three. And they weren't short. I could reach the top shelves by the time I went by myself...but at first it was on tip-toes.
Mom would go on Saturdays and get her hair done. And then we'd go have lunch with Dad. So for roughly an hour I was on my own to wander around town. The path seldom varied. Rexall Drug (they had a great comic book rack). The Circle-K (they had a smallish comic book rack but sometimes different stuff). And then...The Bookworm.
The smell was amazing. Just slightly musty. Not in a bad way. Just enough to remind you that these books had been read. They had given up their stories and were now ready to find a new home, a new mind to enlighten and to thrill and to tantalize. And back toward the back and around the corner were new worlds. Untold worlds. Worlds you could only reach by rocket-ship. Worlds beneath our world that required a great machine to dig down into it. Worlds with green men and white apes and princesses who were rescued by brave men from other worlds. There were entire shelves with black spines and covers that were populated by a bronze man in a ripped shirt who was the best at everything and who made sure the evil-doers paid the price for their nefarious actions. It had worlds where small thieves could do huge things with magic swords and magic rings.
It wasn't perfect. If it were there would have been old magazines made of questionable paper and four-color covers that had populated those heroes before they moved to paperback. But if they were there I didn't find them. And I wasn't perfect. Because I know that there were rows and rows of books with detectives who took no guff off anyone. Books with Gold Medals on their spine and in the upper left corner that told you that some poor schmuck was going to get his head handed to him by some dame. The me of then didn't care. The me of now wishes I did.
There is magic in caves. It's just that the cave may look like a weathered bungalow. And the magic may be a stamp on an used paperback that is going to transport you far from the fields we know...to the fields we hope to know.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 15, 2018 22:10:12 GMT -5
When the boys were young we used to go to a lot of new-construction open houses. Mostly because it was something cheap to do. One of the constants was that Nathan would look for a room under the stairs of any two story house. And if one was there he'd claim it as his own. Apparently he took away the wrong lesson from Harry Potter. Because to him, the room under the stairs was magic. What he didn't know is that I had a room under the stairs growing up. And it was magic.
The room under the stairs had more in common with a dungeon than a place of magic. It housed the back of the furnace. So it was always hot. In the winter the furnace kept it blazing. In the summer...well the whole damn house was hot in the summer. The floor was concrete. There wasn't a light...any light coming in came from a flashlight or from the open door. It was small. Even as a child you couldn't stand up straight except at the one end.
The magic lay in the contents. No library this. That would be far to ostentatious a name for such a humble little room. It was the Book Room. On the tallest wall were four shelves that went the length of the tiny room. And on those shelves congregated the books that no longer found a home on the bookcases throughout the house. But they weren't detritus. There were hidden gems there...just waiting for a boring rainy utterly uninteresting day to lure someone into perusing the shelves...and the boxes. For under the bottom shelf...and against the far wall were boxes containing periodical ephemera that was as wonderful as the books on the shelves.
The top shelf was daunting. Largely green and grey and hardbound. Inside were the tales of detectives that had come in the mail and been read by Mom before ultimately finding their way to the shelves of the book room. It took something special to delve into the world as seen by A. A. Fair...a world I've since re-encountered in luridly covered paper. Further down were the residuals of earlier childhoods. Hardbacks with covers from television shows long gone. Adventure tomes with dogs and ice climbers and the hint of terrifying creatures from the dark on the covers. Slim volumes filled with pictures and small words that told of puppys that dug under the fence and kittens without mittens, an owl and a pussycat and a Peaky Beaky and pink elephant with golden spots.
The boxes were legend. In the corner were comics. Not the ones I bought and kept in a wooden box in my own closet. These were from before. A banana box full of ducks and little monsters and mickey and the kids from Riverdale. And next to it...possibly a greater treasure. Rescued from garage sales...and remnants of older brothers a mix of Car-Toons and Cycle-Toons and Cracked and...treasure of treasures...the vast majority of the issues of Mad Magazine from the mid-70s.
There was one odd box. It contained the joys of the past. Wooden circus animals. A rust colored plastic bucket filled with metal cars and trucks in all shapes and sizes. Round little bodies with spherical heads and painted on faces that used to run farms and drive tiny plastic cars and entertain for hours. Sometimes on very lonely days those old toys just being there made the clouds part.
They may not have known it. But there can indeed be magic under the stairs.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 18, 2019 22:10:20 GMT -5
It seemed the biggest tree in the world. Oh, I knew it wasn't. I was fully aware of Redwoods and Sequoias. But I was sure it was the biggest tree I'd ever seen, for all that I'd been in some forests with tremendous trees. But this tree went from the bottom of Grandpa and Grandma's place to the top...and that was a long ways.
Grandma and Grandpa's property was on three levels. The main portion of the house was on the top level as was the barn. Grandma's garden was between the barn and the house. At least it seemed like it was hers because she did more there than Grandpa did. Past the house, on the opposite side from the barn was Grandpa's garden. Well...it's where the raspberries were. And they were the most important part of all the gardens. One learned to pace oneself. At least one did after the first time of gorging on far too many red raspberries. There were also yellow raspberries. But those were not that plentiful. And they were Grandpa's. Not that he wouldn't share. But they were doled out as preciously as their color would indicate.
From there you could run down a slope to the second level. There wasn't that much there. The entrance to the basement. A little trail that lead up to behind the barn. A decent place for running or playing with trucks...but not terribly exciting.
Then there was the trail that lead down to the bridge over the creek and the lower level. The creek...well we called it a creek. It went through “The Woods” so it had to be a creek. And it was great for wading in and for floating in and for throwing sticks off one side of the bridge and watching them come out the other and for catching water skippers. There was another garden across the creek. And in the woods there was a blackberry patch which was great for eating but awful for thorns. And the chicken coop was down there and by the chicken coop was the base of the tree.
The tree grew up from the bottom level and up over the creek and over the second level and you could climb up and behind the barn. No waiting. No hassle. If for whatever reason you needed to (or more likely wanted to) reach the top...none of that silly running up the trails. You could climb the tree and you were back on top (albeit behind the barn which was a bit of a no-man's land and was riddled with cheet grass).
But the tree wasn't always your friend. It caused catastrophe one summer afternoon. I was down on playing by the creek. Just me staying with Grandpa and Grandma for a couple weeks. Siblings at home being awfully old. No cousins around to play with. But that was okay. There was always stuff to explore. For whatever reason, certainly important, now lost to time, I had to get to the top. I suspect there was something in the barn calling to me. And as I climbed the tree...it struck. My foot got caught in a some branches. And in my normal patient way I yanked it free. The foot came free. But the shoe didn't. The shoe fell...down...at least ten or fifteen feet...into the creek.
The creek water was, in the best of times, muddy. And it definitely had a current. And that shoe...well it was gone. And my world began to crumble. It's not that it was my favorite shoe. Or that I had a great sentimental attachment to it. It was my ONLY shoe (well other than it's mate that was on my other foot). Shoes didn't just grow on trees (though apparently the fell off them). You got a pair of shoes for school when it started. And you probably got a pair of tennis shoes when you could tell that summer was in the offing. And that was it. Woe be unto him whose feet grew too much during the year. And if the shoes were starting to fall apart but it wasn't quite time for a new pair...there were ways to fix them.
It was not nearly time for new shoes and through my mind flashed the prospect of going the rest of the summer barefoot. Or at least limping along on one shoe. Sure...there were things you could do barefoot. But you could not walk to the Circle-K. Maybe you could cut across the apple orchard (heaven help you if Grandpa caught you)...but the blacktop in summer was not conducive to my bare feet. I slunk to the house. And announced the devastating news as bravely as you can when you're 8 and your world is crumbling for lack of a shoe. And Grandma gave me her crooked look. And Grandpa chuckled his Grandpa chuckle. And I climbed into way-back of the car with a couple of comic books and we drove to Ontario and I got shoes at a time of year that nobody had business getting shoes. And never were shoes ever more tightly tied for the rest of the summer. That tree wasn't getting another chance to eat my new shoes.
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