POPCORN, PINOCCHIO & THE WHALE - A Child's Tale

POPCORN, PINOCCHIO & THE WHALE - A Child's Tale(L. Douglas St. Ours) POPCORN, PINNOCHIO, AND THE WHALE

How privileged could one be?
I began my life perfectly healthy
in the middle of 1950.

A first born caucasian male,
my cash strapped parents
barely clinging to the tail end
of a rising national tide of unprecedented affluence.

My infant to toddler world was a walk up flat.
In the communal cellar mom scrubbed our laundry
on a washboard each day before taking me on my daily stroll thru the local park.

Dad held two jobs
as he wrapped up his final year at college.
Thanks to Uncle sam's G.I. Bill picking up the tuition costs,
my father was the first in his family to pursue a higher education.

Neither my parents nor the spinster landladies
had a telephone or a car, consequently in the middle of one night
Miss Aggie, the elder, suffered a stroke,
and Miss Nellie, the younger, summoned Dad
to help lift her back in bed, while Mom dashed out and ran
in her bare feet down the lamp post street
to fetch the doctor from his house deep in sleep.

Dad earned a B.A. degree in business administration
right at the start of the decade when America reigned
as the supreme undisputed business champion of the world
while Asia and Europe were still cleaning up war rubble.

There was big money to be made in the hustle of sales and marketing,
but my Father, uncomfortable with the Willy Loman
hyperbolic hail and farewell back slapping faker comraderie,
instead chose a more staid niche as a buyer
in a booming aircraft assembly factory.

21 months into my life and my brother arrived from maternity,
the second of what would eventually be six siblings.
On a gross weekly wage of $70 dad managed to support
all four of us and scrape together a $500 down payment on a $9000 rowhouse.

Meanwhile I became so envious of my baby brother's monopoly of my Mother's embrace,
I stopped walking to compel her to lift and hold me in her loving arms too.

Through my fifth year on Earth
Mom was my indispensable refuge
a warm island of happiness
buffeted by the ominous winds of change and growing up.
She was a respite from the storm tossed ocean
endured by the older kids who had to go to school
and ride bicyles without training wheels.
I vowed to myself to be as good as gold
if that's what it took not to be exiled from her side.

I couldn't imagine not staying with Mom till the happily ever after,
never to suffer the existential separation, the dreaded angst
in the loosening strings of the vanishing apron
dropping me into frantic semi-psychotic bucket
of learning to swim on my own.

But I played too much back then
to let that specter cloud my innocent mind
and besides Dad got home late and Mom couldn't drive
and I could easily manhandle my two frisky little brothers.

But then on my fourth birthday came that abrupt awakening
as Mom delivered a bitter taste of things to come.
An event at my tender age, I could've neither predicted nor prepared for,
and certainly never suspected - A SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTY.

Initially I couldn't have been more delighted when Mom insisted on holding my hand,
escorting me down into the shadowy and yet comfortably familiar ordinary cellar.
I had no idea waiting in hushed silence in the laundry room, were friends and relatives
who suddenly metamorphized into crazed celebrants crashing the scene,
rushing me just as I reached the foot of the stairs.

Sounding like a tribe of natives out of a Tarzan movie, they shouted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"
The outburst felt like an ambush, stunning, frightening, and panicking me into delerious hysteria,
high pitched and hopelessly struggling against Mom's iron grip dragging me off the bannister
dizzy, kicking, and screaming for an escape from this unbearably shrill lair
of what seemed at the time, the apocalypse of childhood.

A year after that disaster, Mom having learned her lesson,
nixed any notion for an unexpected group celebration.
Instead, for my fifth birthday, she decided to take me
to my first ever movie and my first opportunity
to see on a screen real colors and not just black and white.

We didn't own an automobile which was unusual on our block
where most families owned one for the husbands to drive to work.
Dad had to hitch or carpool a ride to his job
at least for those few months before he got the used Chevy.
Virtually all the moms stayed home, so on weekdays
from breakfast to suppertime, our street was without cars.

So Mom took me on the trolley to an ornate palatial movie theater.
It was downtown where all the cinemas were in those days.

Other than church, I had never before been to a place
where you weren't allowed to smoke, a rule unique to theaters then.
It was cavernous and spooky with a purple Wizard of Oz curtain covering the stage
and all the seats at street level were reserved for the people who shared my pigmentation.
Upstairs in a loft with a balcony, the blacks sat in a more cramped out of the way space.
I never saw them though I heard one white man refer to the upstairs patrons
as "the peanut gallery."

Admission was 40 cents for Mom and a dime for me.
After digging a couple more dimes from her purse to buy me a popcorn and soda,
we selected and settled into our seats in time to watch the magic drapes divide
and swish scross the stage and disappear into the wings
as a beam of light speared the dust,
and I felt content again
as Mom pointed to the brightening screen and the wonders to come.

It was Walt Disney's PINOCCHIO sucking me in and sweeping me up
into this nice little story about a wooden boy built by this kindly old wood making man
and brought to life by a cute little talking cricket
who knew and shared with us watchers
his secret way of wishing that would make our dreams come true.

Alas the fairy tale flavor was too good to last
as the orchestral music took on a somber almost alarming tone
with the introduction of the shifty eye fox and his clueless alley cat accomplice.
I tensed, cringed, and leaned closer to my mother.
My fears escalated when the guileless Pinnochio wandered into the shady orbit of the fox
as the day turned to night and the sound track's soothing strings got lost
in the clashing cymbals and thunderous percussion.

In a split second before I could close my eyes, a mighty whale exploded from the depths
as I ducked into the shelter of my mother's lap.
Oh my God! That leviathon swallowed poor Pinocchio.
It was more than I could stomach, my gut disintegrated as I lost it all
in a hurling trauma vomit of soda pop sticky popcorn
all over Mom's skirt and blouse.

I burrowed my sloppy sobbing face into her encumbered busom,
my shattered self smearing residual bile on everything I touched
as she rushed me out of the theater and hailed the next streetcar.
Safely on board my convulsions abated
with the reassuring ringing of the bell
and Mom's anxious hug softly squeezing out the horrific vision.

But still I was in no condition to hear or believe
that the story had a happily ever after end.


BY L DOUGLAS ST OURS
March 2010