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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Family & Friends
- Subject: Biography / Autobiography
- Published: 07/17/2012
A GOOD RICH LIFE IN A SMALL POOR PLACE
M, from Baltimore, Maryland, United StatesA GOOD RICH LIFE IN A SMALL POOR PLACE
Strip mined vistas,
our ten acre spread
trespassed by poachers,
an old fashioned four room
school serving eight grades,
a car engine that died
every wintry night,
a broken furnace
and frozen pipes,
a clogged septic,
endless snow
and concerns
about dying
in a firetrap,
dad's little
Napoleon boss,
and my self inflicted
stabbing after never
seeing those promised ponies.
A slanted way of looking
at what for sure was true,
but we made that ponyless stable
into an elaborate playhouse,
we picked berries, peaches, apples, and grapes
grown on our very own land,
mom canning jellies
steaming the country kitchen
while I frolicked with my ever only pet dog,
playing football and war on a vast grass field,
tobogganing across the meadows,
ice skating on the pond,
and salt of the earth neighbors
next door on a Christmas tree farm,
three brothers becoming best buddies
and Robert still around...
the happiness lasted six months.
The sprawling eighty year old gable and frame house
with its long side porch looked as comfortable as a hundred mile shoe.
On the brown fields it stood like a sentry
worn a little rough by the winter and the wind.
Our property stretched out 200 times the size of our rowhouse lot
and 40 times the area of our cape cod plat.
Before our descent into pretty scenic Charlottesville
coal ugly Byesville would be our all too brief Garden of Eden.
We brothers romped all over the hills and dales
exploring out buildings, the marsh, ash heaps, and railroad sidings.
We pictured ourselves in a poor man's "Bonanza" our favorite western
roaming and taming our pocket size "Ponderosa"
Rob, Greg, and me playing the Cartwrights
Little Joe, Hoss, and Adam respectively.
And speaking of the air waves,
the nearest significant city was 75 miles east
causing TV reception to be fuzzy when not erratic.
My only memory of a primetime broadcast
was watching a somber President Kennedy
announce the Soviets had secreted offensive missiles in Cuba
and how he had ordered a naval blockade
and implied it might all lead to nuclear war.
I was glued to screen along with mom and dad
stunned fretful for my future...
would I live beyond the age of twelve?
I kept telling myself we had a chance of surviving
the conflagration way out here in the hinterland
far from the bulls eye cities.
That crisis passed and we got back to picking
the last of fall's fruits so mom could bake
more of her deep dish pies and jar her glorious jellies.
When we bored of being the Cartwrights,
we'd pretend to be the three Musketeers
or Robin Hood and his merry men
or the swamp Fox hiking the forests,
seeking out enemies, rolling in the meadows,
getting lost in the aromatic maze of the Christmas tree nursery,
chasing the cat who attacked the rabbits
and spooked the groundhogs back into their dens,
sledding headlong into fences
and tunneling into snowdrifts
prompting mom to warn us
about cave-ins and suffocation.
And wasn't I privileged
when I became the first sibling to get a private bedroom
and then my parents bought me a German Shepherd
which I named Queenie after the abandoned puppy
found by Dondi the war orphan in the comic strip.
Queenie ruthlessly competed with that feral cat
chasing hares he couldn't catch and
a solitary raccoon he nearly killed.
Down creaky wooden steps
the brooding spider infested fieldstone cellar
seemed as haunted as a tomb and as forbidding as a dungeon.
I always suspected a troll might be hiding down in the dust
invisible in the flickering glow of a single light as dim as a little moon.
Under the rough hewn splintered joist beams,
a noisy rattle trap furnace squatted next to an oil drum
as dark and as huge as a whale.
We got home from school one day
to discover mom crying and shivering
under several blankets huddled with my baby sister
after that dinosaur boiler croaked
and before we could get it fixed
the temperature in our living room dropped to 26 degrees Fahrenheit.
The entire structure was a fire waiting to happen but
the drafty rope and sash windows were as tall as doors making easy an escape.
One night I stepped onto the porch, taking out the trash
and got scared shitless by an owl perched in the dark eave
his steely eyes within three feet of mine rocked me
into a panic, spilling the garbage and banging my butt
scrambling back into the house...the owl never flinched.
Dreary gray skies mirrored that interesting season
of burst pipes, brown well water, and dad's nightly struggle
to keep our aging Plymouth alive through too many to count sub zero nights.
Each evening before turning in he'd throw on a coat, head out,
and start the car and run the engine for about an hour to warm it up
and immediately after shutting it off...swaddling the motor
and the crankshaft in blankets to trap the heat
in the often forlorn hope that it would start again
on a twenty degree below zero dawn.
That cat came with the property
and other than a saucer of milk,
survived killing prey for food
which kept our mouse population in check.
The cat and Queenie shared a mutual hatred
in one fight Queenie suffered a bloodied snout.
One day playing hide and seek, we found the bones of her kittens
beneath the lovely boughs of the front yard fir.
As would be the case when we moved to Virginia
my outsider status was made obvious by my foreign accent,
but in depressed Ohio instead of being stigmatized, bullied, and shunned,
the barely literate students idolized me like I was an all wise avatar,
whose sophisticated smarts would supposedly rub off
and lead them out of this dead end wilderness.
I mean these were junior high age kids
who couldn't conjugate verbs
or spell single syllable words
or perform addition and subtraction
and what was really heartbreaking was that they really wanted to learn.
LBJ's War on Poverty was still three years into the future.
The school was so primitive and poor,
my mom with what little we had
bought and donated the textbooks.
There was no such thing as kindergarten...
so my younger sister skipped going directly into first grade.
I was in the seventh grade which shared the same room and teacher as the eighth grade.
She was a battleaxe nun who smelled like she never bathed
and futilely used intimidation to literally beat
some sense into these deprived children’s heads.
The kids wore frayed hand me downs
and for church clipped ties onto their T-shirts
There was an oddball Ukrainian boy, the son of a doctor,
who was more clever and conceited than his peers.
He invited me to his birthday party
where he initiated a game I never heard of called "spin the bottle"
and so through that game I was awkwardly introduced to kissing girls.
In spite of my parents' understandable stress over
this little Siberian style gulag far from our family roots
while maintaining a dilapidated house, the utter isolation,
and dad toiling under that bastard of a boss,
I treasured and will for all time treasure Byesville
as the idyllic interlude between living in the city and then the south.
Byesville became my very own Marblehead, mom's quaint childhood remembrance
of colonials, a clock tower, salt boxes, cobblestones of
that rocky outcrop harbor town in the spirit of 76.
A fleeting felicity with her grandparents,
a respite from foster homes and
the broken marriage of a distant mother and her absent father.
I like mom became in later years wistful
for a childhood through city and suburb filled
with maternal affection and paternal protection,
but it was lowly downtrodden Byesville
which drew our family so close brimming with bubbling over love
like the characters you'd see in "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver"
and years later much like "The Waltons."
Early in the spring of 63
as the snow pack melted swelling Wills Creek
deluging our only road to the county seat,
we relocated again to Charlottesville as the lovely valleys
ushered in spring on the pink delicate dogwood blossoms
and where dad would find the best job of his career
near the university founded on Jeffersonian ideals.
Ironically beautiful Charlottesville as I entered my teens
would become a long and personal nightmare.
But it was Byesville on every fall weekend
that dad would play football with us boys
on the field in front of the crumbling stable
occasionally joined by his coworkers
including a varsity football alumnus of Penn State
who once tackled and drove me
into branches jabbing me like a pin cushion.
Then in late autumn dad was our project engineer
directing us three boys in gathering and stacking rocks and timber
to dam our cattail marsh into an ice skating pond just in time for winter.
That Christmas was the most bountiful ever with gifts
including ice skates, a toboggan, corduroy robes,
replica M-1 army rifles, and for me a transistor radio.
My favorite was a sheath knife which I used to carve wood.
Growing up my parents kept sharp cutlery out of reach.
So thanks to my inexperience and my narrow focus on the task at hand,
I didn't recognize the obvious danger when I realized In digging a groove
I got more leverage pulling the blade towards me
and so when it got stuck...I pulled it with all my might
and instantly stabbed my thigh where it joins the groin.
I punctured myself with the entire five inch blade
the hilt preventing it from going right out the other end.
Instinctively I drew out the blade and my blood gushed out
like I had pulled the drain plug in a bath tub
then I bled and shrieked like a wounded pig.
My parents rushed upstairs and quickly pressed cotton towels to the gash.
Fortunately dad got the car to start and hurried me to the hospital
which happened to be osteopathic but there was no time to be picky.
Dad stood by as they staunched the flow and stitched me up.
The attending doctor asked dad
if the hospital could report
the incident to the weekly paper,
and even though Byesville was starving for news,
dad firmly albeit politely refused.
by L DOUGLAS ST OURS
June 2010
A GOOD RICH LIFE IN A SMALL POOR PLACE(L DOUGLAS ST OURS)
A GOOD RICH LIFE IN A SMALL POOR PLACE
Strip mined vistas,
our ten acre spread
trespassed by poachers,
an old fashioned four room
school serving eight grades,
a car engine that died
every wintry night,
a broken furnace
and frozen pipes,
a clogged septic,
endless snow
and concerns
about dying
in a firetrap,
dad's little
Napoleon boss,
and my self inflicted
stabbing after never
seeing those promised ponies.
A slanted way of looking
at what for sure was true,
but we made that ponyless stable
into an elaborate playhouse,
we picked berries, peaches, apples, and grapes
grown on our very own land,
mom canning jellies
steaming the country kitchen
while I frolicked with my ever only pet dog,
playing football and war on a vast grass field,
tobogganing across the meadows,
ice skating on the pond,
and salt of the earth neighbors
next door on a Christmas tree farm,
three brothers becoming best buddies
and Robert still around...
the happiness lasted six months.
The sprawling eighty year old gable and frame house
with its long side porch looked as comfortable as a hundred mile shoe.
On the brown fields it stood like a sentry
worn a little rough by the winter and the wind.
Our property stretched out 200 times the size of our rowhouse lot
and 40 times the area of our cape cod plat.
Before our descent into pretty scenic Charlottesville
coal ugly Byesville would be our all too brief Garden of Eden.
We brothers romped all over the hills and dales
exploring out buildings, the marsh, ash heaps, and railroad sidings.
We pictured ourselves in a poor man's "Bonanza" our favorite western
roaming and taming our pocket size "Ponderosa"
Rob, Greg, and me playing the Cartwrights
Little Joe, Hoss, and Adam respectively.
And speaking of the air waves,
the nearest significant city was 75 miles east
causing TV reception to be fuzzy when not erratic.
My only memory of a primetime broadcast
was watching a somber President Kennedy
announce the Soviets had secreted offensive missiles in Cuba
and how he had ordered a naval blockade
and implied it might all lead to nuclear war.
I was glued to screen along with mom and dad
stunned fretful for my future...
would I live beyond the age of twelve?
I kept telling myself we had a chance of surviving
the conflagration way out here in the hinterland
far from the bulls eye cities.
That crisis passed and we got back to picking
the last of fall's fruits so mom could bake
more of her deep dish pies and jar her glorious jellies.
When we bored of being the Cartwrights,
we'd pretend to be the three Musketeers
or Robin Hood and his merry men
or the swamp Fox hiking the forests,
seeking out enemies, rolling in the meadows,
getting lost in the aromatic maze of the Christmas tree nursery,
chasing the cat who attacked the rabbits
and spooked the groundhogs back into their dens,
sledding headlong into fences
and tunneling into snowdrifts
prompting mom to warn us
about cave-ins and suffocation.
And wasn't I privileged
when I became the first sibling to get a private bedroom
and then my parents bought me a German Shepherd
which I named Queenie after the abandoned puppy
found by Dondi the war orphan in the comic strip.
Queenie ruthlessly competed with that feral cat
chasing hares he couldn't catch and
a solitary raccoon he nearly killed.
Down creaky wooden steps
the brooding spider infested fieldstone cellar
seemed as haunted as a tomb and as forbidding as a dungeon.
I always suspected a troll might be hiding down in the dust
invisible in the flickering glow of a single light as dim as a little moon.
Under the rough hewn splintered joist beams,
a noisy rattle trap furnace squatted next to an oil drum
as dark and as huge as a whale.
We got home from school one day
to discover mom crying and shivering
under several blankets huddled with my baby sister
after that dinosaur boiler croaked
and before we could get it fixed
the temperature in our living room dropped to 26 degrees Fahrenheit.
The entire structure was a fire waiting to happen but
the drafty rope and sash windows were as tall as doors making easy an escape.
One night I stepped onto the porch, taking out the trash
and got scared shitless by an owl perched in the dark eave
his steely eyes within three feet of mine rocked me
into a panic, spilling the garbage and banging my butt
scrambling back into the house...the owl never flinched.
Dreary gray skies mirrored that interesting season
of burst pipes, brown well water, and dad's nightly struggle
to keep our aging Plymouth alive through too many to count sub zero nights.
Each evening before turning in he'd throw on a coat, head out,
and start the car and run the engine for about an hour to warm it up
and immediately after shutting it off...swaddling the motor
and the crankshaft in blankets to trap the heat
in the often forlorn hope that it would start again
on a twenty degree below zero dawn.
That cat came with the property
and other than a saucer of milk,
survived killing prey for food
which kept our mouse population in check.
The cat and Queenie shared a mutual hatred
in one fight Queenie suffered a bloodied snout.
One day playing hide and seek, we found the bones of her kittens
beneath the lovely boughs of the front yard fir.
As would be the case when we moved to Virginia
my outsider status was made obvious by my foreign accent,
but in depressed Ohio instead of being stigmatized, bullied, and shunned,
the barely literate students idolized me like I was an all wise avatar,
whose sophisticated smarts would supposedly rub off
and lead them out of this dead end wilderness.
I mean these were junior high age kids
who couldn't conjugate verbs
or spell single syllable words
or perform addition and subtraction
and what was really heartbreaking was that they really wanted to learn.
LBJ's War on Poverty was still three years into the future.
The school was so primitive and poor,
my mom with what little we had
bought and donated the textbooks.
There was no such thing as kindergarten...
so my younger sister skipped going directly into first grade.
I was in the seventh grade which shared the same room and teacher as the eighth grade.
She was a battleaxe nun who smelled like she never bathed
and futilely used intimidation to literally beat
some sense into these deprived children’s heads.
The kids wore frayed hand me downs
and for church clipped ties onto their T-shirts
There was an oddball Ukrainian boy, the son of a doctor,
who was more clever and conceited than his peers.
He invited me to his birthday party
where he initiated a game I never heard of called "spin the bottle"
and so through that game I was awkwardly introduced to kissing girls.
In spite of my parents' understandable stress over
this little Siberian style gulag far from our family roots
while maintaining a dilapidated house, the utter isolation,
and dad toiling under that bastard of a boss,
I treasured and will for all time treasure Byesville
as the idyllic interlude between living in the city and then the south.
Byesville became my very own Marblehead, mom's quaint childhood remembrance
of colonials, a clock tower, salt boxes, cobblestones of
that rocky outcrop harbor town in the spirit of 76.
A fleeting felicity with her grandparents,
a respite from foster homes and
the broken marriage of a distant mother and her absent father.
I like mom became in later years wistful
for a childhood through city and suburb filled
with maternal affection and paternal protection,
but it was lowly downtrodden Byesville
which drew our family so close brimming with bubbling over love
like the characters you'd see in "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver"
and years later much like "The Waltons."
Early in the spring of 63
as the snow pack melted swelling Wills Creek
deluging our only road to the county seat,
we relocated again to Charlottesville as the lovely valleys
ushered in spring on the pink delicate dogwood blossoms
and where dad would find the best job of his career
near the university founded on Jeffersonian ideals.
Ironically beautiful Charlottesville as I entered my teens
would become a long and personal nightmare.
But it was Byesville on every fall weekend
that dad would play football with us boys
on the field in front of the crumbling stable
occasionally joined by his coworkers
including a varsity football alumnus of Penn State
who once tackled and drove me
into branches jabbing me like a pin cushion.
Then in late autumn dad was our project engineer
directing us three boys in gathering and stacking rocks and timber
to dam our cattail marsh into an ice skating pond just in time for winter.
That Christmas was the most bountiful ever with gifts
including ice skates, a toboggan, corduroy robes,
replica M-1 army rifles, and for me a transistor radio.
My favorite was a sheath knife which I used to carve wood.
Growing up my parents kept sharp cutlery out of reach.
So thanks to my inexperience and my narrow focus on the task at hand,
I didn't recognize the obvious danger when I realized In digging a groove
I got more leverage pulling the blade towards me
and so when it got stuck...I pulled it with all my might
and instantly stabbed my thigh where it joins the groin.
I punctured myself with the entire five inch blade
the hilt preventing it from going right out the other end.
Instinctively I drew out the blade and my blood gushed out
like I had pulled the drain plug in a bath tub
then I bled and shrieked like a wounded pig.
My parents rushed upstairs and quickly pressed cotton towels to the gash.
Fortunately dad got the car to start and hurried me to the hospital
which happened to be osteopathic but there was no time to be picky.
Dad stood by as they staunched the flow and stitched me up.
The attending doctor asked dad
if the hospital could report
the incident to the weekly paper,
and even though Byesville was starving for news,
dad firmly albeit politely refused.
by L DOUGLAS ST OURS
June 2010
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