Back Home Again ( Part
6 )
4892 Canfield
The Homes My
Grandparents Built
Sept 30th
1994
This is my
4th house and its 4892 Canfield. The only thing I can remember.....I remember
at lot. I had just got out of the hospital not too long ago and I remember I
had this dream in this house. I think I was still a little sick. And I dreamt
of giant strands of spaghetti. It sounds stupid. And when I looked around when
I woke up everything was real far away. Like looking at the opposite end of
binoculars, you know? Oh, it still
freaks me out when I think about this today. That dream, Oh, I must have been
hallucinating or something and what else? Oh, the Freeze’s used to live in back
of us. And my Mom and Dad started going over there all the time partying I
guess and we’d go with. Oh, I hated that. And they’d drink and start getting
drunk and that’s when the drinking started as far as I can remember. And next
to the Freeze’s was this other couple. And this woman took pills. And that’s
how Mom got started on the pills. That’s what my Dad said. So this was kind of
like the beginning of the end, you know, with the drinking and the pills. DAMN!
I only lived here for one year. This is the
subdivision my grandparents built, the Morelands. They built this whole
subdivision here. That was kind of neat when they were building. I liked that.
That was cool.
The
photographer was out that day taking pictures for the new homes for an ad in
the newspaper. From left to right; Jeanne (my sister) Shirley ( she was my
uncle's girlfriend. Everybody liked her. I wish my uncle would have married her
instead of that other one.) Next is my uncle Bill. (He's the one who built the
new homes along with his parents.)My Mom and then there's Me.
And....there
used to be an old barn up ahead there. I used to play in there all the time.
Oh, and then the school is down the street, St Eugene’s school. I went to
second grade at St Eugene’s. And....eh....they made you sell Christmas cards.
You know the nuns gave you Christmas cards to sell around Christmas. I remember
the first time, I didn’t know anything, I was stupid and I brought all these
Christmas cards home that I’m supposed to sell and I didn’t know the price of
them. So I priced what I thought was a good price. Like .33 cents, I remember
that. And I’m selling the cards for .33cents a box and they were supposed to
be sold for a $1 a box. I think my Mom had to make up the difference. She was mad
too that they made you sell this stuff. There were some open houses when they were
selling the houses and the photographer would come over and I was in a couple
of the pictures for the ads for the model homes. That was neat. Jeanne and I
were in one of them I remember. My Mom and Jean and I, we were photographed for
and ad and put in the paper. I got it in my baby book at home.
But we only stayed here a year and then
across the street they started building the next subdivision, so we moved over
there. You know, kind of following the subdivision along. Well, Oh, I remember,
we were playing out in the driveway here right in front. And all of a sudden we
hear this tremendous explosion and we looked toward the back of the house and it
was like a big mushroom cloud. Like the Russians bombed us or something. What
had happened is, there’s a fireworks factory like about 5 miles west of here.
And it had exploded. Just like a hydrogen bomb it looked like. That’s what the
cloud was like. And we went over there, Mom and me and Jeanne. There might have
been somebody else with us, Jimmy my cousin might have been with us. Yeah, I
think he was. And we were walking toward the fire. We were in the prairie and
way in the back was this building that had exploded. We started walking toward
it and all of a sudden it exploded again. Just like a huge bomb. And we went
running through the field and I stepped on all the stickers. My feet were sore
for a week taking out all those stickers. And Jeanne had glass in her feet from
running. Some explosion!
Our House on Canfield
Well, we only lived here a year and I can’t
remember too much except the Freeze’s in the back and my dream and stuff. Oh, I
know something I forgot to say. I was seven years old at the time. This was
1953 and for some reason my ears really stuck out at that time. I looked like
Dumbo, the elephant in that Walt Disney movie. That’s how I looked. And my
sister Jeanne would pull on my ears and try and make them get bigger and
bigger. It was funny at first and then she knew how to get my goat after a
while. She’d just pull on my ears and I think I’d get a little upset. But my
ears finally as I got older they just grew back against my head and they didn’t
stick out as much. For a while there, I was worried they stay like that forever
but they didn’t.
This
is me and Timmy Freeze. He was the son of the people that lived in back of us
So we’ll go on to the next house
______________________________________________________
Back Home Again ( Part
7 )
5164 Monterey Ln
My Cocker Spaniel,
Prune Juice and Other Things
Sept 30th
1994
Well this is
my fifth house I’ve lived in. 5164 Monterey Ln and it’s kind of....it’s in the
next subdivision across the street now. We only lived here like for a summer
until our real house, which is the next street over, was going to be built. We
were waiting for that to be built. So we moved in here on Monterey Ln just for
the summer after second grade had let out.
This is what it looked like when we first moved in. They still had a lot
of homes to build yet
Let’s see,
what happened here? Oh, we had a bird, a canary or a parakeet. Don’t remember
its name but it was the coolest parakeet. I had my choo-choo train. And I had
set up this choo-choo train and it would sit on top of the choo-choo train and
go round and round and round with the choo-choo train. My dog Inky one time, he
loved.....they used to play together, my dog Inky. He was a Cocker Spaniel by
the way, a black one and he used to play with the bird all the time. And they
were friends, they really were. While the bird was riding on the choo-choo
train, Inky got too excited and just went to play with him but accidentally bit
him and the bird died. My dog was so
upset he stayed in the corner for three days. I mean he was.... and we didn’t
even yell at him. We all knew it was an accident because we were there. We saw
what happened. So my dog really had feelings about killing something else.
I have a picture at home of Inky in the
driveway there. Uh... he was right there standing in the driveway.
Here's my dog Inky
and I in our driveway. I sure miss that her. She was the only dog I have ever
had
Let’s see,
next door a big family used to live there. I don’t know, what did they have 4
girls something like that, or 6 girls? I think there was 6 in the family. The
parents were in there early thirties or mid-thirties or whatever. And the
mother died suddenly and the poor guy was stuck with 6 kids. Unbelievable. That
was my first wake I ever went too. I didn’t like that at all.
What else? ....I look down the street and I
can see St Eugene’s school there. Boy, how many times have I walked in and out
of that door? The door right there that I’m looking at is the door I took to my
second grade class. It was thru that door and I think it was the first class on
the right hand side. That was second grade.
St Eugene's grammar school. Well you know what I think of school by now.
And then, I
got screwed. Remember when I said, I’d pay for missing all those days in first
grade? They graduated me and I came to
this school and I went to second grade and my card said I graduated to third
grade but during the summer sometime they figured, Bill had missed so much
work. All these nuns ... had missed so much work in first grade that I’d better
take second grade all over again. Oh was that ever.....That destroyed the rest
of my life as far as schooling went because I would always be behind everybody
else including my cousin. And if you don’t think that wasn’t horrible. My
cousin and I were both born at the same time and all of a sudden he’s in third
grade and I got to go to second grade again. Then come high school and he’d be
in high school and I’d still be in grade school and so on and so on. Boy that
sucks! I hated school ever since then. I don’t think I ever got over that. That
was the worst thing those nuns could ever have done to me was to keep me back
another year at second grade. Damn them!
Oh, one Saturday, I used to watch the cowboy
series on Saturdays. I’d sit in my room and eat breakfast cereal and watch the
cowboys, Roy Rogers and all those. And one time we had a.....I couldn’t find
anything in the refrigerator except this... I guess Ma had bought some prune
juice. I never tasted it before and I tasted it and it tasted pretty good. It
was a whole big quart of prune juice. So I brought it into my bedroom where the
TV set was and I sat on the floor and I drank this whole quart of prune juice.
Ohhh...I thought it was pretty good until I had to go to the bathroom, and I
had to go to the bathroom again, and again, and again. I said Ma, I can’t stop
going to the bathroom. What have you been drinking or what have you been
eating? She thought I was sick or something. I said, well I had some prune
juice for breakfast and she started laughing. She said, how much? I said a
whole quart and she just rolled down laughing hysterical. She said, that’s why you’re going to the
bathroom so much.
Oh, then I had my first date at this house. I
was either 7 or just about to turn 8. And this sharp girl in the back moved in.
Her name was Charlene Reimann. Oh, what a fox. I wonder where she is
today?
Charlene Reimann, I thought see was so pretty. Too bad I was so bashful
back then. I wonder what ever happened to her?
Anyway, one
day I got enough courage to ask her if she wanted to go to the movies. And “The
Littlest Outlaw” (1954) was playing, a Walt Disney movie.
Well anyway, we’ll go to the next house.
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