My GPS sez to get back to my original point, so I’ll swerve back into that lane now.
This is the very point of this particular short story. I recall the very first occasion of a stranger doing something nice for me and just because they were a nice person. I was five years old and I was in kindergarten, living in the West End of Atlanta after we moved from College Park where the Airport is now located. I lived off Avon Avenue, a road that ran from Lee Street at the back entrance of Fort McPherson to Cascade Road at John A. White Park. On the Cascade Road/John A. White end I could occasionally get into the swimming pool with my young cussing coach and rapscallion friend Dickey McGrew. On the Lee Street end, with my friend Stanley Kinney, a guy whose family lived with his grandpa (or vice-versa) and held passes to gain entry legally onto the base to go swimming in one of the large army bases many pools. I tell you that just to let you know his grandpa whacked me with his cane one time for reading a note he wrote to Stanley. The old man couldn’t talk for some reason and he scribbled notes to his grandkids, considering them private. I had looked over Stan’s shoulder one time after the old man handed him a note and it was innocent enough, or so I thought. What I saw looked like hieroglyphics, and a waste of a perfectly good third grade education to me on the old man’s behalf. Gramps caught me on a glancing blow, seeing I was strategically standing with Stan between me and the crusty old man taking aim at my skull, a man who drove a wheel chair and was generally in a foul mood, I guessed, twenty-four hours a day. When the old geezer took his poke at me I saw the cane coming and slightly stepped aside, the bulk of the blow landing on Stanley and pissing the old man off even worse. He caught me on the arm at the bottom of his swing and for a brief second, I had his cane in my young hand. He snatched it out immediately and in one continuous motion swept Stan out of his way with the cane and quickly maneuvered that chair in an attempt to trap me and whack me but good. I meant no harm in reading the note, but you couldn’t tell the old man that particular fact and make it stick. I might as well have been stealing his pension or rooting for the commies. The crusty old codger kept one foot on his wheelchair footpad and one he used to aim the front of his rusty old chair with. I faked right and darted to the left, using Stan as cover. The old man took one last swing at me as I flew past catching me on my heel as I ran past him to the safety of the outside world, off the porch and into the yard. I guess I could count that as the first nice thing anyone I was not related to had ever done for me if you wanted to get really technical. The dodging skills I had learned in those scant few seconds would help me later on in school when playing “Killer ball” now outlawed in most states but a P.E. staple when I was a kid, but in football too. I’d see the old man on occasion before we moved away, and I’m telling you he had a sharp mind. Every time I’d pass by Stan’s house and glance up at his porch, there he’d be. Sitting, staring at me like he had a death wish and putting a dent in my skull with his walking stick was quite possibly the last thing he had to accomplish before he died. I’d always smile and wave, hoping he’d know I wasn’t a bad kid, but he’d shake his fist and whack his cane on the porch like he was rattling his saber at a Yankee Soldier headed to Atlanta with a pocket full of matches. I figured it was best if Stanley and I were going to remain friends, he’d have to come to my house. I was too young to die and my Mom and Dad couldn’t afford a funeral, at least their own, when I’d hear them talk about the bills due every month. I figured if they couldn’t afford their own funerals, I was history, and forth on the list after my Dad, Mom, brother, then me. Of course, there was my little sister, and she came first so I was dead last when it came to gettin’ chucked in the clay. I was, after all, the middle kid.
I lived off Graymont Drive, approximately one half of the distance between Lee Street and Cascade Road. The elementary school I was to attend was named Arkwright Elementary and it required that my brother and myself walk to school. I really liked the walk as it wasn’t too far and it wasn’t too short…it was just right. I had numerous kids my age that all lived on my street and we’d walk as a squad. There were four Jimmy’s; me, Jimmy Pair, Jimmy Crumbley and Jimmy Smith, and I know now it was one of the many popular Anglo-Saxon names around the time I was born. The name “Jimmy” in Georgia was apparently as popular as “Bubba” in Alabama, but that’s a story for another day. There were also three Mike’s, two Chris’ and Timmy’s, a Dickie and few other assorted kids with normal names usually biblically based (except for Dickie, I guess). Every house on my street had at least two if not three kids living in them, making for awesome summers of hide-and-go-seek and streets full of dodge ball and other games. It was a great time to be a kid, the Vietnam war had not begun in full, future hippies were still interested in staying in school and the Beatles had only recently scandalized the airwaves on the Ed Sullivan show. I know now that it was the lull before the storm with racial hate groups, war protesters and assassinations flooding the air waves causing every kid I knew to lose his or her innocence in some form or fashion just a few short years later. My next door neighbor, Mikey Langford, and I met every morning at the street to make the short walk down Avon Avenue, on our side of the street, then have to cross over the busy street at the intersection of Avon Avenue and Westmont Road, then make the short two hundred yards and hang a left at Lockwood and the final one hundred and fifty yards down hill to the elementary school where I’d meet my first teacher, Mrs. Gray.
Mrs. Gray was a middle-aged and experienced Teacher looking back on it, and a no-nonsense type kinda like my mother, except she was nicer most of the time. I guessed she was paid to be nice too, besides being a teacher, my young mind decided. She had an assistant named Mrs. White and she taught us the easiest way to remember their names were to associate them with the colors of their names, and the fact that the confederacy was suited in Gray and White. Shoot, just saying something about the confederacy in school now would get you a ”big neck” picture on the post office of the ACLU these days. I liked school well enough, I guess as good as any kid might back then. I wasn’t a trouble maker and had no plans to be, based on the speech that my dad and mom had given my brother and myself, something about our good name and the butt whuppin’s I’d get if I acted up in class. I believed my folks so I kept my pie-hole shut and did my school work. It was my first experience with being forced to hang out with girls and with assigned seating, I had them on both sides of me. It took some getting used to but I figured it out quick enough, plus there was always recess. That’s when us boys could get back together and re-enact any wars we might want to, or swing so high we’d get banned from the swing sets for a week, just boys being boys. Lunch in a lunch room was something also very new to me and my squad, and our teachers made sure we sat boy/girl/boy/girl to keep the noise to a minimum. I didn’t like that much either, but their was food involved, and my Mom packed my trusty “Wagon train” lunch box each day with two PB&J’s an apple and a Thermos full of ice-cold milk, but no desert or cookies. I didn’t think much of it and thought the jelly in the PB&J served two purposes anyhow.
Part 3 Friday!
No comments:
Post a Comment