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Little Things
Lasting Things

A few things changed after my uncle left to spend some time with his mom and dad before going back to classes at Oklahoma A&M. Mom had one less lunch bucket to pack, “Thermos” to fill, bed to make, fewer shirts and khaki britches to wash and iron. When she had packed the lunches, they were two of a kind. Dad always brought his home empty. J.B. never finished the cookies she put in for snacks. There would always be two left in his lunchbox. He would offer them to Wes and me when he got home, one apiece. I had to gain the wisdom of some years before I realized he was doing this intentionally, He didn’t want the cookie ration for two little boys to be tighter because there was another mouth in the house to feed. He seemed to enjoy the fact that we enjoyed being offered the cookie.

He had no younger siblings; he was the baby of the family. I’m guessing that may be why he took on a “big-brotherly” role so readily with Wes and me. He had things at Grandma’s house that were not being stored, as were the things we had left there; that was still his permanent address. There was a bed in the loft that was always J.B.’s bed, just as there was a front corner bedroom that was always Irene’s room. She was the youngest daughter, an aspiring artist, and was away, studying in Chicago. In the corner by the dining room buffet, was J.B.’s  .22. Put away in a closet was his Daisy bb rifle, in one of the buffet drawers was a big bag of bbs, and in an adjacent drawer, was an assortment of harmonicas. When I asked Grandma about them, she said, “You’ll have to talk to him about those things”. In due time, about age nine, I would receive permission to use all of them, as well as instruction in target shooting, and an appreciation of the use of the rifle sling and peep-sight. My goal: supplant my mentor as the family sure-shot!

Due to the attention paid him by the U.S. military, he would never again need a summer job, but we would have lasting memories, some preserved in color slides, of the time he spent with us in Worland. My favorite picture of him is one where he is standing in a roadside snow bank in Tensleep Canyon while new snow is swirling around him, on the 4th of July! I liked watching him as he used pliers and a soldering iron to mount little resistors, diodes, and capacitors in their proper places and sequence and I credit this for motivating me to tackle a home repair problem. Our refrigerator door had lost a pin that held the hinge of the latch in place. It still worked, but everything had to be jiggled into position and kept in place while the latch was operated. I sorted through the tray in Dad’s tool box and found a soft rivet that looked about right, I slipped it in where the pin had been and bent the end down, cotter-pin fashion, and it worked! It wasn’t pretty, but it worked! Only six, and I’m not even a rocket scientist!

There were many “firsts” logged into my personal history that summer in Worland. The radio and automatic record player would be I, 2, and 3. The first “home-made” radio in our family; the first automatic turntable we ever saw, and the first piece of “furniture” we didn’t have room to haul that was allowed to stay amongst our stuff. In the top ten on the list would be the first, and last time I was hog-tied to my brother and rolled under a bed. The first dry-flies I ever saw were three, affixed to the same common leader, that had been dropped on the river bank by some fisherman. I was fascinated by how tiny they were, and colorful, and would liked to have kept them, but I was not supposed to play with fish hooks, so I turned them over to our landlord. On a trip to the grocery store, I saw my first Bing cherry. It was a big ruby of a crown jewel that stirred every ounce of covetousness within me! One thing that my parents absolutely did not allow, a probable product of the cumulative restraints of the depression, rationing, and their own strict upbringing, was begging, whining, or any other unwarranted demonstration on the part of their offspring in a store, restaurant or other public place! The most I thought I could get away with was a meek, “What is that?”, and the reply was simply. ”I don’t know”; case closed! As a teenager in Montana, I finally discovered what I had been missing. At fifteen, on a visit to the Hood River, Oregon, roadside fruit stands, at three pounds for a quarter, I spent fifty cents and made up for lost time!

Just outside our kitchen door, was my favorite playground. Everything was provided for me by nature, except for a few tiny toy trucks and an overly large cardboard box “hideout“. Three huge cottonwood trees had been removed but the live stumps remained, providing round, smooth “table tops” at table height, and leafed sprouts had emerged between the bark and pulpwood, to serve as “trees” in the same scale as my trucks. My six-year-old pretend world converted these little tables into imaginary wonderlands for driving my vehicles or parking them in the shade of the “groves” at the edge of the large wooden circles, I could entertain myself with trips to visit friends of my own choosing or my own making; I could drive all the way down to Mississippi on those stumps, or follow J.B. to school in Oklahoma, stopping off at Grandma‘s on the way to sit on the edge of the bed in the loft and try to learn to play Daddy‘s guitar!.

A few yards beyond the edge of the property was a small irrigation ditch, that was about a foot too wide for me to step across and having failed on my first attempt, I was bound to stay on my side. I did not like wearing wet shoes nor did I like explaining to my mother  how they got that way. Small boys seem to have an affinity for water in its natural habitat, and this was accentuated by the presence of fragrant vegetation. Partly because of the willows lining the ditch, and partly because of some plant I was never able to isolate and identify, the very pleasant smell, sweeter and more spicy than that of fallen leaves, I did not know it at the time, but it was reminiscent of a frangipani candle. The rippling and trickling and sight and sound of that tiny stream in that easier-imagined than described scene has stayed with me now for seven decades! Yes, I do; I do believe in magic!

Someone wrote a song about the West, with the words. “and seldom is heard a discouraging word”. The use of the word  “seldom” is key: it can happen. Worland doesn’t get much rain, but when it does rain, it can be a gully-washer. We had one of those, a cloudburst, and a huge, deep puddle formed in the center of a courtyard where we lived.  For days, the ground around it was too muddy to approach, but as the surface of the ground began to form a crust, we kids began to wade and float our toy boats. After a couple of days playing in the water, our feet began to be covered with little cut-like cracks. It looked as though someone had taken the point of a knife and “tenderized” our feet like a tough cut of beef. The pain was extreme and there seemed to be no remedy. I was not known to be a whiner, but this ordeal broke my will, and I would cry myself to sleep. We were to find out that the run-off had such a high alkali content that as it concentrated in the pool, that by the time we could wade in it, it was strong enough to be harmful to our young hides!

Mother was trying to decide whether to buy my school clothes in Worland, or wait to see if there were more, or a better selection of, stores in Greybull, where we were headed next. She finally decided to wait until after the move. There would be that much less to pack! So I would have to wait a while to see what school clothes looked like; I had never had any! It was surely going to take a big hunk out of my day to go to school, but looking back on how I envied my brother when he went, and I stayed home, my guess was I would approach it with enthusiasm. I would expect that Mom would be the one trying to follow the kids to school. Well, at least now she had a radio; she would be able to listen to “Just Plain Bill” and “Ma Perkins” while she did her ironing. In simplest terms, I was now a few days and thirty-nine miles away from a brand-new world!

I want to renew my thanks for your word pictures, Ron. Your descriptions of life as a young boy are turning into how family life went in an era of America.

A.J.

("...and the skies are not cloudy all day." Usually.)

Thanks, A.J. for your comments: they mean more to me comiing from a writer as yourself. I sometimes wonder if the picture in my mind bears any resemblance to the one conveyed to the reader by the description I put on paper. The hardest for me is describing the special feelings. the emotions evoked by seeing some thing or just "being" in some special place. Why doesn't someone perfect time-travel, so I could take everyone fishing or searching for agates along the Yellowstone River?

I think you do a great job, Ron. In fact I'm envious of how your writing seems to come to life when you depict places, people or events. Keep writing and I'll try to keep up!