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June 8, Tuesday - Not much doing today. Spent most of the day sleeping.
June 9, Wednesday - Got permanent. Feel better. Raining hard. Bud went bowling and we bought two new chairs for the porch and then used them all evening.
Another day in the city. My folks battled it out - I'm guessing it had to do with Sandy and/or the bait business - probably both. I only heard my folks fight one time in my life, and I confronted them about it. They never fought in my presence again, but I know they had a few verbal Donnybrooks.
When mom and I went for a ride, it meant I was going to get to drive the Cadillac. I can't believe we all lived through this. I had so much experience behind the wheel when I finally got to take Driver's Ed in high school that the teacher would tell me where to go, usually on the freeway, and having just finished his lunch, would nap in the passenger seat until we got there, I woke him up, and we changed drivers. One day, I changed directions after he dozed off and much to the delight of three other Northeast High School students drove to the rustic confines of the old Kansas City Timing Association Drag Strip down on Front Street. We made two strong quarter-mile passes before he woke up as we pulled up to the starting line for a third go. It was the first time I ever heard a teacher say "Fuck!" I got ten detentions and a good talking to from the principal, Mr. McKenna before he commuted my sentence. He was getting up in years, and mistakenly thought I was a football player and thus, entirely blameless in all things. The other students told the story for years.
The back porch. What might be referred to as a deck these days, though not as attractively appointed. It faced Chuck Capo's junk yard, the Twelfth Street bus turnaround and the Jackson Hoe Bar. Beyond were the train tracks of the Santa fe Railroad, and the constant stream of freight and passenger trains going from Chicago to Los Angeles and back. People told me it was noisy. I didn't notice. When I moved to rural Colorado in 1972, I couldn't sleep because the train tracks were at least a mile from my bedroom window, and it was way too quiet.
Our back porch was the default portal to the house. You drove into our yard from the 11th Street side, onto a huge gravel apron and right up to the porch. The front porch, a real concrete porch, had two doors - one to what was originally the living room facing the street, and one to the parlor, or dining room. Odd layout.
What passed for our living room was staked out of the original parlor, and my folks used the living room as their bedroom. When I was very small, we all shared that bedroom, and dad used the only real bedroom as an office. It later became my room, and my bed faced the alley that fronted Jackson Court. The neighborhood teen Visigoths' favorite sport was waiting until I went to bed at night, and as I lay there reading or listening to the hapless Kansas City A's on the radio, they would creep up around the window, and stand just far enough out that my reading light wouldn't shine on them. On some agreed-upon signal, they'd all yell at once and scatter. Fuckers. I still don't like open shades when I can't see out.
The back porch was the gathering place for the neighborhood. Good chairs were a necessity.
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| Chairs - they weren't "vintage" back then. |
If you don't know any pipe-smokers, they are the contemplative thinkers of the world. Decisions have to wait until the pipe is stoked, set alight, the match shaken and disposed of, and few thoughtful puffs have been negotiated, the pipe studied, relit, tamped, and puffed again. You do not hurry pipe smokers. Don't even try. The more you hurry them, the slower they get. If they smoke a pipe and also wear a hat, abandon hope, all is lost.
I tried pipe smoking a couple of times, mostly as an affectation of anti-establishment hip style, but I didn't have the patience for the damn things. Cigarettes were cheap* and easy to come by, packed the required nicotine punch, and had the cool factor that a pipe just didn't have. Cigarettes gave me credibility with my denim and Acme boots costume swagger. I started smoking when I was sixteen, and only managed to quit twenty-one years later. An horrific bicycle crash left me stuck to the couch for a few days. The ashtray was mounded so high with butts that no more would fit, so that was that.
What goes around, I suppose - I like a pipe now and again, but Sir Walter Raleigh and his fruit-salad tobacco-packing ilk need not apply. I prefer an artisanal herbal kick these days.
*I started smoking cigarettes in 1967. They cost about thirty cents per pack, the equivalent of about $2.50 today.
