Distant Memories From A Time Long Past

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Distant Memories From A Time Long Past

October 5, 2008

This weekend I was called in by mom to trek down to my grandparents’ place and watch over grandma while everyone else takes a much deserved break. After grandpa died a week ago, this is the very least I could do to lend a helping hand.

The drive from my place in St. Louis takes about 3 hours. In New York they call suburban houses lining the streets with a few trees mixed in “the country.”

Ha! That’s not the country.

Out here is the kind of territory where miles separate neighbors, and a simple trip to town easily consumes your entire afternoon. The nights are absolute black and if a day goes by where you hear more than the wind and chirping wildlife, you had something to talk about down at the cafe – next time you managed to make it over that way. Which could be a week. Maybe more. And if you stay longer than 7 days, even the finest English gentleman is guaranteed to take home a rather unflattering accent.

In other words… not really Greg’s cup of tea. Never was.

Don’t get me wrong though – it’s a beautiful place to visit and I’m convinced that Missouri country folk rank among the World’s Most Friendly People – you just couldn’t pay me enough to actually settle down here.

Yet… this place, my grandparents’ farm, is where I spent a good portion of my early childhood (as in, ages 0 to 6 and then a few summers after that.) Even though I’ve spent my entire life (so far) always wanting to live “somewhere else”, there are a lot of good memories here.

And since now the farm is mere weeks away from being sold, gone possibly forever, this is the last time I get to walk around and take note of all the little memories that would certainly otherwise be lost to time.

So here this midnight I fondly sit, in the old living room dimly lit
Pondering many quaint and curious stories from days of yore
While I think, nearly napping, from my keyboard comes a tapping
My hands clickety-clacking, fingers rapping… until sore.

Thank you, Mr. Poe

So here are some random memories, in no particular order, of little Greg’s life on the Missouri countryside:

Driving up to the place from the road, the first things you notice are the large cattle fields, the sturdy wooden fences, the barn, and the single story white ranch house where we lived – everything built by hand and maintained by my grandpa… even up until his early 80′s. (I hope I’m as healthy up until the very end too… and if I’m anything like my “tough as nails” dad, I probably will be… assuming, of course, a I’m not hit by a bus or something )

Anyway, I used to go along with grandpa out on his chores to feed the cows and check up on his little rural empire to ensure nothing went awry. It was novel at first, but got a bit monotonous after awhile. As long as I can remember, I always had this feeling inside me that “something better” was happening “somewhere else” so I was never really indoctrinated into real “farm life.” But grandpa had his own ways of making it better for me with some of life’s simple thrills.

One day, after chores, grandpa was driving us in his truck back to the house. There were several fences to pass through on the way, with the last one always gated closed to keep cows from wandering out toward the house and running away. At that last fence, he’d stop the truck, get out, open it, drive through, stop and close it again before continuing on…

…But not this time.

This time, he wasn’t slowing down. I looked over at him. He smiled. I looked back at the gate ahead of us, fast approaching. I glanced back at him again, nervously.

“What are you doing?” I asked, a little worried now.

“Better hold on, son” he grinned, calm as can be.

I latched onto the door and whatever else I could get a death-grip on. I can remember thinking the little kid version of “Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap!” as we rammed the gate full force, slinging it open with a bang and rattling aftershock.

It didn’t break because grandpa had this planned all along. Before we left, he’d purposely left the gate unsecured so I could experience this little stunt.

Grandpa was always like that. In small doses, he’d surprise you when you least expected it.

Another time I remember sitting around on a bright sunny day, dreadfully bored. Grandpa came up to me and asked, “Would you like to go for a drive?”

“Where to?” my little logic-based mind needed to know.

“No where in particular,” he replied, “just a drive.”

And we did. It was nice. He showed me a few things I would’ve never noticed before. With his guidance, I even (reluctantly) took the wheel for awhile. And it was on that drive I learned that not everything had to have some kind of purpose, goal, or task to complete – you could just go out… and… take a drive – enjoy living, breathing, and feeling things most people are too busy for.

Kinda funny the small things that stick in your mind like that.

My two earliest living memories happened at this house. I must’ve been two, three years old at the latest. Mom was bathing me in the bathroom sink. She left to go get something as I sat there having fun just splashing around.

Then somehow, for some reason… it occurred to me that what she went to go get was a camera. And it dawned on me she would return in short order to snap a cute shot of me playing in the sink.

“Well,” I remember thinking, “I’ll show her!”

So when I heard her footsteps coming around the corner, I prepared my face for a surprise just for her and her sneaky little photo. Here was the result:

To me, at the time, it seemed like I was just messing up her photo… you know, raining on her parade. But when it was finally developed, I guess the last laugh was hers indeed Oh well.

My second earliest memory is one where grandpa actually took a sick calf inside the house for awhile one winter so it could get well where otherwise it would’ve died out in the cold.

And in this same bathroom, I used to break into the shaving cream, foam my smooth face up and “shave” with an old-fashioned blade razor (don’t worry, I never loaded a real blade.) I considered it practice, because when I was young all I wanted was to grow up and be older. As I write this now, I’m not yet old enough to want to be younger, but I am at the age I always dreamed about when I was little. Being 26 is good… I like being able to have my own place, buy what I want and travel… but I miss some of those early days too.

I remember watching James Bond movies (in this living room I’m writing in now) with mom. I remember going out to the garden to pick fresh carrots, go inside, wash and eat them right away. Used to leave the green stalks on so I could be like Bugs Bunny.

I used to build with blocks. Play outside in the snow – one time I even jumped off the porch very high up and can remember how amazed I was when the soft snow protected me so well from something that would’ve hurt.

By the way, see that blocks photo up above? Just as an aside, mom always said I should marry a girl who loves it (or thinks its cute, or whatever) when I make that “concentration face” with my mouth… which I still apparently sometimes do to this day, unconsciously.

I remember finding a one of those pressure-based little-black-label-making guns among some old junk and taking it as my own. I had someone buy me some black label tape and for the next several weeks, I went around sticking little custom labels on everything; my gun, my baseball bat, my cup in the fridge… I even stuck little labels on everyone’s bedroom door in the house, indicating whose room it opened into. To this day, even as I write this right now, those labels are still on all those doors. One says “Dallas $” (my uncle’s name with a dollar sign after it, indicating how I thought he was as good as rich back then), another “Grandma” another “Papa”…

I remember nailing nails – as many as I possibly could – into the front porch. Some were so close together the heads overlapped.

I remember, on my 6th birthday, staring out my grandma’s kitchen window at the clearest blue sky I’d ever seen. Ever.

I remember trying to play the piano they have here in the living room… poorly. I didn’t care. It was fun just trying to make the sounds make sense together. I tried to memorize the good note combinations and eventually played little tunes I discovered.

I remember playing out in the fall leaves, hearing them crunch under my feet. One time I went off aimlessly into the woods, walking for a long time, eventually discovering a little waterfall. It was beautiful. I stayed there and played for as long as I could before evening. When it started to get dark, I found my way back home. Strange… I never found that waterfall ever again.

I used to go outside with my BB gun (later, my pellet gun) and shoot birds. This is also one of the million things my cousin Caleb and I did a lot together. Those were great days. Some of the best. We were perfect friends for many years.

We went out and discovered unseen parts of the farm. One time, my uncle bought us a 4-wheeler and riding around in the fields to the far reaches of the territory was one of the most fun days in years. Another time (when we were older, in our early teens) he bought a dune buggy and we rode it around everywhere. It had this peculiar quirk about it though: since it was a stick shift, it would stall and die if not handled just right. And when it did, for some bizarre reason it wouldn’t start back up again with Caleb in the passenger seat. So when it died, Caleb had to get out, I had to start it, get it going, and run around in circles at 10 MPH until he could (literally) jump in with me. Hilarious watching him try to jump at the perfect time.

Caleb and I used to shoot bottles, cans, rabbits, windows… anything that would produce a noticible difference if hit. But our prime target was always birds. Since grandpa hated it when birds got into his garden, Caleb and I waged our own personal little war on birds for years. We always used to say that “country birds” are where you develop real marksmanship skill… they’re hard to hit. But “city birds” will just let you walk right up to them and kick ‘em in the face. And what fun is that?

We also used to play a game…one that we made up ourselves called “Trap” – the object of the game was for one of us to go into the back bedroom and prepare every kind of obstacle he could possibly devise (including ones that hurt!) to prevent the other guy from reaching the end of the house. We’d take turns. When it was my turn to make the trap, Caleb would wait at the opposite end of the house until I said the key word “READY!!!”…at that point, his goal was to make it to the other end of the house by running as fast as he possibly could… and continuing to run even if he encountered a staggering blow from one of my traps. What made it so fun was the speed. We’d spend all this time creating these traps for each other, only to have the whole plan unfurl in a matter of seconds. Sometimes they hurt but that was all part of the fun. One time I remember Caleb reaching the end of my trap when, exhausted, he hit a matress resting up against a wall with his back and slid down to where he was then sitting on the floor, catching his breath. A heavy flashlight I’d placed on top of the matress wobbled… fell, and… missed his crotch by mere inches. We laughed at that one for days.

Speaking of traps, Caleb and I also used to set them for my uncle, who often came home late at night when everyone was fast asleep. The first few really got him good, but eventually he learned to avoid them… so we had to get more and more devious with each one. What began as simple things like black wire to catch his neck and legs on in the dark and short-sheeting his bed, eventually evolved into knocking over water traps, and playing tape recorders with scary/funny messages on them set to go off when he opened the door. We also experimented with different methods to stick his hands to doorknobs and adhere his feet to the hallway floor.

Once when I was little… very little… I apparently jammed a paperclip into the wall socket in grandma’s bedroom. It shorted out the whole house and when the lights went black all at once, everyone rushed back to the room to see if I was OK. They tell me I was found there sitting on the floor, smoke streaming out of the outlet. I looked up at them and exclaimed only one word: “HOT!” – not hurt, just very very surprised. They say the only reason I wasn’t hurt (or worse) was because I’d jammed the paperclip’s prongs into separate holes, creating a path for the electricity to travel through my body and out the other side, rather than INTO it. Whew…

I remember a kid I didn’t like who visited grandma’s house one time. Caleb was there too. We played tricks on him like saying that all the mole hills outside in the back yard were actually land mines so when he goes back there to play, better not step on one or… else. I don’t think he ever went back there to play. I remember the kid wasn’t black, but he wasn’t white either. So Caleb and I called him “grey.” … He wasn’t that, either

And then… there’s the smell of toast from grandma’s super-early-morning breakfast. It’s such a simple thing but brings back good memories. When I was little & staying the summer at this house, my grandma would wake up super-early (like 5am) to fire up the stove and begin making the most mouth-watering breakfast. Of course I was still asleep, but the smell often woke me up and sometimes I would stumble into the dining room bleary-eyed and grab a bite to eat. She’d give me a piece of toast with her homemade blackberry jelly and a couple eggs before I creaked back down the cold hallway to bed. Those were some happy times. So I’ve associated these feelings somewhat with the smell of good breakfast food, but especially toast, for some reason.

These days, I rarely have a breakfast like that. Usually something more like a simple piece of fruit or vegetable; just something small and healthy so I don’t start the day hungry. But once in awhile, I admit it would be nice to wake up to a smell like that again.

I remember going deer hunting once with grandpa and dad. I was little, far too young to shoot… I was just there for the experience, which, in my opinion was VERY boring… just waiting around quietly for something that may or may not happen for hours… or ever at all. But when it finally did happen… a good sized deer appeared in the distance… I’ll never forget how the ringing in my ears felt when that gun blast went off. The feeling reminded me of something like solidified earwax slowly oozing out of both ears in the shape of a cylinder.

Then there’s all the times Caleb and I played with fireworks. Every 4th of July, we’d get excited over all these fireworks catalogs arriving in the mail. And every 4th of July, it was “rich” uncle Dallas who footed the bill for our little hobby. We had a huge cache and used it sparingly. Sometimes we’d have little firework wars. I caught Caleb’s hair on fire with a Roman candle. A firecracker blew up in my face, taking with it all the surrounding air. I remember being shocked and not able to breathe for a bit. For a few seconds there, it was kinda scary and thought I’d actually blown my nose off or something. Nah, I was fine. Just a little surprised.

I remember the gorgeous sunsets on the horizon and the crystal clear black nights, the sky unobscured by light pollution like the city. You could see every star.

Grandpa taught me how he liked the lawn mowed when I was little. He always made the first round on the riding lawn-mower, and then he’d let me take over afterward. I’d finish it up for him. One time he wanted me to get off the mower to talk to him. I left it running but for some reason must’ve forgot to put it in park. While he was talking to me, he noticed my eyes get real wide, and turned around to see the runaway lawn mower about to crash into the house. He ran after it, hopped on, and averted disaster just in time.

I remember my uncle Dallas’ penny collection. He had (has) more than I’d ever seen at once in my entire life. I think he stopped saving them many years ago, but back when I was little, the large jars were everywhere. Every night when he came home, he’d empty the pennies into the latest jar. I have no idea why he started doing this, but it went on for years.

I remember watching PBS television. My favorite shows of all time back then were Ghostwriter (I had a crush on the girl who played Lenni (Blaze Berdahl), 3-2-1 Contact, Sesame Street (of course), “Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego” and “Square One” (my favorite of favorites, next to Ghostwriter… they had a setment on there called “Mathnet” (imitating Dragnet) that was awesome.) OH! And Mr. Rogers! Can’t forget him. I loved Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood while growing up. He taught some great lessons on his shows and was an inspirational role model for several generations of little kids, me included. He had such an influence on me that I actually got a little teary-eyed when I read the news about his death in 2003. I have all of his books and think his simple advice on how to live a good life is some of the best out there. In a time when parents are at work and there was no one around to play with, Mr. Rogers made being a kid a little less lonely.

I remember clothes on the clothesline outside and grandma cutting up and canning all the food from this seasons garden harvest. It was always more than enough for everybody and I personally credit their clean meat (no hormones or other artificial weird shit) and fresh vegetables to my excellent health growing up and to this day.

Many years ago, grandma gave me a large tray loaded down with about $120 worth of old silver dollar coins, half dollar coins, quarters, and dimes (which I still have, by the way!) Ducktales was a favorite cartoon of mine and being the money-loving Cancerian I am, wanted to be just like Scrooge McDuck and have this big multi-story money bin with a diving board at the top so I could leap off, dive into my money and swim around. In my young mind, this coin collection started me on that journey. But… obviously I needed to accumulate far more coin if I were to ever swim in it. So what’s a little boy to do? Start a lemonade stand, you say? Naw… far too plebian for the Cancerian boy. Instead, I started charging admission to the bathroom: 25 cents per person per visit… or $5.00 for a full week up front. Capitalism at its finest. This actually worked for awhile, but eventually the ploy lost its cuteness quickly after I demanded payment for past dues. This taught me a valuable lesson in business: to charge admission for something, you first need to control the resource

Well, I’ve been at this for hours now and… I think that’s about all I can do for this brain dump. If I think of anything else, I’ll edit the post. But for now, I’ll say it is good to spend some last few days around this place again, especially so I can remember all these things and record them here to my site. That’s one of the reasons I have this site here, you know… to serve as a sort of “living record” of where my mind’s been and where I’m going – so that some day I can look back and nothing important is lost to time. I can remember how I was at different times, and others (if they’re interested enough) can discover a few of my innermost thoughts as well.

So I’ll close now with a few more photos of “little Greg” here on this farm… and get myself to bed!

Me, showing off the fish I caught in the stream

Little Greg playing in the fall leaves down by the mailbox

Little Greg wearing a helmet I found in this old storage trailer that my grandpa always wanted to get rid of but grandma wanted to keep around… LOTS of random crap in there. To the right you can see the swing grandpa made for me. It lasted years and years.