12/14/2009
Robert Joy
I guess, I was soooo innocent. Innocent, like every kid is when they’ve only climbed to the second or third step up a ladder. I didn’t have anywhere to fall. It looked high and I felt like I was way off the ground. I was high enough to believe I was seeing the truth and it was all so simple. Every rung made me more fearful, so I took my time in the climb. I guess it hurt to fall from the second rung, but certainly not as bad as from the third or the tenth or the fortieth or even the one hundredth rung. I guess it always hurt in relation to how far I’d climbed. I was also so innocent that everything fit neatly into boxes. Innocent enough to believe in the Good and the Bad. The Black and the White and the Up and the Down. I hadn’t climbed high enough to get my head into the clouds and started producing gray in my clear vision.
I was never uncomfortable when I was on my way up. Garden City, Kansas was the greatest city on the planet. It was better than Dodge City where my family went often to visit Grandfather and Grandmother. No where on this planet was there a better main street with better stores and shops. Garden City had everything anyone could want. While I was a child, I was one without want. I was never hungry, never thirsty, never without shoes, a radio to listen too once I was out of school. I can’t remember a moment when I was so cold that I couldn’t go in and sit over the floor furnace and get warm again. Sure I was normal. I was the normal child who wanted this and that, but it was want in a sea of access. I was never in want for the things I really needed. I was lacking in the normal wants, wrought by simple desire. I was so comfortable that I could sit and dream of things I wanted, and things I thought I needed. I didn’t have to go and peer into the windows of the bakery looking at fresh bread with a pain in my stomach for the lack of bread.
Garden City was half the size it is today. It had half the street lights (maybe ever less than that). Our street, Bancroft was still made of dirt. Hardly a vehicle passed our home in the middle of the night. Hardly a vehicle passed our home during the day. We played in the street. Not once, do I remember some car roaring past and spraying us with sand and rocks with the horn blaring and the driver shouting, waving his arm with up turned middle finger. Hardly, do I remember the police coming by or down our alley.
Hardly do I remember streets so full of cars that it would require a special button on a corner light pole to turn on a light to stop the traffic. I can remember walking across the highway at five points. Walking, not running. Walking across the busiest intersection in the whole town. Two major highways and four city streets all merging like a giant star. Six roadways named Five Points, even though I used to laugh that it had six points and no one bothered to change it. We played grab-ass and tag in the middle of that intersection. We walked across Five Points with oil cans bent around the soles of our shoes as simulated horse shoes. We walked across that intersection on Halloween, blinded by our desire to obtain a candy reward at the front counter of Stoner’s #1 small Mom and Pop grocery store, owned by Harold Stoner. We walked back across that intersection blinded by our Halloween candy reward and by the ill fitting masks and we were never injured and I can’t remember a killing or accident at that corner.
Hardly, do I remember dark streets when we walked across half the city at night. Long dark sections of street, ill lit, but mostly empty, mainly because the ownership of cars was limited to one per family. We walked to school even though it was sometimes a mile from home. Not really that far then and not really that far today. One thing that inflation hasn’t risen from is the number of feet in a mile. Not like a pocket full of money, a mile is still the same. We walked home from school, from the movie theater even after dark. Maybe there were Pedophile’s around, surely there were, but I wasn’t told to be afraid of those sort of people. I was told not to accept rides with total strangers, but I can’t even remember being offered one from a stranger. It would have been hard to know a real stranger in a city made up of neighbors.
I can hardly remember a time when I was forced to spend my lunch hour inside the school at noon. School didn’t open until opening time. If it opened at nine, then that is when we went inside. Before nine, we were outside on the sidewalk, inside the wooden sheltered door ways trying to stay out of the rain, wind, snow or cold arctic blasts of wind. School dispelledus at noon for lunch. We had the option of running to the cafeteria, an old army barracks behind the school, or we could go home, downtown to Frankhauser’s drug store for a coke and french fires for a quarter or to one of several small hamburger joints catering to the kids at noon.
Good God! The horror of having to spend that precious hour of freedom inside the school. I can remember trying to sneak my books back into my locker at noon, so I wouldn’t have to lug them around and getting caught. Punishment was being made to sit in the library instead of being outside. That doesn’t happen now. Things have changed… Punishment is having to be outside the school when it’s hot, cold, snowing, dusty. Punishment is having to stand outside.
Oh Go! I was so innocent and so safe. I was so content, so satisfied and I was never uncomfortable. I remember having everything anyone needed. We had a phone on the cabinet, sure it had a dial and we sometimes had to refer to the operator for help. We had a radio, no television yet, but we had a radio. We had a floor furnace that I’d sit on every morning to get warm after climbing out of bed. A wonderful furnace we sit on when we stayed outside too long in the snow and came in frozen and numb from the knees down to our feet.
I never remember a moment when there wasn’t enough food on the table. Not fancy stuff, but by God enough of it and enough left over to go into the refrigerator. I remember those times and I still have a hard time believing it couldn’t still be that way in sorts.
Back then the radio didn’t bombard us with local new from somewhere elsewhere about an abduction, mass rape, serial killer on the loose, family murder and on and on. We didn’t have on our televisions extended chases of idiots trying to avoid arrest. Day long coverage of a standoff outside a home in San Francisco or a School shooting in Iowa or air planes chasing balloon with kids inside. We didn’t hear all the stuff we hear today. Everything wasn’t about money and the weather report wasn’t just a bunch of hype. We hear it all whether we can do anything about it or not and all it does is make us frightened, worried, afraid and paranoid. I guess we were just a tad bit ignorant and looking at it all today, maybe that wasn’t all such a bad thing. Maybe, just a tad bit of gool old fashioned ignorance would be a good thing for us all today.
Back then all our city streets weren’t lit up like the Las Vegas strip. (Did you know at night, we can see the outline of our country lit up by unecessay lighting from space.) Back then, every sign in town or out on the dark highway wasn’t lit up to attract business to a business closed at three a.m. in the morning. Back then, we didn’t have business open twenty-four hours except maybe the motels and Hotels catering to such customers. Our towns went to sleep. The streets weren’t filled with racing cars and cops. Back then, our little cities were quiet.
God forbid, we have all these problems and there is really no need to have them. This country as well as the rest of this world could solve its energy crisis in one afternoon, by turning off all the unnecessary lighting around their homes. All those useless pal lights over the back yards that come on automatically when the sun goes down. What the hell is the matter with the dark? We could cut out about half the lights we use to illuminate our streets, main streets, alleys and public buildings. Schools are so lit up at night they look like they are in session. Where has our courage gone? Where have our neighborhoods gone? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we took back our streets and could look up and see the stars again at night!