Asparagus and the Stick

Each of us kids didn’t get to spend a lot of alone time with Dad. Looking at it mathematically, if you divide any small number by 12, you get an even smaller quotient.

Looking back after all these years, though, the amount of time doesn’t seem small. It feels like enough, and I suspect most of my sibs would agree. When Dad was with you, he was with you.

The longest period of alone time Dad regularly spent with any of us (boys) was when he was cutting our hair. He was meticulous with everything he did, and it took almost an hour for a haircut. The irony here is that most of us hated how long it took and couldn’t wait to get back to playing. What I wouldn’t give for one of his haircuts now. And he never just gave us a buzz cut (except when we were very young); he always left something in front to comb.
 

My look during junior high was the flat top. (C’mon…it was the ‘50s!) This was challenging, but Dad never tried to talk me out of it. He would take his time – walk around me, snip, pause, snip. Another look, another snip… Patience was his strong suit, not mine.

The most cherished alone time I had with Dad was when we hunted wild asparagus along the railroad tracks near our house. Mostly it was just the two of us. Why no one else wanted to go always puzzled me. Maybe they preferred hunting strawberries or black raspberries with him, which also grew wild along the track. Picking something sweet had to be more appealing than hunting for something most of us didn’t like. Sometimes Mom would fry the asparagus, which was tolerable, but creamed asparagus made me gag. 

I liked hunting asparagus with dad. He had a slow and steady gait and didn’t miss much. We were silent most of the time, but when I would ask a question, he would answer. It’s a memory I cherish.

“Cherish” is the point here. Memories of Dad bring up words like that, cherish, warmth, gentleness, emotions about Dad that I share with my siblings. Memories of Mom bring up thoughts of admiration, respect, even awe. I can’t speak for the rest of my sibs, especially my sisters, but Mom was more complex. (No doubt you’ll hear more about this in a later post.)

Other memories of Dad bring up different emotions, though. I feared his anger, which could boil up suddenly, over milk spilled at the supper table or an insolent child. At times he whacked us on the butt with a stick, a 30-inch piece of plaster lath that he kept above the kitchen counter. His spankings touched all of us, except the two girls. And there was anger in his whacks, never an empathetic comment like “This will hurt me more than it hurts you.” The spankings hurt! But they weren’t hard enough to leave any marks.

As serious and emotionally laden as the spankings were, my fear of them and of his anger didn’t linger after childhood. With Dad’s anger, it was quick and furious, and then gone. That was just how he was.

Even as kids, the harshness of his actions didn’t linger after the spanking. I remember how my younger brothers made up a skit and song about the “stick,” which they performed for the family, even when Dad was around. As adults, we still joke about the stick. I wish that I could carry my anger so lightly.

—Bob

Delivering Newspapers

 

 My paper-boy career started with my subbing for my two oldest brothers, Dan and Bill, earning dimes and quarters. But I didn’t achieve the elite status of an income earner until I had a route of my own. That happened at the start of the fourth grade.

I don’t remember how I got that route. Maybe Mom made phone calls to the Sidney Daily News circulation manager, maybe she didn’t. But I had a SDN route and I was cool.

 Carrying a new, white canvas newspaper bag to school with my books in it meant I had joined the world of workingmen. (A world I still like to think I inhabit today.) I felt like I wasn’t a kid anymore, even though as a shrimp of a kid, my route bag hung nearly to the ground. Not only did I have a job, but I had the accoutrement to prove it. Ahh, status!

When I first had a delivery route, the carriers picked up their papers at the SDN office in downtown Sidney. It was here that I spent a large chunk of my earnings. There was a bakery across the alley and an ice cream parlor three doors down. Plus, on the way to my route there were two gas stations that sold sodas and ice cream.

Being a wage earner meant that I could be a consumer of other things, too. Soon I had a used but nice red Huffy Flyer and then a basket on the front to hold my paper bag. Using a bike to deliver papers meant doing the route faster, but I learned walking had it advantages, too. My aim for tossing the papers onto the front porch was much better while walking, and missing a porch while riding meant getting off my bike, correcting my bad throw, and returning to my bike. It probably didn’t take that much time, but an errant throw interrupted my day-dreaming, a habit I frequently engaged in as a child.

My favorite time for flights of fancy was on a rainy fall day, when the street gutters ran with rain, carrying fallen leaves with it. I liked making leaf and stick dams, patching the leaks until my dam could hold no more, then breaching it. I would fantasize about what would happen to the townspeople, houses, and cars carried away in the flood. Delivering papers was where I really honed my fantasizing skills. And it made the route seem shorter.

There was a down side with being a paper carrier, too - collecting payment for my deliveries. Every Friday I had to knock at each customer’s door and ask for money. This wasn’t too much of a concern with most of my customers because I had a “good” route. This meant clean, stable, middle-class families who didn’t move out without paying, who answered the door on the first knock, and didn’t say, “Come back next week, I don’t have any money.”



I had a few of these customers, enough to affect my income a little and my equilibrium a lot. Because the next week when they asked what they owed, I’d reply, “One week, 42 cents.” I was too afraid to ask for two weeks’ pay. Or more probably, I’d just skip collecting there the next week. The best solution (and the weasel -iest) was to pay my younger sister Nancy to collect for me.)



The trauma of collecting from overdue customers left me with “collecting dreams” for decades. Several of my brothers recently told me that they too had the same problem with some of their customers - they wouldn’t always collect from them either. And they had the same type of dreams. Even so, I still feel that I was a wimp back then. But hey, that was back then. These days I don’t feel like a wimp, very often.

--Bob