I’m four years old, sitting on the concrete front steps of our house. I like to watch the wheels go around inside the glass globe of the electricity meter sticking out of the side of our house. And listen to the ocean.

The ocean is always out there. Even when you can’t see it, you can hear it. In our town, whenever you go outdoors, or even open a window, there’s the Pacific Ocean purring like a big old cat.

Our house is made of wood. The whole outside is covered with worn wooden shakes that radiate heat when the sun shines. This is the only house my parents will ever own. I don’t know this at the time, but even when I am forty years old I will return home to visit my parents in the same house. I also don’t know that this is the only time in my life when I will have enough spare time to sit and watch the wheels go around in the power meter.

I hear my mom turn on the faucet in the kitchen. I look up and see her through the window at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. My mom is real pretty. She has beautiful brown eyes the same color as her hair. She is, as usual, smoking a cigarette, and looking sort of serious. I decide to go inside and do something funny.

Before I open the door I fall to my knees, and drag myself across the linoleum floor, like a legionnaire dying of thirst in the desert.

"I needs me spinach," I croak.

Mom walks calmly to the refrigerator and pulls out an open can of spinach, kept for just such occasions. I chew feebly at first, then faster, and jump up and down Popeye in the cartoons.

We are an odd family.

My dad is a doctor. Everybody in town is always telling me how he saved their life, cured their cold, or delivered their baby. This is back in the days when doctors made house calls. Dad is always dashing off in the middle of meals, carrying his little black bag. To this day both my parents still hate the phone.

I think it’s so glamorous. My favorite memory is of a Coast Guard helicopter landing on the beach behind our house, Dad running across the lawn with his black bag to aid some ailing sailor or fisherman.

We had a dog, a dalmatian named Sindoo, at the time. It seemed like Sindoo was always in trouble - chasing cars, growling at people.

Every time we sat down to eat, Sindoo would scratch at the front door to get out. My two older brothers, Orman and Tooey, allow me the honor of letting her in and out, which is practically every time I lift a forkful of food to my lips.

Dad decided it would make things a whole lot easier if he taught Sindoo to ring the doorbell. He gave her a dog biscuit every time she pushed the doorbell. Then the dalmatian kept ringing the doorbell every time she wanted a dog biscuit, and we had to untrain her.

One night at dinner the doorbell rang, only it wasn’t Sindoo. It was Officer Maltman, the Highway Patrolman. Dad went out on the porch to talk to him. "Evening, Doc," the policeman said.

"Hello, George," my dad said.

Officer Maltman rubbed his index finger along the side of his nose. "Doc, Helen Malone said your dog’s been killing her guinea hens…"

"Sindoo?" my dad replied, like he was real surprised. "Not Sindoo, George! Sindoo would never do that!"

At which point old Sindoo, herself, walked up the sidewalk, with a dead guinea hen hanging out of her mouth.

Somehow, my dad got off with a warning!

But the very next day Sindoo came home carrying the muddy carcass of a cat. It was Mrs. Malone’s prize Persian cat, Wobbles.

Dad was sure Sindoo was history after that, so he took the dirty dead cat into the bathroom and bathed it in the sink. Then he blew her hair dry with a hair dryer and put Wobbles on Mrs. Malone’s front porch, curled up like the cat died in her sleep.

The next morning Mrs. Malone stepped outside to collect the newspaper, took one look at Wobbles, and fainted. Luckily, she had a doctor living nearby.

"Great Ceasar’s ghost!" Mrs. Malone exclaimed after Dad revived her with smelling salts. "I buried Wobbles under the rose bush in the back yard last Tuesday!"

Before my dad began remodeling the house so we each had our own bedrooms, my brothers and I all slept in the same big brass bed on the third floor. Orman and Tooey put me in the middle. When they started one of their nightly slug-fests, I always got caught in the crossfire. Some mornings my arms were practically purple.

It was the perfect place to tell scary stories - with the wind whistling and the ocean roaring outside the windows. Tooey, the middle son, was a natural born story teller. He had a blonde crew cut (everyone had crew cuts then), bright brown eyes (like a racoons, I always thought), and was the smallest of us boys. Tooey never let me forget he was older, though. Even as adults he still insists on his predominance (he is a lawyer).

Anyway, the story he told that scared me the most was all about Mad Mr. Elliot, the town barber. My brother said he cut off his wife’s head with his razor sharp shears and buried the body in a cranberry bog behind his barber shop.

Shortly after sharing these atrocities, Mom asked my brothers to take me over for a haircut. In those days, a haircut only cost fifty cents.

As Orman and Tooey walked me over to the barber shop (which was in a garage across the highway from the lumber yard a few blocks from our house) Tooey told me that the barber had trimmed Orman’s ears with his razor sharp scissors - they had been as big as an elephants’ before!

My brothers had to practically push me through the front door of the barber shop, and when I saw Mad Mr. Elliot in person, I had to suppress a whimper. He was about ten feet tall, and did not have a single hair on his head - not even eyebrows!

He put a board across the arms of the barber chair, and once I was in place, wrapped a white sheet around me so I couldn’t get away. The barber shop smelled strongly of hair tonic. My brothers sat in the waiting area, smiling sadistically at my predicament.

When the barber came up behind me and clicked on the electric shears, the sudden buzzing scared me so bad I wet my pants. Then I had to sit in utter misery, my damp secret concealed, until the moment Mr. Elliot whisked the white sheet away at the completion of his services.

I have hated haircuts ever since.

Every other house in our neighborhood was a summer house, boarded up from September through Spring, or occupied only on weekends. There was a kid across the street, I remember, a five year old from Chehalis who let me know right away that coming from a larger town and being a year older than me put him in charge.

I heard his mom yelling at him all the time, "Patrick! Patrick Brown!" It seemed like he was in trouble a lot.

One of the first times I ever played with him, he had me climb under his house where he showed me a pack of cigarettes he had stolen from his mother. He threatened to tell my parents if I didn’t smoke one with him, but I ran home crying instead.

One day Patrick Brown came over and asked me if I wanted to go down to the ocean. There was a foot path that went from our back yard, wound through the sand dunes, to the flat hard dark sand beside the surf. I had never gone that far without a grown up before.

Patrik and I invented a game called "Grandma!" We pretended the ocean was our Grandma, who we were running away from. We would run after the receding surf, waving our arms, until the wave rolled back in, when we would run away screaming, "You can’t catch us, Gramdma!"

Boy, the surf was loud when you got close to it. We were both hollering our chant, and Sindoo was barking at our heels.

It was probably a good thing we were making so much noise because one time when my turn came to run after a wave it turned on me, and the next thing I knew I was in over my head in freezing salt water. I struggled to get to the surface, but it was as if something had a hold on my feet and wouldn’t let me up. I knew then what my parents were talking about when they warned us about the undertow.

Suddenly, two hands plunged through the murky depths and lifted me to the surface, sputtering and gasping for breath.

I always thought it was a miracle that my oldest brother, Orman, happened to be walking on the beach, heard Sindoo barking, and saved me from drowning. I rode home on my big brother’s shoulders. For punishment, my mom made me get into my pajamas and into bed at four o’clock in the afternoon, and when my dad got home he gave me a big glug of some nasty tasting medicine. That pretty effectively ended my adventures with Patrick Brown, but that was all right because the best part about living at the beach was that there was always a fast turnaround of tourists to do things with.

Every Saturday night my mom made hamburgers and deep fried French fries, and we all got to carry our dinner into the windowless room at the back of our house which we called the TV room, to watch Perry Mason. Normally we kids weren’t allowed to eat any place except at the dinner table, but Perry Mason was my parents favorite television show, and it came on late enough that Dad would be back from his evening house calls so we could all eat together. Nobody knew it, but these family nights were sheer terror to me.

Perry Mason scared me. All the actors had big black shadows under their eyes, and all the characters ever did was argue, frown, and shout at one another. I even thought the theme music was scary. The only part of the program I did enjoy was Perry’s secretary, Della Street, but her appearances were in my opinion entirely too brief.

So I suppose I should have been grateful that I was appointed the gopher. No one else was willing to tear themselves away from the compelling courtroom cases long enough to run back and forth to the kitchen for ketchup, drink refills, or to let the dog in and out. So I went. Unbeknowst to the rest of the family, there was something sinister right outside the TV room even more monstrous than Paul Drake’s resemblance to Frankenstein.

Between the TV room and the kitchen was a short hallway that took a right turn where the staircase leading upstairs emptied, a long, dark, narrow stairway.

I had a recurring nightmare, in which a monster materialized at the top of the stairs, oozing out of the light fixture on the second floor landing like a genie from a lantern. It had a huge head, a wide, wiggly mouth, big, bulging bloodshot eyes - the creature closely resembled, in fact, the cartoon monsters of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, from Orman’s hot rod magazines. The monster would fly down the stairs, chasing me, laughing like mad - but I always woke up just before I was captured.

That’s why I sprinted to and from the kitchen as fast as my feet would carry me, holding my breath, with my eyes squeezed shut. It’s a wonder no one ever asked why I returned from those missions so out of breath.

I did not know what to do, or who to tell. My parents were still upset about the fire I accidentally set in the kitchen, after dreaming that cartoon characters cut from the front of a cereal box came to life and did a dance in the oven when baked at three fifty. So I suffered in silence.

Well, one night I dreamt that the monster was chasing me again, only instead of waking myself up I let the dream play itself out - I let the monster catch me. And guess what? The monster turned out to be as jovial as Captain Kangaroo!

So I learned a valuable lesson - how to control my dreams.

But I never did get over my fear of Raymond Burr.

Until I started grade school, I spent every day alone with my mom. We were good buddies.

While Mom cleaned the house, prepared meals, or entertained her best friends Verla Monnes and Pauline Doupe at the kitchen table, I would sit on the linoleum floor in a patch of sunlight from the window over the sink. I would either stack the tin cans from the low cupboard beneath the oven in tall towers and castles that I’d then knock down, or play records on my red plastic phonograph. My favorites were the themes from Bonanza and Maverick, the Jimminy Cricket safety song (which I can still sing every word of today), and "Heartbreak Hotel."

Sometimes my mom’s friends would be there, smoking cigarettes around the kitchen table. Pauline Doupe was the wife of Marshal Doupe, who ran Doupe Brother’s Department Store with his brother Charles. Verla Monnes was married to Will Monnes, who had a real estate office right under the traffic light downtown. I loved it when Verla or Pauline fussed over me, and told my mom what a well behaved boy I was. They both had pretty hair and curvy figures.

In the afternoons, Mom liked to take a nap on the living room couch. While she rested, she’d have me take a nap in the TV room. But most the time I’d fool around in there - I didn’t need as much sleep as Mom.

Once I was playing in the TV room while Mom slept in the other room. The TV room walls were covered with acoustic tiles, which were supposed to keep the noise down. I was pretending that a carpenter came to fix the house. I took a coat hanger out of the hall closet and pulled off half the acoustic tiles on one wall.

"Mommy! Look what the carpenter did!" I cried aloud.

"What carpenter?" my mom asked sleepily, entering the room.

When she saw the damage I had done, she called my dad at the clinic. When he got home that night I got one of the few spankings I can remember him handing out. Later, when I heard my parents retell the story to company, and they all laughed, I decided it was worth the licking.

My favorite part of the day was when we went to the post office. The post office was about ten blocks from our house, next to Henderson’s grocery store.

Now, the post office was a small, square, windowless building covered with ugly yellow ochre asbestos shingles. Inside, three walls were lined with mail boxes. Ours was box 114. It had two little wheels you turned with a combination, and a little window. If the window was empty, then you didn’t have any mail that day. I hated an empty window.

Right next door was Henderson’s Food Store. The sign outside said, "Henderson’s - the friendly store." This was true. You didn’t go to Henderson’s if you were in a hurry!

Joe Henderson, the proprietor, was one of the nicest people I have ever known. His store had wooden floors, a pickle barrel, a long cooler full of popsicles, Dixie Cups, and ice cream sandwiches, and three twirley racks of comic books.

Sometimes Joe would place me up on the counter while Mom shopped and feed me chunks of cheddar cheese from a big wheel imported from Wisconsin.

"Alvin," he would say kindly, "you are some fellow!"

Once my mom bought me a bag of Planter’s peanuts; cost: 5 cents. On the back of the bag was an ad for a Genuine Mr. Peanut Silver Spoon. For some reason, a Mr. Peanut spoon lured me like a snake charmer does a cobra. I begged my mom to let me send away for one.

The next morning, starting about seven a.m., I started pestering my mom to take me to the post office. When we stopped at the store I told Joe Henderson all about the Mr. Peanut sterling silver spoon I was expecting. It was all I thought about for weeks.

Finally, after driving my poor family and anyone else who would listen crazy for two and a half months, Mom opened box 114 one morning and handed me a small brown box with my name on it.

Something didn’t feel right. The box didn’t weigh as much as a sterling silver Mr. Peanut spoon should have. When I opened the package, I discovered a silver spoon, all right - a silver plastic spoon. My Mr. Peanut spoon was molded plastic! I was only four years old, but learned an important lesson in the American free enterprise system that I would never completely recover from.

Back then, when Tooey and I were both small enough, we took our baths together in the same bathtub, a bathtub with four feet!

Tooey took being the middle brother seriously, as seriously as he took everything. Despite Orman's imperfections (he seemed sort of thick sometimes, and had a bad temper), Tooey stayed faithful to Orman because he was the oldest, deserving of unwavering loyalty, that I didn’t always share. Tooey also assigned himself my mentor -- at birth, apparently. He was my teacher, THE authority. I remember him teaching me the alphabet in the bathtub, and then the sounds of the letters so that I knew how to read before I even started kindergarten. Tooey adopted phonics years before the public schools did.

Tooey had great concentration. He would look at something and pay serious attention to it, whether it was a stick or a pine cone or the sunset or a stranger in an airport or our neighbor’s dog or a comic book, that object had Tooey’s serious attention. He stuck to things. And he never forgot anything. In fact, he remembers all these funny anecdotes about me that I don’t even remember -- even though I’m in them! Like the time he claims our family was in a fancy restaurant and the waiter brought Bing cherries to our table floating in a big bowl of water, and I distinguished myself by bobbing for them. Tooey always felt that if a story was good enough, it was all right to tell it. Well, I guess my whole family is that way, now that I think about it.

Human Suffering and Loss Dept. - I have been stuck for three days on the next installment, about a visit from my grandfather, whom I also feared. While my writing stalled (after all, hadn’t the last five segments centered around subjects I feared - I mean, how fearful a four year old was I?), I watched television. Now, I can’t explain this (like it would really take Freud to explain it), but every Leave It To Beaver segment where June and Ward showed understanding and sympathy for Beaver’s latest screw-up, every Andy Griffith Show wherein Opie is absolved for a misdemeanor, any Home Improvement episode where Jill and Tim work out their marital and familial differences so amicably (within thirty minutes!) - I inexplicably burst into tears!!! (Jeez, I even get teary over Friends episodes.)

I dreaded visits by my grandfather. I know that doesn’t sound very nice, but to be perfectly honest, my Grandpa Weaver scared me.

How do I put this? Grandpa Weaver was from Arkansas. He was rich - something about a fortune in Champion Sparkplug stock and owning several apartment buildings in Little Rock, Arkansas. The ring on his finger sparkled with diamonds. He looked like William Powell and his middle name (as far as I was concerned) was Intimidating. I was the only member of our family who did not propose sainthood where my mother’s father was concerned.

Anyway, it was Christmas Eve, 1957. Dad was going to drive to Portland to pick up Grandpa Weaver at the airport. I went; so did Tooey (he positively worshipped Grandpa). Now, normally our Christmas Eve ritual consisted of Dr. Egg visiting the peninsula nursing homes with his three sons, a basket of presents for the nursing staff, and our boyish good looks and unaffected good cheer a holiday placebo for the elderly occupants. Afterwards, we would always drive down to Ilwaco (a neighboring fishing town), passing Black Lake, which the volunteer fire department had decorated the distant shore of with a brilliant display of Christmas tree lights, before returning home always just moments after Santa Clause left our Christmas presents under the tree.

Not that this year wasn’t without it’s share of holiday wonders. On the five hour drive to Portland International Airport (in those days, the roads between Seaview and Longview were gravel) in Dad’s Valiant station wagon, we followed Santa’s progress on the radio (there were reports of a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer blipping the Coast Guard’s radar screens), AND we encountered real snowflakes (signaling our first white Christmas, just like the Bing Crosby song)!

But when Grandpa got in the car he made us turn the radio off. He wouldn’t let us stop once all the way home, and even though Dad thanked Ivan profusely for providing the loan that allowed us to own a luxurious Valiant station wagon, Grandpa criticized the comfort of our car the whole way home!

When we finally arrived home, all Grandpa Weaver seemed interested in was a glass of brown liquid. Of course, my brothers and I were more interested in all the brightly wrapped presents Santa Clause had left under the Christmas tree (according to my mom, we missed his Ho-ho Holiness only by a matter of minutes!).

Traditionally, we were allowed to open one present early, on Christmas Eve, and save the rest for Christmas morning. Mom and Dad usually stacked the deck to make sure we picked something entertaining for the evening. So Orman, Tooey, and I were particularly primed by the time we assembled in the living room.

We had to wait a while longer while Grandpa emptied the brown liquid from his glass, requested a refill, and after a leisurely sip, sat staring through his glass of brown liquid first at the fireplace, then at the twinkling Christmas tree.

Grandpa Weaver was one of the few people who called my dad "Oliver". Most of the people in town called him "Doc". My mom called him "Obie" (for his first and middle initials). The sign on Dad’s clinic read "Dr. O. B. Egg, MD." As long as I’m dealing with details, I should also mention that Sindoo, our errant Dalmatian, had disappeared after another run in with the authorities in October.

"Oliver, go get my bags," Grandpa ordered in his Southern accent; he pronounced "bags" with three syllables.

When my brothers and I jumped up to follow Dad down to the basement, he inexplicably turned on us. "Stay!" he insisted. "Sit!"

We sat.

To diffuse the situation somewhat, Mom placed a plate of Henderson’s special imported Wisconsin cheddar cheese and crackers on the coffee table, poured more brown liquid in Grandpa’s glass (as well as her own glass, out in the kitchen), and put the Burl Ives’ Christmas album on the hi-fi.

By that time Dad was back with the bags. Grandpa, seeming to us boys, at least, to be moving in slow motion, carefully removed the airline labels from each suitcase handle, one by one, with a miniature pearl handled pocket knife he apparently carried for that purpose, unlocked each suitcase and searched through their contents for about twenty minutes apiece, methodically unfolding and refolding every article of clothing on the way to extracting a pile of presents wrapped in bright, shiny gift wrapping paper and fancy ribbons from Little Rock, Arkansas’ finest department stores.

Naturally, Mom made a big fuss over the pretty packages, which resulted in our getting Grandpa’s gifts as our one token Christmas Eve opening! Grandpa kept telling us to be careful, so as not to tear the fancy gift wrapping paper. When we finally got them opened, my brothers and I each had matching sweaters from Neiman Marcus.

While the Egg brothers stood there, trying to appear enthusiastic over our new matching wardrobe, Dad disappeared. A moment later he came clomping back up the wooden basement stairs. A funny clattering came from the kitchen, claws skidding across linoleum, before a black blur cleared the end of the couch and a puppydog skidded in our midst!

Eloise (our mom named her) was black with a white blaze between her eyes, a white throat and belly, and white on the tip of her tail. Her eyes were the same shade of brown as all of ours, and she had that peculiar puppy smell. Now, back to her eyes - they seemed like they had seen a lot, even though she wasn’t that old.

Anyway, she jumped all over us, licking our faces and fingers, then wandered over and whizzed right in front of where Grandpa sat on the couch, nursing his drink. He frowned down at the dog, but if it bothered her, she didn’t show it. Eloise came back and sat down next to me. I smiled, all innocence, and petted her head. We had bonded.

Christmas morning, Orman and Tooey got coonskin caps. Dad got a banjo! Dad gave Mom a ruby ring; then Grandpa gave her a fox stole that still had the head attached, biting its own tail!

Me, I got a jack-in-the-box. I had never seen one before. Mom and Dad knelt down on the floor, and showed me how to turn the crank and play "Pop Goes The Weasel." When the clown popped out, it surprised the heck out of Eloise, who was looking on with keen canine concentration!

A few days after Christmas, my mom asked Grandpa to drive me down to the pool. I was taking swimming lessons at the public swimming pool, a result of the Patrick Brown incident.

I felt nervous, all alone in the car with Grandpa Weaver. He was particularly cranky in the early afternoons, before he had his first glass of brown liquid at 5:00. I wished Eloise were with me.

Grandpa stopped at the end of the driveway, and asked, "Which direction?"

I pointed toward town. "That way!"

Grandpa said, "No, I mean left, or right?"

"That way," I repeated, pointing. I hadn’t learned left or right yet.

But my grandfather insisted I learn them right then. "Left, or right?" he insisted.

So I guessed. "Right?"

Unfortunately, it was the wrong guess. Grandpa pulled out in the opposite direction from the public swimming pool!

"Left!" I cried.

He turned up another street, stopped at the stop sign, and said, "Left, or right."

We ended up going in circles for about forty five minutes, and arrived late for my swimming lesson. I had a hard time not crying. I still was confused about this right and left business.

To this day, I tense up whenever anyone asks, "Left, or right?"

Chapter Two: Nineteen Sixties

Now I was six. My universe was expanding.

I was in the first grade at George Washington Elementary School, a big, wooden, creaky, old two-story building painted a queer shade of green. There was a wide stairway leading up the front of the building that no one was allowed to use because they were too dangerous. Naturally I ran right up them my very first day and got yelled at.

You had to be careful on the stairs inside the school, too, because the wooden steps were practically worn out from so many kids traipsing up and down over the years. One time Billy Herman, a fifth grader, clomped downstairs too hard, broke clean through, and got stuck under the stairs; he had to sit in the dark for an hour before the principal, Mr. Van Over, and Sven, the janitor, figured out a way to get him out.

The first and second grades were downstairs, as well as the kitchen and the lunchroom (which had monkey bars on the walls!). The older kids, who included both my big brothers, were upstairs. There was a big bell at the top of the stairs, and a sixth grader ran out and pulled the string that rang it for recesses, lunchtime, and at the end of the day. I couldn’t wait until some day I was old enough to ring the bell.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Peterson. She had pretty brown hair, which she piled on top of her head, and glasses that were shaped like cats’ eyes. She smiled all the time, with plenty of teeth.

I liked her a lot. I always tried to do exactly what Mrs. Peterson taught me to do, so she would really like me, too. She seems particularly pleased with my being able to read so well. That is because Tooey taught me the alphabet and how to sound out words while we were in the bathtub together. But I couldn’t tell my teacher that!

When Mrs. Peterson read us stories she did the voices of all the characters, even if they were animals! My favorite books were Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel and Curious George. In the afternoon she played the piano and we all sang. I like the way her legs looked when she sat on the piano stool. To this day I still remember one of the songs:

                I like monkeys

                They are cute

                Riding on horseback

                In their purple suits!

There were only fifteen kids in the first grade. We sat in really tiny chairs and wrote with pencils the size of tree trunks. For the most part, we would stay together all the way through high school.

Nicky Folger and Ron Krebs lived next to each other in the swampy part of Seaview, and would remain partners in crime throughout life. They were famous for, among other things, inventing the game 'pantyhose', which they tormented Jo Ann Henderson with relentlessly. Jo Ann's dad owned the grocery store, and was a deacon at the Presbyterian Church. She had red hair, and always got straight A's - reminding me of the character Margaret, in the Dennis the Menace comic strip.

Anyway, the way you played 'pantyhose' was, no matter what anyone asked you, you answered, "Pantyhose!" For example:

Jo Ann Henderson: "Nicky, how old are you?"

Nick Folger: "Pantyhose!"

Jo Ann Henderson: "I said, how old are you?"

Nick Folger: "Pantyhose!"

Jo Ann Henderson: "Mrs. Peterson!!!"

Steve Nickles lived right across the street from the school, which made him special in no ones eyes but his own. He was always combing his hair with a pocket comb.

Gabe Meany, whose father owned the lumber yard, could always be depended on for information; even as a first grader, she could confirm any rumor about anyone in the school, or for that matter, about anyone in town. She could also recite the TV schedule and knew all the songs on the Top Forty. Her best friend was Diane Pickles, who was very short, but the most ferocious fighter on the playground. Diane's dad was the milkman. In those days the milkman used to come into our kitchen and leave milk in the refrigerator while we were still asleep upstairs, if you can image. Diane had a very 'mature' vocabulary (she swore a lot!). She and Gabe were always whispering secrets to one another.

My best buddy was Willie Marsh. He was a chubby kid, hence his nickname: Marshmallow. Within weeks of school starting Marshmallow and I were inseparable, bike-riding fanatics.

Ricky Rice was naturally gifted athletically, but not exactly a great student. He was feisty, funny, good at getting along with people and particularly popular with females, the captain of every team sport, and future president of the student body of Ilwaco High School. Rick was always fun to be around.

Cydni Cleavey always had a funny affect on me. I sort of had a crush on her, but was still too young to know what a crush was. She had a really nice laugh. Her best friend, Sherry Maidenhead, was always blowing bubbles with Bazooka bubble gum, which she was asked to spit out on average six times a day.

Filling out the class roster were Galen Doughty, a kid I only remember because of his funny name (he moved away in the middle of second grade - I think Gabe told us that Galen's dad embezzled money from the bank); Debbie Carpenter, a snively, freckled girl who always liked me a lot more than I liked her; and finally Carol Stanway, who was an only child and always seemed more adult, more worldly, somehow, than even our teacher.

Then there was Dennis Holtz. Dennis was always in trouble. Dennis was about a foot taller and much more muscular than most third graders. His parents had a huge dairy farm on the edge of town, so he had been raised with hard work, milking cows, and bore the mysterious distinction of being adopted. Dennis didn't just find trouble, trouble sought him out! He probably spent more time getting hollered at by Mr. Van Over in the furnace room than he spent in the classroom in the eight years it took him to finish six grades.

Every day at 11:10, Mrs. Peterson walked the first graders single file down the hall to the lunchroom. We broke into two groups: those lucky kids who ‘brought their lunch’ peeled off into the lunchroom, took their seats at a picnic table, and started eating. The rest of us had to line up for ‘hot lunch’, served by Mrs. Warner.

The only good thing about waiting in line was having your ticket punched by Mary Somela. Mary was a sixth grader. I held all upperclassmen in awe (with the exception of my brothers, of course). Mary Somela was, in my eyes, as pretty as Donna Reed, or even Ingrid Bergman. She always smiled so nicely at me – probably because the mere sight of her made me blush as bright as a beet.

Once I got past Mary, and could breathe again, I took a tin tray and moved down to the serving window. Mrs. Warner, the cook, was about four feet tall, and wore a hair net. She had to stand on a milk crate to ladle lunch on our tin trays. She always had a huge grin that reminded me of the picture of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, which Mrs. Peterson was reading us. Mrs. Warner always had her AM radio tuned to KISN, a Portland station that played Elvis Presley, Dion and the Belmonts, Ricky Nelson, Chuck Berry, Chubby Checkers, and this new thing, surf music.

The coolest kids in the school were the ones working in the kitchen. You had to be a sixth grader for this honor. Mary Moon (about half the girls in the school were named Mary) and Millicent Meany (Gabe’s oldest sister – the Meany’s were a big sprawling family who were related to about half the population of Long Beach) were Mrs. Warner’s serving assistants. They both lived in my neighborhood, which should have qualified me for bigger portions or something... but they were sixth graders, and rarely acknowledged my lowly existence. Even cooler were the dish washers – Don Houston, Butch Jasperson, and Duck Meany, who were famous for their daring deeds, such as pushing a donkey in the emergency exit of the movie theater downtown, blocking the screen.

For thirty cents we got a tray of good government approved creamed-tuna-on-biscuits, or maybe meatloaf, or sloppy joes, boiled vegetables, chocolate pudding, peach or pear halves slathered in a sugary syrup, and stacks of buttered white bread guaranteed to have you bouncing off the walls twenty minutes later. Was it any wonder kids were always falling asleep in the afternoons? But Mrs. Warner always wore such a fiendishly friendly grin on her face as she spooned out this stuff (it sort of reminded me of the delirious expression our dog Eloise wore after inhaling her canned dog food every evening); who was I, a mere first grader, to critique the cuisine? Besides, I wasn’t that interested in eating. I liked to run from table to table, shmoozing.

One feature our lunchroom had that made it unique was wooden monkey bars built up the sides of each wall. Kids would suddenly spring up the wooden rungs, hang by one arm, and drop down again – sometimes smack dab in the middle of a crowded picnic table, scattering diners in all directions.

In another corner of the room was a line of garbage cans. My brother Orman was one of the ‘scrapers’, who along with his best friends Greg Reese and Lenny Cox, collected our utensils and, armed only with rubber spatulas, emptied our trays. They had to wear plastic aprons and white paper hats, a small price to pay for the privilege of banging the tin trays against the inside of metal garbage cans an hour a day.

For sheer volume, the bedlam of the lunchroom could have drowned out the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The picnic tables so tightly packed together were crammed with the constituents of every clique – groups of boys and girls of all grades (seldom sitting together, but often screaming or throwing things at one another), basketball groups, baseball groups, student government groups, cheerleader groups, and splinter groups who didn’t fit in anywhere else. No one was exactly sitting still, either. Many major food spills occurred each day. Poor Sven, the janitor, would stand sadly in the corner, leaning on his mop handle, waiting to be needed.

How I wanted a lunch pail. For some reason, I thought the kids who brought their lunches were glamorous. My mom had explained that our family could afford for me to eat hot lunch, that it was a privilege. Yet I would go in the coat room every morning and cast my eyes on the brown paper bags and colorful lunchboxes sitting on the shelves, the aroma of peanut butter, tuna fish, and ripening bananas enticing me, intoxicating me.

Steve Nickles had a Davey Crocket lunch pail. Diane Pickles had a Mickey Mouse Club lunch pail – with Annette! Cydni Cleavey had Felix the Cat, Gabe Meany had Howdy Doody, and even Debbie Carpenter, whom I considered quite uncool otherwise, had Woody Woodpecker. I wanted to join this exclusive club.

Every day I begged my mom until finally she relented. The next time we went to the store, she said I could get a lunch box.

Henderson’s Food Store wasn’t like the supermarkets we have today. There wasn’t quite the selection. In fact, I only had few models to choose from. One of those was a plain black lunch box. And there was simply no way I was taking the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans model. That was for sissies.

"Why don’t you get the Dr. Kildare lunchpail?" my mom suggested.

"Aw, Mom!" I moaned.

"Because your dad is a doctor," she explained.

"Aw, Mom!"

Mrs. Henderson, who was a very religious person, leaned over the counter and said, "It’s really too bad they don’t make a Jesus Christ lunch pail, don’t you think?"

"Or John the Baptist," Mom replied, dryly.

But my mind was already made up. I had my sights on the Elvis Presley lunch pail. Both my mom and Mrs. Henderson rolled their eyes over my preference. I didn’t care, though. I was going to be one hip first grader! Even my brothers would be impressed.

The next morning I woke my mom up about an hour before sunrise to pack my lunch. I watched very closely as she made my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Don’t cut it!" I exclaimed. "Don’t cut it! That’s right, just fold it over. When you cut the sandwich, all the flavor leaks out," I told her.

My mother eyed me warily and lit a cigarette. She was not what I would characterize a morning person.

Mom wrapped the sandwich in waxed paper, which is all they had to wrap things with in those days. She filled the thermos with milk and placed it inside the lunch pail with a banana and a paper napkin. It looked quite cozy in there.

"There you go, Buster," she said, snapping the lid shut.

All the way to the bus stop I was singing, "You ain’t nothin’ but a lunchbox!"

Our bus stop was in front of the Moon’s house, three doors down the street. Charlie Moon made his living painting pictures. He liked kids a lot – in fact, he and his wife, Maureen, had seven of their own! The Moon’s bumpy back yard was a favorite place for the neighborhood kids to play football. Their driveway doubled as a basketball court.

Between their house and Charlie’s shop was a big Tarzan swing; their eldest son, Jim (who was in the military) shinnied up the tallest tree on the property and attached a long rope with a stick handle on the end you stood on. You climbed up a ladder to a fifteen foot tower and jumped, Tarzan style – the rope swung you way out across their lawn and over the street. It was exhilarating fun, and also quite dangerous, but nobody worried about that in those days.

Anyway, we were all playing basketball while waiting for the bus: my brothers, several of the Moon girls (there were four all together), a couple Meany’s, and a Fink, I think. I put my lunchpail down and when I wasn’t looking Mrs. Moon backed over it with her car!

She didn’t apologize, either. Smashed my Elvis Presley lunch box (and thermos!) flatter than a pancake, and called me a ninny for leaving it in the driveway.

Of course, all the kids were rolling on the ground, laughing hysterically at my tragedy. And there I was, confronted with the most awkward social situation I could conceive of. My beloved Elvis Presley lunch pail lay squashed on the asphalt, leaking milk. I could have cried. Instead, I lowered my eyelids and adopted the cool, semi-detached expression I’d studied from the movie poster of James Dean’s East Of Eden that Tooey had hanging in our room.

"C'est la vie," I said. I borrowed that from a Chuck Berry song.

To my astonishment, laughing the matter off in this manner paid off handsomely. Boarding the school bus, all the kids kept saying, "C'est la vie," over and over. I’d launched a buzz phrase that I heard in the hallways and was tossed around the playground for weeks!

The best part was later that morning when I took my place back in the ‘hot lunch’ line. When Mary Somela took my lunch ticket, she smiled fondly at me and said, "Hey, Alvin. C'est la vie!"

We were sitting in a circle of miniscule chairs, and Mrs. Peterson was flashing her flash cards.

I didn't like math much. Instead of paying attention, I was looking at the picture of George Washington that hung over the blackboard. Every room in the school had the same portrait. You've probably seen it, where the bottom third of the picture is covered with clouds because George Washington died or something before the artist finished. I was wondering why the artist couldn't have just painted the rest of George Washington's clothes from memory, it shouldn't have been that hard to do...

Mrs. Peterson held up another flash card, and pointed to the numbers. "Three plus three. Who knows the sum of three plus three?"

Jo Ann Henderson waved her hand frantically. "I know! I know the answer, Mrs. Peterson!"

Mrs. Peterson called on Steve Nickles instead. Steve carefully pulled a pocket comb through his hair, stood up, put the comb back in his pocket, and answered, "Six."

"Very good, Steve!" Mrs. Peterson turned the flash card over, and slowly swept it back and forth for everyone to identify the answer.

"Why does the six have a line under it?" Debbie Carpenter asked. She had recently assigned herself the Class Question Asker.

"That's to show it's a six," Mrs. Peterson replied. "If you turn it upside down, it looks like what?"

"Nine!" several students chimed.

"Hey, that's sort of like Tom Mot, in the third grade," Ricky Rice said. "His name is the same backwards and forwards!"

"Well, sort of," Mrs. Peterson conceded. "Okay, who knows this one: zero plus one?"

Jo Ann Henderson started waving both hands before Mrs. Peterson was even finished speaking. "Please, Mrs. Peterson! Please!! I know the answer!!!"

"Thank you, Jo Ann. I'm sure you do. How about you, Ronny?" Mrs. Peterson said.

"I don't know," Ronny Krebs said, so slowly that it sounded like every word in his sentence had a period after it.

"I know! I know!" Jo Ann shouted.

Mrs. Peterson bent closer toward Ronny Krebs. "See, Ronny? You have one," she said, holding up one finger, "and you add zero," she continued, making an O with the fingers of her other hand. "What have you got?"

Ronny thought about this several long seconds. "Zero?" he asked.

Jo Ann could barely contain herself. She jumped out of her chair and chanted, "I know it! I know it!!!"

"Nicky Folger, can you help Ronny with the answer?" Mrs. Peterson asked, kindly.

"Pantyhose!" Nicky piped.

Just then the door opened and our Principal, Mr. Van Over, waved Mrs. Peterson over. Mr. Van Over had red hair, which he wore in a military hair cut. He always looked like a war hero to me; or maybe it was just that he resembled Ernest Borgnine.

Mrs. Peterson went over and they started whispering.

"It's one!" Jo Ann Henderson informed everyone in our teacher's absence. "One and zero is one! It's so easy!!!"

But no one was paying Jo Ann any attention. We were all staring at the two teachers conferring in the doorway. Standing just behind Mr. Van Over, almost completely concealed by one pant leg, clung a tiny, timid girl.

I knew who she was, of course. Shannon, the youngest of the Moon girls. She had the same crooked nose and wide mouth as her mom. What I couldn't figure was what she was doing here. Shannon was a grade ahead of me, and in all the time we'd been neighbors, she had probably only spoken to me a time or two.

"Hi, Shannon!" I called. I was only trying to be friendly.

She gave me a withering look.

After Mr. Van Over left, Mrs. Peterson escorted Shannon to an empty chair and resumed the math lesson.

Gabrielle Meany and Diane Pickles started whispering fiercely. The phrase "held back" passed around the room with the speed of lightning.

Shannon didn't say a single word all afternoon. She either hung her head so that her hair hid her eyes, or stared sullenly out the window, avoiding all eye contact with her new, unwanted classmates. When school let out, she streaked outside. Mrs. Moon was waiting out front in an antique automobile – a shiny Pierce Arrow with a fancy hood ornament. Shannon scrambled inside, scrunched down in the back seat, and drove off without so much as a glance at any of the kids standing in the school yard, staring after them with their mouths wide open.

When the dismissal bell clanged at the end of the school day, the building emptied out with the commotion of a jungle stampede. We would rather walk home than ride the school bus, even if it was raining. My brother Tooey and his friends, Freddy Meany and Herman Herman, being older and that much more advanced, would walk half a block ahead of me and my friends, Ricky Rice and Marshmallow. Freddy Meany, who was a hoodlum at birth, would throw rocks to keep us at a respectful distance.

There were several excellent trade routes to take home. By far our favorite way home was along Washington Street, past the big Baptist Church and the lumber yard, past a deserted and therefore haunted house, and through a vacant lot (there were lots of vacant lots in those days). Candy bar wrappers littered the well-worn foot path through the vacant lot, from goodies kids bought at Dell Dinger's Texaco station across the highway from there.

Ricky Rice's house was at the end of Washington Street, so he would break out of our formation just before the vacant lot and run the rest of the way home. And I mean run. Ricky was the fastest runner in our class. His arms and legs pumped with the efficiency of pistons; he moved so fast that he left a cloud of dust in his wake.

Our first stop was always Star Corner, the Texaco station/grocery store/bait shop run by Dell Dinger on the corner of 12th Street. In addition to gasoline, Dell sold bait and tackle for all the fishermen in the area, but to us kids, he was the candy man. He kept the candy counter stocked with every brand of candy bar imaginable, as well as plenty of penny candy. In those days, a dime bought a candy bar that was huge – sometimes Marshmallow and I would pitch in a nickel apiece for a Baby Ruth or Mountain Bar that would satisfy both of us (well, almost). But most of the time we bought penny candy – licorice, Bazooka Bubble Gum, wax tubes of colored sugar water, Pixie Sticks, jawbreakers, wax lips, root beer suckers, malt balls (two for a penny!). For a few cents you could get a bag of stuff that would last almost all the way home!

Now, on this particular afternoon we were walking down the Ditch Road, eating candy. We called it the Ditch Road because it had ditches dug along its sides, where the sewage from all the houses ran. It was a safe street to walk down because people didn't drive as fast as they did on the highway, which gave a kid time to get out of the way.

There were always lots of frogs croaking from the ditches along the side of the road, so Marshmallow and I decided to stop and catch some. We got down on our bellies and inched up to the ditch. The frogs all stopped croaking when they sensed us there, but we stayed still for a few seconds until the frogs started sticking their eyes above the surface of the water to look around.

That's when we pounced. Our arms shot out and grabbed in the gooey water. Then we sat up and slowly opened our clenched fists, which were dripping with slimy algae, to see if we caught anything.

"Did you get one, Alvin?" Marshmallow asked.

"Naw," I said, wiping my hands on my pants. "Did you?"

"Almost," Marshmallow said. "Come on, let's try again."

So we kept trying. It did not even occur to us that we were sticking our arms in raw untreated sewage.

"Hey, I know," Marshmallow said. "How about if I hold on to your legs? That way we can get closer to them!"

"All right!" I agreed.

Soon I was suspended out over the surface of the water. I felt a little unbalanced, but what kid wouldn't sacrifice comfort to catch a frog any day? Then I saw a big bullfrog surface a few feet in front of me.

"Look!" I whispered.

"Yeh!" Marshmallow marveled, behind me.

I slowly stretched my arms out, and was about to pounce...

SPLOOSH!!!

Freddy Meany snuck up and lobbed a big rock right next to us! The bullfrog swam away, Marshmallow lost his grip, and my head and shoulders plunged into the mucky water. Luckily, Tooey and Herman Herman rushed up and yanked me out by my belt loops.

"Oh, man!" Freddy Meany laughed.

"Geez!" I sputtered.

"That's not funny!" Marshmallow said. Although dripping wet, he was laughing as hard as everyone else.

So we headed on home. Marshmallow's house was first, then Freddy Meany's. Tooey, Herman Herman, and I walked the final few blocks to our house together. Herman came home with us a lot, because he liked our household better than his own. My sneakers make squishy sounds.

A couple blocks before our house, we saw our dog, Eloise, coming up the street toward us. She looked lost. Her tail was hanging kind of low.

"Hey, girl!" we called.

Eloise ran up to us, wagging her tail. She didn't care that I smelled like sewage.

When we got to the concrete steps leading up to our house, Eloise refused to climb them. She sat down at the base of the stairs with a faraway look in her eyes.

"Gee," Herman said. "I wonder what's wrong with Eloise?"

"Come on, girl," Tooey tried. The dog wouldn't budge.

"Why don't we go in and make some sandwiches?" I suggested. "She'll want in if we have some food."

"Say, that's pretty smart for a first grader," Herman said, as we headed up the stairs.

"Race you!" Tooey cried. The three of us clambered up the steps and raced for the front door. Naturally, the older guys got there first. I ran up and collided with them in a noisy pile right inside the kitchen door.

Standing at the stove was a stranger, a tiny, elderly lady with frizzy blue hair, like a Brillo pad. She wasn't very big, but she frowned at us so disapprovingly that we cowered against the front door as if she were Count Dracula.

"Who are you?" Tooey stuttered.

"I'm Mrs. Hudson," sneered Mrs. Hudson. She pointed a wooden spoon at Herman Herman. "You there! Get on home!"

Herman untangled himself and lunged out the door as if she were the Wicked Witch of the West. "See you guys tomarrow!" he called, retreating down the sidewalk. Now we knew why Eloise wouldn't come in.

"Where's Mom?" I whimpered.

"Your mother is in bed. I am taking charge of you boys until she has her baby."

"Baby?" my brother and I said, at the same time. You would think that in a doctor's household we would be a bit better informed.

Instead of answering, she pointed at me with a crooked finger. "You are taking a bath."

"I don't need a bath," I started to say, and ended up, five minutes later, soaking in the bathtub. Tooey sat on the toilet seat nearby, looking glum. A few minutes later Orman entered the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.

"I sure hope Dad gets home soon," he said.

After barely passing Mrs. Hudson's critical inspection, we were allowed upstairs to our parent's bedroom to visit our mom. She was sitting up in bed, propped up with a pile of pillows, wearing a nightgown, reading a Herman Wouk novel.

"Hello, fellas," she said. "It's all right to breath."

The three of us exhaled with relief.

"Don't worry," she said. "I just need to take it easy for a month or two, until the baby is ready. Mrs. Hudson will help around the house and keep an eye on you guys after school until your Dad gets home from the clinic."

"She made me take a bath," I blurted. Orman nudged me to shut up.

Mom smiled and asked, "Which would you boys rather have: a baby brother, or a baby sister?"

My brothers and I looked at our feet.

"You decide, Mom," said Tooey, the future litigator.

The evening meal was an ordeal. Mrs. Hudson had two moods: cross and very cross. After we finally coaxed Eloise inside, Mrs. Hudson banished her to the basement, slamming our poor pet's tail in the door in the bargain, which caused a minor insurrection in itself.

Then she sat us down at the dinner table, and placed before us plates of corned beef, sauerkraut, and peas. We greeted this hideous concoction as eagerly as soldiers facing a court martial. I missed Eloise sitting in her usual place under the kitchen table, where she always assisted in eating my meals. I doubt she would have been any help with my sauerkraut and peas, anyway.

I was still sitting stubbornly in front of my plate when my Dad got home, shortly after dark. He barely got to put his black medicine bag on the bishop's bench inside the front door before my brothers rushed him, as if they hadn't seen him in a year.

After greeting both my brothers, he helped Mrs. Hudson into her coat. "Thank you, Rosetta," he hurriedly said, practically pushing her out the door the second she had her hat pinned on.

Dad came over to the table and examined my plate appreciatively.

"How was your day, Alvin?" he asked.

"Just fine, Father."

"How's the cuisine?" he ventured.

After Dad scraped the plates he went up to talk to my Mom. Then he fed the dog, cleaned the kitchen, and sent us off to bed.

Before I fell asleep, Dad started practicing his banjo playing in the kitchen, where the sound was the best. You could hear it all the way upstairs. His style had yet to develop. There were noticeable pauses between the chord changes. He made occasional plinking sounds that I felt certain were not an intentional part of the arrangement.

I drifted to sleep to the strains of "Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah", one of my all-time favorite songs:

                Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah

                Someone's in the kitchen I know

                Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah

                Strumming on the old banjo!

                Fee, fie, fiddly-eye-o

                Fee, fie, fiddly-eye-o

                Fee, fie, fiddly-eye-o

                Strumming on the old banjo!

That Friday night my brothers and I were going downtown to see a new Jerry Lewis movie. Mrs. Hudson set the dinner table. A meat loaf was in the oven, and Brussels sprouts boiled on the stove.

We waited anxiously for Dad to get home. It was a rule in our family that we always have dinner together. With Dad's job we sometimes started sort of late.

It was nearly six thirty when Eloise's ears perked up - she always heard Dad's car engine before we did. When he walked in, we were at our places at the dinner table, our silverware poised. The movie started at seven.

Dad dismissed Mrs. Hudson and disappeared upstairs to see Mom. Precious minutes passed. Tooey, Orman, and I fidgeted nervously. The sickening aroma of boiled Brussels sprouts added to our discomfort.

By the time Dad came downstairs and served supper, it was a quarter to seven. We lunged at our food like a pack of ravaged animals. We even gulped down the wretched vegetables.

"Well, boys. What did you learn in school today?" Dad asked - a trick question which, frankly, there wasn't time for.

Orman acted as our spokeman. "Not much, Dad. Mr. Pells is making us memorize the states and their capitals. Can we be excused?"

"Well, what's your hurry?" Dad asked.

"There's a Jerry Lewis movie downtown, Dad," I explained.

"Oh, Jerry Lewis," Dad conceded, rolling his eyeballs in resignation. "Guess you want to get going, huh?"

We were on our bikes roaring down the Ditch Road within moments. Orman had a big black Schwinn bike - I rode on the handlebars. Tooey raced ahead on his shiny blue J.C. Higgins bicycle, ordered from the Sears catalog.

It had always confused me why we called it 'downtown', since the business district of Long Beach was only three or four blocks long. Didn't that imply that there was an uptown somewhere?

"Yow!" I cried. I wasn't paying attention and put my foot in the spokes. The bicycle, Orman, and I crashed in a tangle to the hard concrete road.

I shrieked hysterically. My leg was bent backwards in an extremely painful position, by foot stuck between the bicycle wheels spokes. My scraped elbows burned as if on fire.

"Are you all right, Alvin?" Tooey asked anxiously, bending over me.

"Ahhhhhh!!!" I screamed. Of course I wasn't all right.

Orman went to work with the same serious precision our dad employed in the operating room. He took a wrench from a set of tools he kept in a little black bag behind the bike's saddle. He hurriedly loosened the bolts from the front axles and straightened my twisted leg. My crying turned to sniffles. With the same calm concentration Orman used a spoke tightening tool to free my foot.

Even though we were late by now, we walked our bikes the rest of the way to the movie theater. My face still stung from my tears. Despite my discomfort, all I was really worried about was seeing the latest Jerry Lewis picture.

Downtown Long Beach was decorated with outdoor Christmas tree light twelve months a year, strung across Main Street from the telephone poles on the end of each block, lending a faux carnival atmosphere to the business district. We parked our bikes on the porch of the Pacific Hotel, a dilapidated wooden building that dominated the center of town. It was so old and run down that it would get torn down within a year, along with the aging train depot - to make room for a drug store, a bakery, and an asphalt parking lot.

We ran up to the box office of the Sunset Theater, breathlessly. Millicent Meany, Gabe and Freddy's older sister, sat in the ticket booth, blowing a big pink bubble with a look of benign boredom on her face.

"Sold out," she said, snapping her gum.

My brothers and I slumped our shoulders in a collective gesture of dejection. I felt tears coming on again.

Smitty, the owner of the movie house, stood in the open doorway with his hands in his pockets. He was a big man, with a remarkable resemblance to W.C. Fields.

"Psst," he pssted. "Hey, guys! Come ear!"

He took us inside, and led us into the projection booth. It was dark in there, and smelled of machine oil and cigarettes. The projectors whirred away, showing previews.

Smitty shoved a sturdy wooden table against the wall underneath a small square window, and helped the three of us up. I had to stand on tiptoe, but I didn't think about it as soon as the movie started.

I can't remember what the movie was called, but it was in black and white, and Jerry Lewis played a TV repairman who wanted to be a private eye. He was the long lost son of a millionaire, and got chased around by some man-eating robot lawn mowers. We laughed ourselves silly. Smitty even provided some popcorn. We didn't know it, but our dad treated Smitty's wife when she suffered from the miscarriage of their only child.

When the show let out we retrieved our bikes and took our time heading home. The sidewalks were crowded with people spilling out of the movie, still laughing over the comedy. We joined a bunch of kids hanging out in front of Stoltz's Candy Store, sniffing the delicious aroma of fresh, hot after-theater carmelcorn, and gawking at the high school kids cruising their cool cars up and down Main Street.

Tooey bought a ten cent hunk of hard peppermint salt water taffy which we cracked on the sidewalk and sucked on, as the three of us headed down the sidewalk toward home. We passed Shier's Dry Good Store, with it's dusty, faded window displays, and the Police station, which was located right across the street from Mary Lou's Tavern. Next to the tavern was a long wooden bench, where some of Mary Lou's customers sometimes slept it off!

We crossed the street and leaned our bikes against the wooden bench, being careful not to disturb old Ben Sott, who snored away quite unselfconsciously.

We stopped to pay homage to our favorite local shrine. Although our town only had a population of two hundred and sixty, Long Beach claimed to have the largest and longest of everything: the World's Longest Beach, the World's Largest Piece Of Driftwood, and last but not least, the World's Largest Frying Pan!

If you traveled to the farthest corners of the planet, you would find few tourist attractions to rival the magnificence of the World's Largest Frying Pan. The gigantic cast iron skillet was, with the exception of the water tower, the tallest structure in town. It needed to be that big, legend told, to fry the humongous razor clams which grew out front. Bleached whale bones were scattered by the base of the monolithic skillet to emphasize its enormity. As was our custom, my brothers and I salamied the giant black cast iron skillet several times before returning home.

Although my elbows and ankle still stung, I had recovered enough to climb back onto Orman's handlebars for the return trip. I would drive my family, teachers, and friends crazy with Jerry Lewis impersonations for weeks to come.

Everyone was afraid of Chick Mitchell. It was said he drank beer. He was a huge kid, with a big barrel chest and bulging arm muscles. He had red hair which stood on his head in greasy spikes, like he was sweating all the time. A rash of freckles splattered his face, and his eyebrows were so thick they grew together in the middle, like a furry feral animal. He always walked around with a toothpick in his mouth, sometimes two, one on either side of his mouth - which made him look really tough.

He was just a mean kid. One time he came over to our house and asked if I could come to the door.

"Hey, Alvin," he sneered.

"Hi!" I squeeked, nervously, wondering what Chick Mitchell wanted with me.

"Alvin, I want you to do something," Chick Mitchell said.

"What?" I asked, innocently.

"Press your face up against the screen door," he said.

"Okay!" I said. I pushed my face against the screen and Chick Mitchell slugged the screen right where my face was. This was my first experience with an actual terrorist, and I did not like it. It didn't go over very well with the other kids in our neighborhood, either. But it took the football incident to bring things to a boiling point.

We usually played football in the Moon's back yard, but one Saturday we were playing in the Crosby's yard across the driveway from our house, so our mom could watch us from her bedroom window. The Crosbys' were 'summer people'; in fact, they occupied the house infrequently, just a few weeks in July or August. So we were free to tear around their yard most of the time, and climb their trees. They had an authentic Indian totem pole in their front yard, which we weren't supposed to climb on – a rule which for the most part we respected.

The other feature that made their yard really attractive, especially for football, was a steep cliff running the length of the lawn, or the northern side line. It was about an eighty-five degree gradient, dropping directly into the gravel driveway below, so you didn't want to get tackled on that side of the field. The football field itself was only about forty yards in length, and the Crosby's house butted up against the opposite side line. We modified our rules so that you could complete a pass by bouncing the football off the Crosby's house. Accommodations also had to be made for the totem pole, which stood in the middle of the end zone.

Anyway, the two teams that Saturday consisted of Mary and Alice Moon, Tooey, and Freddy Meany on the shirts team, and Orman, Herman Herman, Marshmallow, and I on the skins team. The pairing of the teams wasn't really fair, but the Moon girls couldn't very well take their shirts off, now could they?

Mary Moon was the undisputed all-star of the neighborhood – she was better at sports than any of the guys. Whichever team she was on always won. Alice Moon, Mary's junior by one year, was also good at athletics – but Alice was gentler than her oldest sister.

The score was 46 to zero. Our team huddled.

"What do you think we should try now?" Orman asked Herman.

"I don't know," Herman Herman said. "Maybe if we run that last play over again we'll catch them off guard."

"We lost yards on the last play," I said.

"I wish we could put our shirts on," Marshmallow said. "It's cold out here!"

"Hurry up, already!" Freddy Meany hollered.

We decided to punt.

I held the ball, hoping I wouldn't get kicked in the head. Marshmallow was usually the best punter we had. Unfortunately, the ball sailed off sideways, wobbling end over end, bounced down the hill, and landed in the street. Everyone charged after it, but screeched to a halt – there in the middle of the road, tossing the football up and down with one hand, stood Chick Mitchell.

Mary Moon was there first. "Hey!" she growled. "Give us the ball!"

"Is this yours?" he asked belligerently. If he felt outnumbered, he didn't act it.

"Give it back!" Mary repeated.

"Yeh, give it back!" we echoed.

"Why don't you go home to your mama?" Chick Mitchell mocked.

Freddy Meany, a man of action, ran around behind our enemy and tried to grab the football. Chick Mitchell held it over his head, laughing cruelly, and forced Freddy to jump up and down and up and down in vain. I was reminded of the evil puppet master in Pinocchio.

"Come on!" Orman ordered. "Give it to us!"

"Who's gonna make me?"

"I am!" Mary yelled.

"You and whose army?" Chick Mitchell sneered.

Mary Moon had a pretty short fuse. She lunged at him; they tussled. She grabbed the arm that held the football and tugged with all her might…

"Let go of me, you dyke!" Chick Mitchell spat.

Suddenly, we all went silent. We had never heard anything so vile. I didn't even know what a dyke was, but I knew it was something really bad.

Mary hung her head. It completely diffused her.

Chick Mitchell turned, and threw the football in a perfect spiraling, Johnny Unitis pass that lodged in the branches of a treetop in Bradley's Lot, a patch of woods that occupied half the block.

Then he ran. We ran after him, but he outran us all.

We gave up a block later, and all stood there, panting, feeling very defeated.

"We've got to get that guy," Mary Moon murmured.

The next day, I was standing out in the street, strategically placed between Chick Mitchell's house and the beach. I waited around, scuffing my sneaker in the dirt, until I heard a whistle.

"Hey, Chickie!" I called. "Hey, Chick-eee!"

The front door to Chick Mitchell's house flung open. Chick Mitchell burst out like the Tasmanian Devil. He spun around and around, shaking his fists menacingly.

"I'll kill you," he slobbered.

I ran as fast as I could down the street, Chick Mitchell in hot pursuit. I called out, "Chick-en! Chick-en!"

I headed for the beach. The soft sand started to slow me down. Chick Mitchell was gaining.

I led him between two sand dunes. "Chick-en!" I called, victoriously.

A rope snapped up, catching him at neck level. Mary and Alice Moon were on one end, my brothers on the other.

"Erk!" Chick Mitchell gagged.

We dragged him by the neck through a sticker patch, a mud puddle, and a couple blocks of pavement. We deposited Chick Mitchell on his own front doorstep, as deflated as a burst balloon.

Mary Moon bent down and spit on him.

That night, my brothers and I were in our bedroom, on the third floor of our house, when we heard Chick Mitchell's mother screaming down the street for our father.

After the yelling died down, Dad came upstairs to talk to us.

"Gentlemen," he began. "You nearly killed that boy."

We stared back, as blankly as cigar store Indians.

"I guess I have to punish you," Dad said.

We didn't care.

Chick Mitchell never bothered any of us again.

One day after recess, Ricky Rice and I were dawdling in the coat room before returning to our seats.

"Did you know ‘racecar’ is the same spelled backwards and forwards?" he asked.

"You're putting me on," I replied. I was sort of surprised Ricky could spell racecar, either forward or backward.

Shannon Moon came up to us holding some slips of paper.

"Here Ricky," she said, handing him a piece of paper . "I made a list of your faults."

"No kidding," Ricky said, reading. "Too gub?"

"What’s gub?" I asked.

"That’s not gub," Shannon insisted. "It’s glib. You’re too glib."

"It looks like gub to me," Ricky said. "Doesn’t it look like gub to you?" he said, showing me the list.

"Gub," I said.

"IT’S GLIB!" Shannon shouted.

"Glib," Ricky repeated, scratching his head. "Could it be?"

"Impossible," I assured him.

"Oh, blow up!" Shannon Moon exclaimed, shoving a list at me.

My list was a lot longer than Ricky’s list. It unrolled like a roll of toilet paper.

"Oh, come on!" I moaned. "Are these all my faults?"

"Now that you mention it," Shannon said, "I think I forgot something." She took the list back and started scribbling something else on the bottom.

"There is always room for self-improvement," she said.

Sometimes after school I liked to stop by my dad’s doctor office on the way home from school. Dad’s clinic was a small red building with a flat roof next to the highway a couple blocks south of Dell Dinger’s Texaco station.

There was always quite a crowd of patients sitting in the wooden captain’s chairs in the waiting room, reading magazines and smoking cigarettes - the cancer threat hadn't been uncovered yet.

In one wall was a window, well above my head, where Mrs. Saunders, the friendly receptionist, sat.

"Hello, Alvin," she gushed. She always sounded glad to see whoever walked in the door, even if they were extremely ill.

"Hi!" I squeeked. I felt really small all of a sudden. After spending the day around people my own size, the grown up furnishings of the doctor’s office made me feel comparatively Lilliputian. "Can I see my dad?"

"I’m sure we can arrange something," Mrs. Saunders said, winking. She made it seem like there was no one else in the room, and we were whispering secrets.

A second later the door that led from the waiting room to the examining rooms opened. Alice O’Keefe, my dad’s nurse, stood in the doorway, as tall and thin as a piece of paper. I don’t remember ever seeing her wearing anything but her crisp white nurse uniform. Everyone in the waiting room leaned forward expectantly – hoping their wait was over.

Alice smiled at me primly. "Alvin? The doctor will see you now."

Everyone in the waiting room laughed. What else could they do? They were a captive audience.

Alice took me by the hand and led me down a narrow hallway. She slid open the flimsy door to Dad’s lab. My dad was perched on a padded bar stool, squinting into a microscope. He had a shiny silver device in one hand, with a button he kept clicking. There were racks of test tubes, a whirring centrifuge, and cabinets stocked with thousands of jars filled with powder and bottles of multi-colored capsules. It smelled very medicinal.

"Hi there," Dad said. "Would you like to look in my microscope?"

"Sure," I said. I was actually more interested in the shiny silver gizmo he kept clicking. "What’s that?"

"It’s a counter," he explained. The machine had a tiny window with numbers that advanced every time he pressed the button with his thumb. "I am counting blood cells. Want to see?"

Dad slid off his stool and lifted me up to stand on the soft leather seat. I leaned over the microscope and looked in the eyepiece.

"I don’t see anything," I said.

"Let me look again," Dad said. He leaned over, adjusted the focus knob a little, and leaned back. "There," he said.

I looked, but it just looked black. I tried switching eyes, but it still looked black.

"Here," Dad said. He reached down and jiggled the mirror underneath the slide.

"There!" I exclaimed. "I see something!"

"What does it look like?" my dad asked.

"It looks like a bright light," I answered.

Dad sighed. "That’s just the reflection from the mirror," he said.

I was beginning to feel like a failure. Dad fiddled with the knobs some more and had me look again, but I couldn’t see what he was talking about.

"Squint," he suggested.

"What do you mean?"

"You know, squint your eye. Like this," he said, demonstrating.

I squinted. Still couldn’t see anything. I tried squinting with the other eye and thought I saw something.

"Do you see anything, Alvin?" Dad asked.

"Yes. It looks like... a big eyeball!"

"Good grief," he moaned. "That is your eyeball!"

Alice O’Keefe slid open the door. "Doctor?"

"What is it, Alice?" Dad asked, a little exasperated.

"It’s your wife, doctor."

There was a pregnant pause.

"Your wife, doctor," Alice repeated. "Her water just broke."

"Oh?" Dad simply said. He unclipped the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on the Formica counter. We all considered it for a moment.

"Alice, send an ambulance to pick up Val - I'll meet them at the hospital."

"I've already done that," she said.

"You'll need to reschedule my patients," Dad said.

"I've done that, too," Alice deadpanned.

I was still puzzled about what was going on.

"Thank you, Alice," Dad said. "Come on, Alvin!" He picked up his black bag with one hand, then scooped me up and carried me like a sack of potatoes under his other arm, and headed down the hall.

People spilled out of the waiting room after us. "Good luck, Doc!" they called. Mrs. Saunders smile looked like it would split her face in half.

Within seconds Dad's Valiant station wagon was speeding toward the hospital in Ilwaco, the next town, ten miles down the highway. Dad was driving fast. He lit a cigarette, which was unusual.

"Dad?" I said. "I'm sorry I couldn't work the microscope."

"That's okay, Al," my father assured me. We were pushing sixty. The station wagon roared past Black Lake and skidded to a stop in the Peninsula Hospital parking lot.

The hospital staff greeted our entrance in the emergency wing as rapturously as the Second Coming. People collided like pinballs, waving and shouting and congratulating my dad and each other ecstatically.

I was still not sure exactly what the commotion was about. I was feeling a little anxious. Everyone was so much taller than me!

"Hi, darlin'!" a friendly, familiar voice called. An elderly, full figured woman in a starched white nurse uniform rushed up and smothered me against her amble bosom in a tight embrace.

"Hi, Ruby," I said. Because she was hugging me so closely it came out, "Mffmfff."

Ruby Ring was my godmother. She was assisting in the operating room on the day I was born. I didn't remember this, of course, but Ruby did. She also remembered my birthday every year, Christmas, and even Easter. This past Easter she gave me the most amazing gift: a bar of soap shaped like a bunny - when I washed with it, the rabbit grew a fuzzy coat of fur overnight, resting in the soap dish. Truly magic!

Ruby sank down on a vinyl sofa and began bouncing me on her knee. I felt comforted. Dad crouched down in front of us and explained that he had to go help deliver Mom's baby.

"When can I see her?" I asked.

Dad tousled my hair. "They don't allow kids back there," he explained, pointing to the double doors marked 'STAFF ONLY'. "We'll see what we can work out later, okay? You go on over to Ruby's, and I'll pick you up later."

"Okay, Dad."

"I'll give you a nice big piece of pie," Ruby promised with a wink.

"All right!" I agreed readily. I liked pie.

Ruby's house was in upper Seaview, about a block from Ronny Kreb's house. When we drove by he and Nicky Folger were throwing rocks in a mud puddle on the side of the road.

They waved and yelled, "Panty hose! Panty hose!"

Ruby laughed and said, "Those characters!"

I looked over and raised my eyebrows innocently.

Ruby's house had a huge front porch, big enough to ride a bicycle on, or play hockey. The wooden planking made pleasing sounds as we clonked around to the side door that opened into the kitchen. Ruby left her kitchen door unlocked, in case her neighbors needed to borrow anything from her well stocked pantry.

She went over to the refrigerator and took out a plate of cold fried chicken and placed it on the counter, next to three homemade pies - apple, rhubarb, and my personal favorite, blackberry.

"Soup's on!" she sang.

I was given the best seat in the house, the naugahide reclining armchair right in front of the television set. We watched the Huntley-Brinkly Report, What's My Line?, and Cheyanne, sampling slices of all three pies as the evening wore on. I fell asleep about half way through The Untouchables.

My dad was shaking me. "Alvin? Alvin? Wake up, son."

He carried me, still half asleep, out to the car and placed me in the back seat. Orman, Tooey, and Eloise were in front. The dog scrambled over the front seat, landing in my lap, and licked me.

We drove down to the hospital and parked in back, among tall pine trees.

"Everybody out!" Dad called.

"What about Eloise?" I asked.

"Eloise too," Dad replied, jovially. "Follow me, everyone!"

Stealthily, Dad led us along the back of the hospital building. We kept shushing each other. Eloise's tail wagged back and forth, showing she was happy to be along.

Finally my father found the window he was looking for.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

After a moment, a light blinked on inside. Dad lifted me up so I could see inside. Tooey handed me Eloise, so our dog could look inside, too.

My mom came over to the window and placed her hands against the glass. I had never seen her look so beautiful.

Mom was really glad to see us. It showed in her eyes. She smiled so nice, it lit up the night. It must have been lonely for her in the hospital. I realized, all of a sudden, how much I had missed spending time with my mother lately.

We visited through the window for a few minutes, then a nurse came up behind Mom and handed her a bundle of blankets wrapped around a brand new baby. A serene smile spread across Mom's face. She took the baby's tiny hand in her own and waved it in greeting.

"Hi, guys," Mom said in a baby voice.

"Hi, girls," Dad beamed, proudly.

"This is Olive," she said through the window.

"What?" Orman asked.

"Olive," Dad repeated, reverently. "You have a sister."

Tooey, Orman, and I exchanged uneasy glances.

A sister. Life would never be the same again.

Monday morning. Show & Tell.

Steve Nickles walked to the front of the room, combing his hair carefully. He squared his shoulders, and began twitching his upper lip. Everyone stared at him, uncertainly.

"I'm Elvis Presley," Steve Nickles explained. He moved the left side of his upper lip up and down a couple times to illustrate. We all stared at him silently. "Geez, haven't you ever seen an Elvis Presley movie?" he pleaded.

His shoulders sagged. He had probably been practicing in the mirror all weekend.

"Thank you, Steve," Mrs. Peterson said, kindly.

Debbie Carpenter came up next, carrying a hula hoop. "My cousin from Portland visited this weekend and taught me this trick," Debbie said shyly.

We had all seen a hula hoop before, of course. But instead of lowering the hula hoop over her head and rotating it around her hips, Debbie grasped it upright in one hand and tossed it, with a backhanded twist of the wrist, away from her. The hula hoop landed a few feet away, spinning in place like a car tire stuck in the sand - then it hopped right back into her hand!

"Wow! Neat! Cool!" the class applauded. "Do it again!"

Debbie performed her trick a few more times, completely captivating her audience. By the end of the week every kid in town would have tried it. Despite my earlier reservations, I had to admire Debbie Carpenter for introducing a new fad.

Jo Ann Henderson followed after that. She seemed extremely pleased with herself. She stood in front of us, hugging herself with both arms. "Yesterday in church I gave myself to Jesus," she announced.

The rest of us were as unsure how to react as we had been when Steve Nickles impersonated Elvis Presley's upper lip. She seemed really happy, though. I figured on asking Tooey tonight what Jesus was about.

"That's nice, Jo Ann," Mrs. Peterson commented, nervously.

Shannon Moon stood up without raising her hand. "What if instead of being a person, I were really a butterfly?" she demanded. "And my whole life were just a dream? A butterfly dream."

Jo Ann Henderson was on her feet instantly.

"Wait a minute!" she insisted, aghast. "That's wrong!" Her face turned the same shade of red as her hair.

"It's a free country," Shannon shot back. "Everyone's entitled to an opinion."

"Yeh," Nicky Folger agreed. "Maybe I'm really a dog!"

An unspoken understanding flashed between Nicky and Ron Krebs. They simultaneously dropped to the floor, and scooted around on their hands and knees. "Woof! Woof!" they laughed.

"You're just being mean," Jo Ann wailed, practically in tears. Her religious foundations had clearly been shaken.

"That's enough now!" Mrs. Peterson instructed. "Let's return to our seats."

Marshmallow raised his hand, waving it urgently. "Mrs. Peterson?" he said. "Mrs. Peterson!"

"Yes, Willie."

Marshmallow stood up. "There's free candy and popcorn at George's after school today!"

It took several minutes for the class to calm down after Marshmallow's news flash. 'George's' referred to Stoltz's Candy Store downtown. Each Autumn the kindly owner would give out free candy, caramel corn, cotton candy, snow cones, and popcorn the day before he closed his shop for the winter. The Stoltz's vacationed in Florida during the off season, and liquidated their stock - which would otherwise grow stale or attract ants in their absence.

When the brouhaha subsided somewhat, Mrs. Peterson turned to me and asked, "Alvin, don't you have something special to share with us?"

"I don't think so," I said with some uncertainty.

"Class, Alvin has a new baby sister!" Mrs. Peterson proclaimed.

"Oh, yeah," I said.

"She must be a beautiful baby," Mrs. Peterson gushed.

"I suppose," I said, uncomfortably. "She's sort of wrinkled."

This was what I would deal with, wherever I went, for the next few months. Neighbors, teachers, total strangers - everyone had something to say about Olive. You would think I was personally responsible for bringing my sister into the world.

I didn't mean to be a grouch about it. I was happy about Olive’s arrival, the same way I was happy for Jo Ann Henderson. Just because I wasn't as ravid as everybody else. As long as it made them happy, I was happy.

"Now, class," Mrs. Peterson said, interrupting my thoughts, "when you get home tonight ask your mother…"

"Mrs. Peterson?"

"Yes, Galen."

"Can I ask my father?"

"Of course you can. Ask your mother or your father to send a bath towel to school with you tomorrow."

"Are we going to take a bath?" Galen inquired.

"No," Mrs. Peterson said slowly, as if she were silently counting to ten in her head. "Tomorrow we will be making plaster of paris hand prints in art class. It will be a bit messy, so you will need a towel to clean your hands afterwards. Don't bring your mom's best towel - bring an old towel neither your mother or your father or your aunt or uncle or anybody else under the sun would mind getting dirty."

It was uncharacteristic of Mrs. Peterson to resort to sarcasm.

Recess!

Ricky Rice, Marshmallow, Nicky Folger, Ron Krebs and I hung from the monkey bars in the lunchroom.

"Brother, I think our teacher has cracked," Nicky said.

"Be afraid. Be very afraid," Ricky said.

"I think we should give her a break," I said.

"Teacher's pet!" Ronny Krebs taunted.

After recess, Mrs. Peterson read us a story about a little Dutch boy who saved the city of Amsterdam by plugging a hole in a dike with his finger. Mrs. Peterson seemed back to her normal self. We did some flash cards, practiced our penmanship, finger painted…

Finally the dismissal bell rang! The school emptied out even faster than usual. The streets and sidewalks of Long Beach were thronged with kids, lured to the call of candy. The line at Stoltz’s Candy Store ran out the door and down the sidewalk for a full block.

I was with Marshmallow. We were thinking caramelcorn. Hot caramelcorn. Heavenly hot caramelcorn. The line took a long time.

Finally we were inside. The aromas were mesmerizing. We had a sugar high from just breathing. Just inside the door was an overflowing popcorn machine, a shiny cotton candy machine spinning long strands of pink spun sugar, and a long glass candy counter filled with fudge, rocky road, chocolate covered nuts and raisins, and salt water taffy. Mrs. Stoltz stood behind the counter, wearing a pretty pink apron. She had gray hair and fine lines radiating from the corners of her eyes from smiling her whole life. Behind her, George mixed a big batch of caramelcorn with a baseball bat in a big steel drum. He wore thick glasses and a huge toothy grin. His arms were huge, the result of mixing huge batches of candy.

"What’ll it be, boys?" Mrs. Stoltz asked.

We each got a brown paper bag of warm caramelcorn. Marshmallow also got some cotton candy, a pink cloud of spun sugar two feet tall on a paper cone. Before we were finished Mrs. Stoltz forced a square of fudge wrapped in tissue paper on us.

"Thanks!" we giggled.

"You’re welcome," Mrs. Stolz said, warmly.

"Thanks, George!"

"So long, fellas!" George called.

Out on the sidewalk, several kids waiting in line snatched strands of our cotton candy. We didn’t mind.

"It doesn’t get much better than this," Marshmallow giggled.

We made our way down the sidewalk, pausing to show our friends what they had to look forward to. I saw Mary Somela and, blushing badly, gave her my fudge.

Two blocks later we were reeling from an acute cotton candy overdose. We stuffed the remainder of the sticky stuff in a garbage can, which almost instantly attracted a bunch of bees.

"Let’s go to the shop," Marshmallow suggested. His parents owned the most popular tourist attraction in Long Beach, Marsh’s Free Museum. The shop took up half a block on the south end of town, right beside the amusement park. Marsh’s Free Museum was housed in a rickety whitewashed wooden building with hundreds of tiny window panes that rattled every time the door closed. Attached to the roof with visible wires were a peculiar assortment of life-sized statues of pirates, sea captains, women in Victorian dress pushing baby carriages, dogs, cowboys, cattle – what was even more peculiar, all the mannequins had huge white angel wings attached to their backs. One of the statues had a human body (wearing a tuxedo), but a horses head!

The inside of the building was crammed with hundreds of wooden bins containing a prolifera of items – seashells, sand dollars, dried seahorse corpses, corals, clam shells, oyster shells, sharks teeth, Japanese glass floats, plastic slide whistles, cheap jewelry and charm bracelets, beads, dribble glasses, fake vomit, fake dog poop, toy monkeys that danced on a stick, pens that revealed topless ladies when turned upside down…

The crowd-pleasing image of The World’s Largest Frying Pan was printed on post cards, decals, sweat shirts, key rings, Oriental fans, china plates, hand held slide viewers, charm bracelet ornaments, even underwear!

The "free museum" was a misnomer. There were free exhibits of ‘SOME OF THE STRANGEST SIGHTS ON EARTH!’ such as a stuffed three-headed calf and an authentic shrunken head from the jungles of Borneo, plus Jake the Alligator Man – the fossilized half-man/half-alligator! But tourists rarely left the shop without buying something. I thought Marshmallow had the greatest parents alive.

When we went in Mrs. Marsh was sitting behind the counter. She smiled when we came in and kissed her son. Whenever I was around Marshmallow’s family I noticed the way they kissed each other, fondly and completely unselfconsciously – quite unlike my family, who rarely even hugged. We were dignified. Mrs. Marsh kissed me too, and gave me a free seashell.

Marshmallow asked his mom for a nickel, and led me to a turn-of-the-century pinball machine. It was a baseball game, with iron statues of the Boston Red Sox behind the plates and standing in the outfield. The pitcher lobbed large steel balls from a hole in his stomach, and you whacked a handle to swing an iron bat behind home plate. There were holes in front of the players – if the ball went in you were out, otherwise you scored. Marshmallow was so practiced we got to play about twenty minutes on our one nickel.

Then we sneaked over to a hand-cranked peep show that showed flickering images of nude ladies from the days of silent movies. The women all seemed overweight by modern standards.

When I got home Mom was on the phone. "Yes, Dad," she was saying, so I knew it was Grandpa Weaver on the other end. She put her hand over the receiver before I could sneak past.

"Alvin, could you check on your sister? I left her on the couch in the living room when I answered the phone. I may be a few minutes."

"Sure, mom."

"Dad," she said into the phone, "she isn’t old enough for a pony."

Olive was lying in the middle of a blanket on the sofa, barricaded by couch cushions. I thought she was asleep when I walked up, so I carefully placed a chair next to the couch and sat down gingerly opposite her. I dug the seashell out of my pocket so I’d have something to play with while I waited for Mom to get off the phone. I pretended it was a flying saucer. All at once I realized Olive’s baby blue eyes were upon me.

I swooped the seashell in circles around her head a few times, providing some eerie outer space sound effects. Olive’s face crumpled with displeasure.

The last thing I wanted was to make her cry. It seemed inevitable; then I remembered the story Mrs. Peterson told us about the little Dutch boy and put my finger in her mouth.

To my amazement, Olive stopped fretting. I stood there about fifteen minutes while my sister happily sucked on my index finger.

Mom rushed into the room at long last, looking anxious – but relaxed when she saw how I was handling things.

She smiled and tousled my hair, before carrying Olive into the other room. I waited an appropriate time before going into the bathroom to wash my finger. I wasn’t sure if you could die from baby drool, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I was washing my hands a second time when Tooey came in.

"Hey, Alvin," he said. "Whatcha doin’?"

"Washing my hands."

"Oh."

He went over and used the toilet. Then he came over and washed his hands.

"Tooey, do you know who Jesus is?"

"Sure," Tooey said, drying his hands on his pants. I looked at him expectantly.

"It’s kind of hard to explain," Tooey said. He sat down on the toilet seat, and thought about it. "I guess Jesus is, like, all the love in the world. He’s always there for you, all the time, even if you do something bad. If you believe in Him."

"Do Mom and Dad believe in Jesus?"

"Well, sort of. I mean, I don’t think they believe in all the stories about Him walking on water and giving eyesight to the blind, but they believe in His philosophies. You shouldn’t let that change the way you think, Alvin."

"What’s phil-sof-afee?"

"Philosophy? That’s what people think. Like ‘It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle then for a really rich guy to get into Heaven.’ Or the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you."

Just then Orman barged into the bathroom. "Hey! What are you guys doing in here?"

"Discussing philosophy," I said, stopping him short.

"What philosophy?" he said.

"The lamp post stands with folded arms," I said.

Orman stared at me a second. "Come on," he said. "Supper’s on the table."

7:15 a.m. All along the bus route, first graders board bearing bath towels.

7:45 a.m. Students arrive at school and stuff so many towels in the coat closet, it looks like a linen closet.

8:00 a.m. Classes commence. Mrs. Peterson has students take turns reading out loud from a Dick and Jane book. Some students read torturously slow; they will be branded as such for the remainder of their public school tenure.

8:45 a.m. Sven The Janitor enters classroom carrying a cardboard Woofie's Dog Food box filled with mixing compounds. As he unloads the supplies on a long wooden table covered with butcher paper, he attracts a captivated audience. "Stay back, now," he says, importantly.

9:00 a.m. Mrs. Peterson places fourteen paper plates on the table, one per student. Sven stirs plaster of paris mixture, whistling through his teeth, making his mustache puff in and out over his upper lip. Students stare like zombies as molden material is poured into paper plates. Teacher tells the class that they will have to wait patiently for plaster of paris to set. Waiting is not exactly a first grader's strongest discipline.

9:45 a.m. The first lucky student is chosen alphabetically. For once, Steve Nickles is so eager he forgets to comb his hair. He is wrapped in a bath towel, and his hand is placed in the center of the plate, forming an impression of his handprint in the hardening plaster of paris. Glitter, a perennial favorite among first graders, is sprinkled around the edges. Meanwhile, the rest of the class practically claw themselves with suppressed anticipation.

10:03 a.m. I finally get my turn. The feel of the cool, hardening plaster of paris is delicious. Seeing my hand print sculpted so precisely, so permanently, my senses brim with unabashed awe, an overwhelming feeling of my own position of immortality in the history of humankind.

10:06 a.m. The students standing in line behind me grow auspiciously impatient, like a tea kettle about to boil.

10:10 a.m. Against the anguished protests of Mrs. Peterson, Nicky Folger puts his face in the plaster, instead of his hand. The impression this creates is quite sensational. Several students surge forward for a closer look. Mrs. Peterson begins to panic.

10:11 a.m. Ronny Krebs doubles over with laughter. Nicky aims a second pie at his pal, who ducks under the table. The pie smacks squarely against my chest. I pry the plaster pie off and swing it around in a circle, aiming at Nicky. The plaster of paris pie presses, instead, into Mrs. Peterson's hip. She screams. Sven sputters. Nicky dives under the table with Ronny, sliding more pies toward the floor.

10:12 a.m. The table upends and Sven gets a pie in the face. First grade does not get any better than this!

3:30 p.m. Nicky Folger, Ron Krebs, and I stay after school, taking turns writing "I will not throw pies," one hundred times on the blackboard.

A short, unsheltered sidewalk led from the back door of the school building to the gymnasium. The gym was a big box of a building, with two wide double doors which, when opened, unleashed the sounds of bouncing basketballs, shouts echoing, kids running, jumping, colliding, sneakers squeaking on the varnished floor. The walls were built of tongue and groove boards, which thumped when walloped with various hurled objects. It didn't have any windows, either.

We had so much rain in Washington that we played inside a lot. Most of the time we played basketball. Bombardment, or prison ball, was also popular, played with inflatable balls the size of pomegranates which were hurled at the velocity of heat seeking missiles; if you were hit you would walk around the rest of the day with a round red welt, a testament to being tagged.

There was one particular game called American Eagle 1-2-3. The biggest, strongest kid was usually "it", who stood in the middle of the basketball court, while the rest of the players lined up along one wall. When the big kid in the middle gave the signal, everyone tried to run to the other end of the gym, without getting caught. If you got caught, the player who was "it" had to lift you up so your feet didn't touch the floor, and shout, "American Eagle, 1-2-3!" Then there were two who were "it", and everyone would run back and forth until there was just one poor kid left panting against the wall, and everyone else was in the middle of the floor. The last kid was usually the swiftest; he had the hunted look of a cornered rabbit. When the mob in the middle caught the hapless victim, they would lift him above their shoulders, shout "American Eagle 1-2-3!" (in unison), and throw him like a rag doll as high in the air as they collectively could - to plummet down, down, down to the hard wooden basketball court with a resounding, and I might add, satisfying crash. Then he was "it." We didn't worry about safety as much back then.

Anyway, one morning we were in our classroom, singing along to Mrs. Peterson's piano, anticipating a little ultra-violence in the gym at recess. We were boisterously singing:

                Let's all sing like the birdies sing

                Tweet! Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet!

                Let's all sing like the birdies sing

                Peep! Peep-peep! Peep-peep!

or something like that. When we finished singing we all started jockeying for a position by the door for the race to the gym.

"Alvin," Mrs. Peterson said, "would you mind waiting a minute, please?"

"Huh?" I huhhed, as the recess bell clanged.

Everyone else ran ahead, laughing and jostling each other, having a good time without me.

Mrs. Peterson said, "Alvin, I have wonderful news!"

I looked past Mrs. Peterson, out the window, at all my classmates running down the sidewalk to the gymnasium, waving their arms and screaming. It looked like fun.

"You have been chosen from the whole school to sing a special song at the Christmas pageant this year!" Mrs. Peterson announced, proudly.

I gave my first grade teacher my full attention.

"What do you think of that?" she gushed.

I remained silent for a minute or so, letting her sweat it out. Finally I said, "Can I go to recess now?"

Mrs. Peterson rushed ahead breathlessly, ignoring my request.

"You will have to practice every day. Mrs. Anderson is going to rehearse the song with you. Now, this is the most important part in the pageant - it's positively pivotal! Your parents are going to be so proud…"

A growing sense of dread began to envelope me. I didn't want the most pivotal part in the school play. I couldn't sing. I just wanted to bash some balls around the gym.

"You have such a sweet voice! I'm sure with just a little coaching from Mrs. Anderson…" she gushed. "Alvin? Honey, are you all right? Do you need to go to the bathroom?"

Mrs. Anderson was the third grade teacher, a very stern, almost fabled disciplinarian. Tooey told me if you misbehaved in her classroom, she would rap your knuckles with a wooden ruler - hard! She was shorter than most of her pupils, but made up for her size by yelling a lot. Sometimes we could hear her hollering all the way downstairs.

She didn't smile much, and when she did, it was very scary looking. She smiled at me the first time we met. It reminded me of a mean dog we had living down the street.

"Stand up straight, Mr. Egg!" she said. "Just so we understand each other, I taught both of your brothers, and will tolerate no nonsense from you, either. Understand?"

I nodded my head as fast as I could. This was probably not a good time to play 'panty hose'.

"Okay, Alvin. Let's warm up by singing the state song, shall we?"

"Okay."

Mrs. Anderson started to pound the piano keys. I was afraid to admit that I didn't know the state song. After a few bars she stopped and looked down her nose at me. I shrugged helplessly.

"All right," she sighed crossly. "I'll sing it first, then you."

After adjusting the pile of encyclopedias she was sitting atop, she resumed her piano pounding and sang:

                Washington, my home!

                Wherever I may roam

                This is my land, my native land

                Washington, my home!

Fortunately, I had an easy time remembering song lyrics, and sang it correctly the first time through. Mrs. Anderson showed her approval by ending with a flourish.

"Now let's rehearse the song you are to sing in the pageant. You will be a pixie…"

"What's a pixie?"

"A sprite," she explained.

"What's a sprite?"

"All right, a leprechan," Mrs. Anderson said, crossly. "All the animals in the forest wake you up in time for Christmas. Your song starts:

                Wake up, wake up, sleepy head

                Hurry, hurry, out of bed

                All the creatures in the zoo

                Want to take a look at you…"

I raised my hand. "I thought I was in the forest."

"You are," Mrs. Anderson said, impatiently.

"Well, how come the song says the zoo?"

"Because. That's. What. Rhymes," she said through clenched teeth, deliberating between each word.

"Who wrote this, anyway?" I asked. After all, I was only a first grader. I hadn't learned any tact.

"I did," Mrs. Anderson said, her voice shaking.

"Oh! Oh!" I said, using the same exclamation as they used in the Dick and Jane books.

Mrs. Anderson banged the piano case shut. Her whole face was shaking, now. "That will be all for today!" she shouted.

I ran as fast as I could to the gymnasium. Just before I got there the doors flew open and everyone piled out. I almost got run over!

In the intervening weeks, I sacrificed numerous noon recesses to practice for the school play. Mrs. Anderson made me sing the same song over and over and over. She would pound the piano keys so hard that the baggy skin under her arms would wiggle. I had to look away when that happened, and she would yell at me for not paying attention. I didn't know how many more rehearsals I could take.

"That was just about right," she would say. "Now try it again, but enunciate the t's. Like this: waittttt. The audience won't be able to hear the words you are singing if you don't enunciate."

"Try to roll your r's more. Rrrrrrrrrrrr."

"Don't pop you p's!"

I didn't see what all the fuss was about. It was such a simple song. She had me practicing scales all during recess like I was Figaro, or something.

Meanwhile, the other kids were playing prison ball and Johnny-on-the-pony in the gym. I felt gypped. But Mrs. Anderson was so ferocious in her piano pounding, I dared not dissent. When word leaked out what my role in the school pageant was, I had to suffer further abuse.

"Hey, pixie!" Nicky Folger said in the lunch line one afternoon.

"Just shut up," I grumbled.

"Hey, everybody! Alvin's a pixie!" He made it sound like pixie was a dirty word.

All my classmates started laughing and pointing their fingers at me.

"Pixie! Pixie! Alvin is a pixie!" they chanted.

"What's a pixie?" Ron Krebs asked, slowly.

"You know," Nicky leered. "Like Tinkerbell, in Peter Pan!"

"Wait a second," Ron said, while he figured things out. "Alvin's not a pixie… he's a fairy!"

That was too much. I shoved Ron Krebs with all my might. He fell back against the garbage cans and knocked over a stack of tin lunch trays, which clattered to the floor, spilling creamed corn and tuna gravy all over the place.

I had never been in a fight before. But Nicky and Ronny had. Nicky socked me in the nose, and it hurt! I took a mad swing back at him, but I slipped in the grease and spun around like the Tasmanian Devil in the Bugs Bunny cartoon before crashing into Ron, who was trying to stand up. We both banged into the garbage cans and slopped soapy water onto the floor, which made it even more slippery.

Then my oldest brother Orman and his friend Lenny Cox and Sven the janitor and Mr. Pells the fifth grade teacher joined in the fracas. They all slipped and fell too! What a mess.

Mr. Pells managed to untangle us. Everyone was yelling and jumping up and down. Talk about confusing. Then both doors to the lunch room burst open, and it was as if all the air were sucked out of the room…

The school Principal, Mr. Van Over, was not a violent man; he did, however, have a voice that could be heard above an air raid siren. "HEY! ALL THREE OF YOU KNUCKLEHEADS GET DOWN TO THE FURNACE ROOM RIGHT NOW!!!"

The furnace room was the private domain of Sven the janitor, Mr. Pells, Mr. Van Over, and a few bus drivers. The temperature of the furnace room never dropped below a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. As every kid in the school knew, the furnace room was where you went to get swats.

Nicky, Ron, and I cowered in front of the boiler, which burned away like the Ovens of Doom. The seat of our britches felt like they were on fire, and we hadn't even been spanked yet. It was dark in there; the flames from the boiler made Mr. Van Over's eyes gleam unnaturally. Sweat beaded his forehead, and I feared that his furry red eyebrows, the size of hamsters, might burst into flame with the heat, or his burning anger.

Mr. Van Over marched back and forth in front of us like a drill sergeant. Mr. Pells, on the other hand, sat cross legged in a captain's chair, gently tapping a ping pong paddle against the palm of his long, bony hands, a bemused look on his face.

"WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!?" Mr. Van Over hollered. The hair on our heads blew back like we were in a wind tunnel.

"WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? HUH?!?!!

Ronny mumbled something indecipherable.

"SPEAK UP!"

Ronny had the shakes pretty bad, and Nicky couldn't seem to lift his chin up from his chest, so I figured I might as well act as the spokesman.

"Well, you see, Mr. Van Over," I explained meekly, "Ronny called me a fairy in the food line…"

"DID YOU DO THAT?"

"Ye-h-h-s-s-s s-s-s-i-r-r-r," Ronny stuttered, like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT A FAIRY IS?" Mr. VanOver demanded.

"It's-s-s-s uh, it's-s-s--s-s uh," Ronny attempted, his knees knocking audibly.

"WHAT ABOUT YOU?!?" Mr. VanOver shouted, his mouth only an inch from Nicky Folger's ears. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?"

Nicky nodded his head imperceptibly, his eyes as big as pies.

"DO YOU?" Mr. VanOver screamed at me.

I looked at the toes of my sneakers, P.F. Flyers, before I had the courage to reply. "A sprite."

"WHAT?!?!?"

"A leprechaun?"

Behind us, Mr. Pells chuckled, and pulled his chin.

"Red," he said, "may I confer with you a moment?"

They consulted in whispers for a moment. Nicky made a long mugging face, but Ronny and I were too terrified to laugh.

Mr. Van Over turned around and glowered. "EGG! DO YOU WANT TO MISS SINGING IN THE SCHOOL PLAY?"

"Yes, sir! Very much, sir. Thank you, sir," I said. I would have bowed, but I didn't think my knees would support me.

Mr. Pells snickered again. Evidently their punishment had backfired.

"ALL RIGHT, YOU SLACKERS! LINE UP!"

We knew what this meant. Swats! We took turns. First Nicky, then Ron. They both got two swats with a wooden paddle about three quarters of an inch thick with holes drilled through it that hung beside the boiler door. Then I had to grab my ankles and receive the same sentence. It stung, all right, and my bottom burned the rest of the afternoon.

When we marched out of the furnace room, kids scattered in all directions. We were minor celebrities for a day or two. But it didn't get me out of singing in the school Christmas pageant.

That night our family was dining together in the kitchen. Mom was feeding Olive, or trying to, anyway. Olive kept spitting out the strained baby food that Mom spooned in her mouth. It really didn't look very good. Eloise wouldn't even lick up what the baby spilled. The Gerber Baby Food Company gave doctor's families free samples of their baby food. We had cases of the stuff

Dad looked up from his plate and said, "Well, boys. What happened in school today?"

I kept staring down at my plate. So did Orman. Tooey looked up and smiled mischieviously.

"Nothing, Dad," he said.

"Oh, come on," Dad said. "Didn't anything interesting happen in school today?"

I concentrated on my peas.

"No, Dad," Orman replied, without looking up. We all started shoveling our food in faster.

"I see," Dad said. He turned to me and beamed. "Well, Alvin. How is the singing coming along?"

I peeked up from my plate long enough to peep, "Fine, Dad."

"Can I be excused?" Orman said. "I've got a lot of homework to do."

"Yeh, me too," Tooey said.

"Me, too!" I echoed.

Both my parents remained silent, following our movements out of the corners of their eyes, while we carried our plates to the sink.

"Bugga bugga!" Olive babbled, banging her hands on the tray to her high chair.

We tromped up the stairs before anyone could comment further.

"Do you think they suspected anything?" Tooey whispered.

"Naw," Orman said.

"Naw," I echoed.

"Cut it out!" Tooey said, socking me in the arm.

"You cut it out!" Orman ordered, punching Tooey in the arm.

"Boys! Don't make me come up there!" Dad called from the kitchen.

The day of the Christmas pageant, we had rehearsals in the hallway all afternoon. The gym was off-bounds the last few days, as Sven the janitor applied fresh varnish to the floor. Only a few sixth graders were allowed inside to help decorate the stage. We had a contest to see which grade could make the longest chain of alternating red and green construction paper loops; when the chains were combined, they stretched fifteen lengths of the basketball court!

Since we couldn't go to the gym for recesses, we were all cooped up in the school building instead. You know how wired kids get just before Christmas? The halls reverberated with noise. All the teachers staggered around with glazed looks on their faces. School finally let out an hour early for final preparations before the evening's proceedings.

For dinner my mom made my favorite meal, Welsh Rabbit. That's what I called it, anyway. It was a Hollandaise sauce poured over toast, in honor of my singing debut.

It was a dark, starry night. The air seemed supercharged, like in a cereal commercial. Dad drove Orman, Tooey, and I to the school in the Valiant station wagon.

When he dropped us off he said, "Break a leg, boys," which sounded kind of comical coming from a doctor, I thought.

I had never seen anything as beautiful as the inside of the gym. It was so sparkly. The basketball court gleamed, reflecting the Christmas tree lights, the big kind, trimming the walls and rafters. About a hundred folding chairs were arranged in straight neat rows, enough for the whole town. Fir tree branches and fake snow covered the front of the stage. It smelled so good, varnish and wood!

The biggest Christmas tree I had ever seen towered all the way to the ceiling. It's branches held hundreds of handmade ornaments: painted wooden thread spools from the first graders, egg carton segments with glitter glued to them by second graders, glossy magazines pictures pasted on paper saucers by the third graders. The fourth graders contributed these feathered monstrosities that were supposed to resemble partridges, the fifth graders folded construction paper and cut snowflakes, and the sixth graders strung popcorn.

The basketball hoops were hoisted to the ceiling for the occasion, and thick blue velvet curtains were drawn dramatically across the stage. I stood and stared for five minutes. It felt so Christmasy it gave me goosebumps.

"First graders!" Mrs. Peterson called from the front door, clapping her hands. "Come get into your costumes!"

Doubling as a dressing room, our classroom was like a war zone. Most of the first grade girls were struggling into flower costumes. The boys were being outfitted as animals. I was the only elf. Several mothers had volunteered to get us all dressed. It was understandably chaotic.

"Nicky! Stop that!"

"Diane, stand up, dear!"

"Who is the other end of the donkey?"

"All the bunnies line up!"

"Get over here!"

"Put that down!"

"Stay still!!!"

Then they dropped the bomb. All the boys had to wear lipstick!

"I AM NOT WEARING LIPSTICK!!!" I screamed loud enough to hear in the next county.

"But boys, the stage lights will wash out your features," Mrs. Peterson pleaded. "You will look like dead people."

"I would rather be dead than wear makeup," Steve Nickles said, sticking out his tongue.

I dove under a desk. Mrs. Worthington, who had spent hours working on my pixie costume, tried to coax me out.

"Alvin, be careful. You'll wrinkle your costume!"

"I AM NOT WEARING LIPSTICK!" I howled.

I was wrestled into a chair and smeared with the poisonous stuff.

"Stop wriggling, Alvin," Mrs. Worthington begged. "You're just smearing it." Actually, she was smearing it - all over my face.

After the humiliating ordeal, the boys retreated to the coat closet to take turns in front of the mirror. It took about ten paper towels to rub the dreaded stuff off our faces; the school issue paper towels were as course as sandpaper, and removed several layers of skin in the process.

For some reason, Ricky Rice didn't seem to mind the makeup. He studied his red lips and rouged cheeks in the mirror in the cloakroom reflectively.

"I don't think this is my color," he mused.

The play started with all six grades crammed on bleachers spanning the stage, singing Washington, My Home:

                This is my country

                God gave it to meeeee

                I will protect it

                Ever make it freeeeeeee…

                Washington, my home!

                Wherever I may roam…

Looking out over the audience, I could see Mom and Dad, who both looked like they were in pain (I heard them whispering in the kitchen how they had to 'endure' the evening). Mrs. Moon already had a handkerchief to her eyes. My godmother, Ruby Ring, was right in the front row. I started making eye contact with as many people as possible. If you smiled sweetly at them, they would smile sweetly back. I liked having an audience.

We made as much noise shuffling off the stage as we had singing. Orman was on the stage crew. He, Lenny Cox, and Butch Jasperson started sliding props into place. They pushed a huge paper mache boulder onto the stage, straining and wiping their brows like it was really heavy. Everyone in the audience laughed loudly. They weren't supposed to do that.

"All right you guys!" Mr. Pells barked from the wings.

The theme of the play had something to do with animals. At least, ninety percent of the players were wearing animal suits. There were about a dozen dancing daisies, and Marshmallow was a bush. Dennis Holtz was wearing a cow costume, but when he came out on the stage little Johnny Bays cried, "Look, Mommy - a billy goat!"; causing Dennis to moo real loud all through the play and Mr. Pells to continually shush him from the wings.

Flowers danced around and around the stage while animals trotted back and forth, an odd assortment of barnyard, domestic, and jungle creatures - a donkey, a tiger, a rhino, a giraffe, a turkey, a tortoise, a lion, a weenie dog, a zebra, a raccoon, an elephant, a frog, a rabbit, a penguin, the Cat in the Hat (a costume left from last Christmas), an alligator, and a dancing bear. I was zonked out in a bed, oblivious to the bedlam. Why my bed was in the forest in the first place was never fully explained.

They sang:

                Sleepy head, sleepy head!

                Warm and cozy in your bed

                Good thing your nose isn't red

                Aren't you glad that you're not dead?

                Tra la la

                La dee dah

                Doe dee oh doe

                Jelly roll

                Donut hole

                Show moo the way to go home!

(It was supposed to be, "Show me the way to go home," but once again Dennis Holtz drowned everyone out mooing.)

The flowers planted themselves around my bed. All the animals danced the Charleston, then crumbled cross-legged across the stage. Orman and Lenny Cox trained a spotlight on my bed.

I suddenly found myself the center of attention of a gymnasium full of townspeople. Bingo!

Mrs. Anderson played my cue, the opening notes of my song. I sat up in bed and faced the audience. Every eye in the audience was watching me.

I was wearing a pixie costume, a big, baggy clown suit about eight sizes too big, topped off by a striped night cap with a pom-pom on the peak. When I sat up the pom-pom drooped down in front of my face. I looked cross-eyed at it, and got a big laugh.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Anderson kept repeating the opening notes of my song over and over, pounding the piano keys more furiously every second. I tossed my head back to get the pom-pom out of my eyes, then smiled and nodded my head in satisfaction, which caused the pom-pom to fall back between my eyes. A wave of laughter swept the stage. I improvised for several minutes. The audience loved it, but Mrs. Anderson was furious.

Finally she stopped playing and screamed, "Sing the song, Alvin!"

That got an even bigger laugh. Even the kids on the stage were laughing. The whole building was! My dad was doubled over, he was laughing so hard. My mother wasn't exactly laughing, though.

Mrs. Anderson's face was as red as a beet. She started the song one more time, as slowly as a funeral march. This time, I sang. From the prolonged applause at the end of my performance, I assumed the reviews would be favorable.

The rest of the pageant went well. For a finale, Santa Clause came in the front door and down the center aisle, waving warmly at everybody. All the kids lined up to receive gigantic naval oranges and candy canes from Santa's sack. People kept congratulating me. It was a magical evening.

But I had my detractors. Mrs. Anderson was fit to be tied.

"The big show off!" she grumbled.

"Well, it was kind of funny," Mrs. Peterson said, in my defense.

"Ooooooooooo!" Mrs. Anderson said frostily, shaking her jowls.

On the drive home, Orman, Tooey, and I laid low in the back seat, eavesdropping.

"I thought it was hilarious!" Dad exclaimed.

Mom maintained a chilly silence.

"I about pissed my pants!" Dad grinned.

"Obie…" Mom warned.

The baby in her arm yawned in its sleep, and stretched its tiny fingers.

The stars twinkled.

I didn't feel too bad. At least I wouldn't be chosen to solo in next year's pageant.

Dad had a funny way of waking me up in the morning, and an even funnier way to put me to sleep at night.

My father was a morning person. He liked to prepare hearty breakfasts - eggs, pancakes, bacon, strange sausages, oatmeal. He used to pour the left-over Cream of Wheat into bread pans, then fry it up after refrigerating it over night, like it was a delicacy. The only way I could eat the stuff that early in the morning was to slather it in syrup. Dad looked unkindly at leftovers.

My brothers and I would rather have had cold cereal, which made Dad wince in pain. When mom had the breakfast detail we were allowed Wheaties, Rice Krispies, Cheerios and, on rare occasions, Trix or Cocoa Crispies.

Anyway, Dad would stand at the bottom of the staircase and call, "Hey, up there! Up and at 'em!" That was our cue to get out of bed.

Orman and Tooey would always jump right up and get dressed. I must have taken after my mother - whose idea of getting up in the morning was slumping in an armchair for forty five minutes, bundled in her bathrobe, her eyes unfocused, staring down a cup of coffee and chain smoking cigarettes.

The way I figured it, you were 'up' once your feet hit the ground. I would reach one foot out of the covers and touch the cold floor boards with one toe. When Dad hollered up the stairs a second time, "Alvin! Rise and shine!" I could in all honesty reply, "I'm up, Dad!" and catch a few more winks before I came downstairs.

I was never hungry, anyway. Luckily, Eloise sat at my feet under the kitchen table and helped me clean my plate.

At night, Dad would carry me upstairs to bed at eight o'clock, hoisted upside down over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He'd stop beside my bed, on the other side of which was a wide window which loomed out over the ocean.

"Bwaa-wah-ah! Bwaa-wah-ah!" Dad would guffaw maniacally, like a vampire signifying his happiness at cornering his prey.

"Im going to throw you out the window!" he'd chortle, swinging me out over the bed. "Bwaa-wah-ah!"

"No, Dad! Don't throw me out the window!"

"One!"

"No, Dad!"

"Two!"

"Don't throw me out the window, Dad!"

"Threeeeeee…" and pitch me into the middle of the bouncy bed.

"Good night, son."

"Night, Dad."

Some nights my father would stay and tell me a story. My favorite was a serial we invented, Cliff Hanger: Private Spy. The story had something to do with a world famous spy, who was constantly foiled my his arch-nemesis, the Countess of Hong Kong.

Years later I lifted a number of elements from Dad's bedtime story when I pitched my first pilot to NBC. The series was called The Regulator Guy. Each weekly episode began with a stand-up comedian telling jokes to an audience in a comedy club.

"By night," the voice-over announces, "he was a stand-up comedian…"

Then he would get a secret signal, dash off stage (leaving the audience, mid-joke, in a state of suspended animation), and jump into a nearby shower stall to emerge as "The Regulator Guy" - dressed in a scuba outfit, mask, fins, harpoon, yada yada. He would dive off a pier and perform an underwater act of heroism (in the pilot episode he taught a school of fish how to do long division).

Each episode always ends with The Regulator Guy, back in evening clothes, stepping back on stage to deliver the punch line to the joke he started in the opening sequence; the audience always laughs and applauds over the ending credits.

The Peacock Network, I might mention, passed on the project.

I decided I wanted to be a writer very early in life. I remember the first book I ever did. I copied some poems from Compton's Encyclopedia and created a tiny tome, maybe two or three inches square, ten pages, something like that, with my own illustrations, which I had the audacity to title: Poems by Alvin Egg.

I showed it to my mom. She seemed pretty impressed. When Dad got home from the hospital I proudly held out my handywork.

Dad flipped through it. Read one of the poems. Turned a page. Stared at it. Stared at me.

"You didn't write this book, Alvin," he said.

"Yeh, I did, Dad!" I exclaimed, beaming with pride. I thought he was kidding me.

My dad held up the cover. "This says 'Poems by Alvin Egg.' Did you write these poems?" Giving me the eye.

"Well, I got them from the encyclopedia… but I drew the pictures and put it together and everything…"

"So you didn't actually write the poetry?" he interrupted, in a very Perry Mason voice.

"Well…"

"DON'T YOU EVER" he hollered, "PUT YOUR NAME ON ANYTHING YOU DIDN'T WRITE YOURSELF!"

"Well, Obie, he didn't mean any harm," my mom suggested meekly, trying to pacify the situation.

"Do you know what this is?" Dad barked, shaking the book so hard a page fell out. "It's plagiarism!"

"I'm sorry, Dad!" I pleaded. I though 'plagiarism' was a dirty word, or something.

From that point onward, I made sure every single word I committed to paper was original. I even avoided cliches and figures of speech as much as possible. Plus, I learned something about my father.

Which created another credibility problem later in life, when women were always asking me, "Do you really mean that? Did that really happen? Or is this just one of your stories?"

I'm getting ahead of myself. It's a strange compulsion, wanting to entertain people with your own words, with your own original thoughts. Very strange indeed.

It rained almost the entire month of January. Finally, the first of February, the sun chased away the clouds and we had about two weeks of blue skies - before it started raining again. During that time we got to go out on the playground during recess, and play baseball for P.E.

We were shooting marbles - Marshmallow, Ricky Rice, and I - on the hard dirt under the monkey bars; we had to keep ducking so the kids up above wouldn't kick us in the head.

"You fudged," Marshmallow said.

"Did not," Ricky replied, snatching his fist back behind the line we had drawn in the dirt. He always shot with his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. He shot basketballs, batted baseballs, and even ran with his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.

"Take it over," I suggested.

"WATCH IT!" Marshmallow cried, rubbing his head.

Ricky shot three marbles out of the ring before he missed. There was a blue peerie in the ring that I really wanted. I hoped Marshmallow wouldn't get it before my turn came.

"Hey, let's ride our bikes down to Beard's Hollow Saturday," I said, hoping to distract Marshmallow's shot. I immediately felt bad about it because 1.) Ricky didn't own a bike and 2.) Marshmallow did shoot the blue peerie out.

"That's okay," Ricky said. "I got to go to my grandmudders."

"Sorry," both Marshmallow and I said at the same time.

By the time Marshmallow missed there were only a couple cat's eyes left in the ring. In those days, they were a dime a dozen. Literally.

"Hey!" Marshmallow said. "Why don't you stay at my house Friday night?"

I looked up from lining up my shot. "You think your mom would let me?"

"Sure," Marshmallow said. "You think your mom would let you?"

"I think so," I said.

"HEY, WATCH IT!" we all three hollered at once.

"What you should do," Ricky said, "is ask your mom with Alvin standing there, then ask your mom, Alvin, with Marshmallow standing there. Then they have to say yes."

"Yeah!" we yeahed.

"Oh, man!" Marshmallow moaned.

Friday after school I walked home with Marshmallow. He lived about two blocks south of Star Corner, in a square white house on the Ditch Road. Right across the street was Hill's Hotel, which had the first (and only) heated swimming pool in town. A dozen tourist cottages, each painted a different pastel shade, dotted the Hill's curving driveway. An enterprising kid, Marshmallow mowed their large lawn in the summer.

When we stepped onto his property, Marshmallow's big grey collie, Sparky, bounded from the garage and barked a friendly hello.

"Here, boy!" Marshmallow hailed, patting the collie's tall, narrow back. Sparky was a huge dog, loyal, intelligent, and uncommonly good-natured. His nose was as long as my arm. Whenever we played outdoors, Sparky followed us around like, well, a puppy dog.

Sparky was an 'outdoor dog'. When we went into Marshmallow's house, Sparky sat down on the concrete front steps and maintained a vigil.

"Hi, Mom!" he hollered, across the living room, which was furnished with a couch, a television/stereo console with Dean Martin albums stacked on top, and his father's large leather 'Lazyboy' reclining chair.

Mrs. Marsh, a tiny woman with a frizzy gray halo of hair, came out of the kitchen. She hugged her son and kissed him lightly on the lips. Marshmallow's mom did not call him Marshmallow. She called him Willie.

I stayed back a few steps from this open display of affection.

"Hello, Alvin," Mrs. Marsh said warmly, and kissed my cheek.

I rubbed my cheek awkwardly, and blushed. I did not know how to handle it very well.

Mrs. Marsh served us each a big slice of chocolate cake and a glass of Kool-Aid at the chrome dinette set. There was a plastic statue of Jesus and a framed picture of some dogs playing poker on the wall. I really liked their house.

His older sister Cheryl's room was right off the kitchen. She had the door closed, naturally, but you could hear her radio playing, "Johnny Angel." We started singing along, in funny falsettos.

"Mom!" she shouted. "Make them stop!"

Which got us giggling uncontrollably, until finally I snorted Kool-Aid out my nose.

Secretly, I admired Cheryl. She was pretty, and smart. She read great books, like Little Women, Wuthering Heights, and Nancy Drew. But because I was a boy, I always had to join in giving Marshmallow's older sister 'the business'. She thought I was an idiot, anyway.

That evening, Mrs. Marsh took us down to Ilwaco for dinner. Ilwaco was the next town over, a fishing town, about one block long. There wasn't much there - a hardware store, a drug store, a gas station, a bank, Archie's Food Mart, and Red's Restaurant. The docks and canneries on the edge of town were a hundred times busier than the sleepy business district.

With the possible exception of Red's. Red's Restaurant was the hot ticket in town. All the tourists down for salmon fishing ate there, as well as we 'locals' (a major distinction, let me tell you). Red's was always swirling with fishermen and loggers and their families and friends. All the waitresses were real pretty, too.

Marshmallow and I positioned ourselves on two twirling counter stools; Cheryl sequestered herself in a private booth about twenty yards away. Mrs. Marsh disappeared into a dark door with a neon sign above it that flashed "The Flame Room" in blue lettering, with wiggly red neon flames.

We ordered hamburger baskets and chocolate milk shakes served in frosty silver canisters. We blew the paper wrappers off our straws at each other, and squirted too much ketchup on our fries just because the red plastic ketchup dispensers begged us to. Cheryl, in a nearby booth, ordered a shrimp basket – an excellent choice which I secretly wished I had thought of – which she proceeded to devour in a haughty manner. I thought it strange we were sitting apart from each other, yet were so exceedingly aware of each others movements – but lacked the sophistication to connect the dots adjoining post-adolescent attention-getting rituals.

Besides, Marshmallow and I were too elated over not being chaperoned to worry about his older sister's snobbery. We made snakes by dropping water on our drinking straw wrappers, loosened the tops from the salt, pepper, and sugar shakers, and laughed so much at our own obsequies we fell short of breath at times.

"What would you do if you had a million dollars?" Marshmallow suddenly asked.

"I don't know," I said. "What would you do?" (I could not fathom a million dollars. In those days, a million dollars signified immeasurable riches. Besides, my parents paid for everything. I didn't know what money was yet!)

"Hmmm," Marshmallow hmmmed, spinning around on his counter stool. "I think I would build an Olympic swimming pool with a slide and a high diving board right in my back yard!"

"But you already have a swimming pool right across the street from your house," I objected.

Cheryl turned her head one hundred eighty degrees in our direction. "You know what I'd do with a million dollars?" she asked.

"What?" I replied. I knew it was a rhetorical question.

"I would buy a forest," she said. "And I would fill the forest with animals – fifty cats, a giraffe, pink flamingoes, zebras, hedgehogs… Then I would build a really cool tree house, and stock it with board games. I would play Parcheesi with my cousin Margaret, and just listen to the sound the dice make rattling in their little cardboard containers out in the middle of nowhere, with nobody else around to bug us."

Mrs. Marsh moseyed up, and helped herself to a couple left-over French fries.

"What would you do with a million dollars?" I asked.

"I would pay off our bills," she sighed.

We went back to their house, and watched The Jackie Gleason Show after Marshmallow's dad came home. Cheryl made big bowls of popcorn; she put vinegar on her popcorn, which I had never heard of before or since. When we went to bed, Mrs. Marsh kissed Marshmallow good night, and gave me a good night kiss, also.

"Good night, boys," she said, shutting off the lights and closing the bedroom door.

I slept real good.

The next morning sunshine streamed invitingly through the bedroom windows. We tossed on our clothes and tiptoed across the living room to the front door to greet the day. Sparky, who had spent the night on the front porch, licked both our faces. The sky was blue and cloudless. Birds chirped. The ocean roared.

We wheeled our bicycles out of the garage and turned them upside down on the lawn, so we could oil our chains and check the tires.

Marshmallow had a black Schwinn Panther. I was always envious of that bike. It was bigger and better than mine. I had a tiny red Sears bicycle with about a ten inch wheel span that required me to pedal twice as hard to keep up. But my bike had a basket. We put some fishing gear into it, and a couple peanut butter jelly sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper that Cheryl made for us the night before.

We waited about forty five minutes for Mrs. Marsh to poke her head out the screen door for the morning newspaper.

"Bye, Mom!" Marshmallow called. "We're riding our bikes to Beard's Hollow."

"Okay, honey," she said, waving her Oregonian. "Be careful."

"We will!" we both promised, mounting our bikes.

"Come on, Sparky!" we yelled, although we didn't have to. He was already ahead of us.

We pedaled lazily down the street. Marshmallow rode with no hands. Sparky padded along, his glossy coat feathering in the wind, his black lips stretched into a grin.

"That a boy, Sparky!" I said.

The collie tossed his head happily, and barked.

We rode our bikes across the Long Beach city limits into the residential district of Seaview. We waved to anyone who was out in their yards that early in the morning.

"I know!" Marshmallow suggested. "Let's stop and see Bill!"

"Sure!" I said.

Bill Williams was a nice old man who liked kids. He ran a tourist court about halfway between our two houses. When we rode up to Andrea Court, he was carrying a bundle of sheets across the driveway from one of the cabins. The driveway was paved with oyster shells, so Bill was alerted to our presence as soon as we turned in.

"Hi, Bill!" we called.

"Well, hi there, boys!" Bill replied warmly. He was a skinny man, and bald, which made his ears stick out. Bill had a big goofy smile that wouldn't go away even if he were being tortured.

"What are you fellers up to so early this fine mornin'?" He put down his load of laundry so he could pet Sparky.

"We're going on a bike ride," Marshmallow said.

"Well, now," Bill said. "Looks like a crackling day for that. You planning on fishin'?"

"Gee, Bill! How'd you know that?" I didn't believe there was a more perceptive person that Bill Williams in the whole wide world.

Bill laughed with his whole body. "I expect the hand lines and bobbers in your basket tipped me off, Alvin! Tee hee! Now, boys, when you get to Ilwaco, here's what you ought to do: stop at Archie's Market and ask him for a hunk of raw liver. You cut that into tiny pieces, put it on your hook there, and the fish will bite like moonshine."

I was preparing to ask what moonshine was, but my practical friend asked, "What do we cut the liver with?"

"Well, with a little pockie knife. Don't you fellers have a blade with you?"

We just shrugged our shoulders.

Bill dug in his overalls and pulled out a pearl handled pocketknife. He handed it to Marshmallow.

"Here you go, Willie," he said. "Just bring it back in one piece, okay?"

"Thanks, Bill!" we both answered in awe.

"You be careful now," Bill said, picking up his bundle. "Well, I better get these beds changed, or Mrs. Williams will have my hide," he winked.

Marshmallow and I rode down the street, repeating reverently over and over, "Good old Bill!"

We passed a whole lot of houses all bunched together, then they started to thin out and the trees got thicker. We turned onto what was called The Willows Road, a tunnel through the trees where daylight disappeared until the road started to climb steeply. So steeply, in fact, we had to walk our bikes to where the main road from Ilwaco intersected ours. A wooden road sign pointed left, downhill, to Ilwaco, or in the other direction, uphill, to Cape Disappointment.

"I wonder why it's called Cape Disappointment?" Marshmallow panted.

"Probably because it's uphill all the way," I grumbled.

Sparky wasn't even winded. He marked his path for the four hundredth time and trotted ahead. We huffed and puffed our way up another hill, which was lined with coniferous trees and dense ivy, moss, ferns, and salal bushes, which thinned in places to provide glimpses of the ocean coast below.

Finally the road leveled out. We were on top of a huge cliff overlooking the Pacific. The sound of the surf crashing against the rocks far below was awesome. We dismounted and pushed our bikes over to a wooden fence bordering the abyss.

"Gosh," I gushed. "I mean, gee whiz!"

"It's a long way down," Marshmallow observed. The view was too grand to describe in a single sentence. The flat sandy beach and the deep blue sea stretched for miles to the north. Where the ocean met the southern headlands there was a misty cloud with multiple rainbows. The rocky cliffs formed a huge canyon, filled with ponds and dense woods directly below us.

Marshmallow pointed to the natural estuary directly below us. "That's Beard's Hollow," he said. "My grandpa said that it was called Dead Man's Hollow in the pirate days."

"I wonder why they changed the name?"

"It was probably too scary for girls," Marshmallow scoffed.

We stood and stared for a long time. Sparky sniffed the grass growing along the fence.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Marshmallow suddenly asked.

"A comedy writer," I answered automatically. "I want to write for Uncle Milty. Or Red Skeleton."

Marshmallow was silent for a moment, staring at the sea. Finally he said, " How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't live there?"

"Can I use that?" I asked. It went right over his head. I was to get used to that.

I knew what Marshmallow wanted to be when he grew up – a baseball player, like his hero, Willie Mays. Marshmallow picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could over the cliff. It took several seconds before we heard the rock plop in the swampland below, indicating just what a long drop it was.

"Wow!"

My friend could throw way farther than I ever could. I picked up a rock and tossed it over the edge of the cliff. Sparky struck a pointer pose, and bounded eagerly after it.

"Sparky!" we both screamed. But it was too late. The collie disappeared over the precipice.

"Yikes!" Marshmallow cried. We frantically called out the collie's name, again and again. Finally, far, far below us, we heard a faint bow-wow.

"Quick!" Marshmallow ordered. We hopped on our bikes and roared down the road toward Beard's Hollow. Fortunately, it was downhill all the way.

We took the turn into the hollow about thirty five miles an hour. The road into Beard's Hollow was unpaved, and bumped us up and down so rapidly our voices shook like Kathryn Hepburn's. We didn't care. We were on a mission of mercy. We kept calling Sparky's name, and hearing his barking somewhere, we knew not where, ahead of us.

The road was full of potholes and big brown mud puddles that completely washed out the path in places. The terrain was turning swampy. The underbrush was so thick it would take a machete to cut through it. Steam rose from quicksand pits in the very near distance.

"S-s-s-sort of s-s-s-pooky," I stuttered, bouncing over the ruts in the road.

"S-s-s-sure is," Marshmallow said.

Suddenly, there was a rustling in the bushes. Out of nowhere (or so it seemed), Sparky bounded from the bushes, barking merrily. We were rather relieved, I believe, that the rustling in the bushes wasn't a bear, or a badger, or a wild boar like in Old Yeller.

The collie, although a little muddy, was grinning from ear to ear. We were so glad to see him we jumped off our bicycles while they were still moving, and let them crash on the side of the path.

"Yay! Sparky!" we shouted. Then we all three rolled around on the ground.

We rode into Ilwaco right around noon. You would think we were a gang of outlaws from the way people on the sidewalks stared and pointed at us. We were unaware how filthy we looked. Our clothes, our bikes, our faces and hands, even our dog was completely coated in mud.

People actually moved out of our way when we walked into Archie's Market.

"You boys want somethin'?" the butcher asked.

"Hi!" I chirped. "Can we have a hunk of liver?"

The butcher, a chubby, mustached man with wisps of white hair above each ear, took his time. He snagged a piece of raw liver from the tray in front of the meat counter with a stainless steel hook, transferred it to a white piece of butcher paper, and fastened the paper parcel tightly with a tatter of tape spit from a dispenser beside a big white scale. Then he picked up a curved knife and whacked a link from a string of sausage hanging from a silver meat hook behind him.

"For the pooch," he said, pushing them across the counter toward us.

"How much?" we asked, digging in our pockets.

"Get out of here," he said, smiling.

Everyone else backed out of our way as we exited. We were oblivious to our redolence.

So we took our purchases down to the docks and stretched out on the warm wooden pier to do some serious fishing. We baited our hooks with raw liver, Marshmallow lording Bill William's precious pocket knife conspicuously. It wasn't easy. The raw liver was extremely slippery.

As soon as our lines were bobbing purposefully in the water, we swished our hands over the edge of the docks (thus sterilizing them) and ate our peanut butter jelly sandwiches. Sparky took a nap. We looked at all the fishing boats moored nearby and fantasized future salmon fishing excursions.

"I got one!" Marshmallow yelled. His bobber dunked briefly below the surface of the water, popped back, and jerked seductively while he hauled in the dripping green twine – to the end of which was attached a floppying two inch bullhead.

"Wow!" I marveled.

"She was a real fighter," Marshmallow assured me, smugly.

We fished for another hour, until we were robbed of all our bait by swarms of sneaky minnows. We had reached the limits of our attention spans by then, anyhow. We rolled Sparky off the edge of the dock, then Marshmallow threw me in, and dove in after us. After that a couple of cranky cannery workers came along, fished us out of the water, and told us to get the hell home.

"What a day!" Marshmallow marvelled, as we pedaled homeward along the Ditch Road.

"Since we are already wet," I suggested, "let's go frog huntin'!"

Which we did.

I remember the first record I ever owned. An old war buddy of my dad's, Carl Bishop, visited one time and gave me an Alvin and the Chipmunks album. It was printed on red vinyl, and the album cover itself was made out of green tinted tin foil. I never got over it.

Tooey and I were slowly acquiring the foundation of what would turn into a lifetime obsession of rock and roll record collecting. We owned every Elvis Presley single that came into the Long Beach Pharmacy. We played The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Rock Around the Clock, Peggy Sue, Palisades Park, Blue Moon, Runaway, Goodbye Cruel World, and North To Alaska over and over and over. I kept after Mr. Cox, the pharmacist, to import some singles by James Brown, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and anything by The Shirelles (my favorite girl group).

There were two radio stations in nearby Astoria, Oregon, but they didn't play much rock and roll - mostly country western or, worse yet, Scandinavian polka music. Orman, Tooey, and I put up enough antenna wire in the attic to pull in the Portland radio stations; on a good night we were able to pick up Seattle's boss radio station, KJR. One night we stayed up until two a.m. listening to a weak signal from Detroit, which introduced us to Motown.

Of course, Dad had his Dixieland albums. Boy, did he play them loud! When he first started playing along with his banjo it was pretty painful, but after a while he got somewhat better. The music was so corny, though! I grew up suffering to the sounds of Somethin' Smith and the Redheads, The Firehouse Five, and Sweet Emma and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Some of those songs (Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days Of Summer, You Always Hurt The One You Love, Seven Years With The Wrong Woman) have continued to haunt me all my life, looping endlessly in my mind for hours, sometimes for days! The strange thing was, our father never understood what we saw in rock and roll music.

Most of the focus in our household at the time was concentrated on the baby. Olive was special: our sole sister, the only girl, the daughter of the dynasty. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, the only Egg with those markings.

Mom dressed her in pink petticoats and little white leather shoes. Everywhere we went as a family people would point and ahh and coo as if they had never seen anything more darling in their lives. They didn't even mind that she was imperfect - there was a small pink birthmark on her left leg. There should have been a song on the radio about how special our kid sister was.

Every stage of Olive's development stopped the presses. The first time she wiggled her fingers, the first time she crawled, stood up, fell down. Her first tooth, her first haircut, the first time she farted, practically. Our sister was more photographed than Marilyn Monroe.

I was not jealous. I reckoned the rest of the population of Pacific County were just more easily amazed by babies than me. There were more captivating events occurring in our neighborhood. Like the George Burns Club.

My brothers started the George Burns Club with some of their friends from school in an old abandoned shack covered with blackberry vines in Bradley's lot. Bradley's lot was a block of woods where nobody lived. My brothers and the Moon girls built tree forts where we held pine cone fights, and tied a tire to a big branch that swung out over the street and angered motorists. It was the perfect place to play hide and seek, and Army. Grown ups hardly ever entered the woods.

The primary purpose of the George Burns Club was to burn things. Lenny Cox had a magnifying glass, just like Sherlock Holmes. He focused a sunbeam shining through a hole in the wall and burned his initials into a broken plank on the floor. Then the other kids took turns burning their initials before Tooey drafted the charter that made the George Burns Club official.

Pretty soon all the guys were bringing magnifying glasses of all kinds: the lenses of Boy Scout compasses were popular; Cracker Jacks boxes came with plastic magnifying glasses as a free prize in those days. They attempted to burn the name of the club on the floor but gave up because it took too long:

All the windows were broken out of the shack, and blackberry vines grew through the many holes in the walls. The roof was a haven of birds nests. One day the guys found a surprise in a dank corner of the clubhouse.

"Hey!" Herman Herman shouted. "Guys! Look at this!"

"What is it?" Orman asked.

"Come and look!"

It was a huge turd.

"Oh, shit!" Freddy Meany exclaimed. Talking dirty was another institution of the George Burns Club.

"That's an animal turd," Herman Herman explained, rationally.

"Boogers!" Lenny Cox exclaimed.

"Bully!" Tooey paraphrased.

Everyone stood staring at the feces. Freddy Meany held his nose, although it didn't really smell that bad.

"Now that you mention it, it is rather animal-like," Orman observed. He touched the turd gingerly with the toe of his sneaker. "See, it's got straw in it."

Freddy Meany made a long loud farting noise by blowing on his forearm.

"Cookie cutter!"

"Float a boat!"

"Go see Mr. Brown!"

I marveled at the older guys. They were such cut ups.

"What kind of animal do you suppose it was?" Lenny Cox asked.

"Something pretty big. Maybe it was a deer," someone suggested.

"I've seen deer droppings," Herman Herman said. "That's not deer dung."

"It's not a cow pie," Tooey said. "I know what cow pies look like."

"Oh, brother," Orman said.

"Maybe it was a bear!" Freddy Meany exclaimed.

"Oh, sure!"

"Or a wolf! A werewolf! Wolfman! Bwaa-wah-ah!"

"So… what should we do with this piece of crap?" Orman asked.

The answer was obvious. Five magnifying glasses were instantly focused on the fecal remains of whom or whatever had defiled the sacred sanctity of the George Burns Club.

"Hey, I bet this is the way cave men started fires," Tooey suggested.

"Naw, they rubbed sticks together," Lenny Cox said.

Since I didn't have a magnifying glass of my own, I found two sticks and started rubbing them together, as nonchalantly as possible. You notice I had not made a single contribution to the previous scatological discussions. I was allowed admittance to the George Burns Club only because my parents had entrusted me to the care of my two older brothers.

The older guys added some twigs and sticks, and blew into their cupped hands, until finally they got a few sparks to ignite. Pretty soon we had a satisfying blaze going. Freddy Meany threw a broken plank on the fire and wished aloud he'd brought some marshmallows.

Everyone was congratulating each other for starting such a good fire with just magnifying glasses when the flames ripped rapidly across the floor and leaped up the dry timbers of two inside walls.

When it became apparent that they weren't going to extinguish the fire by fanning the flames with their jackets or peeing on it, the constituents of the George Burns Club turned to the only non-voting member.

"Alvin! Run home and call the fire department!" Orman ordered.

"Don't let Mom catch you!" Tooey added.

Well, I ran all the way home and opened the kitchen door as quietly as I could. Fortunately, my mom was taking a nap in the living room. Olive was slumbering in the crib nearby, her rump sticking up in the air. I didn't see how anyone could actually sleep in that position.

I went back into the kitchen and fixed a quick mayonnaise sandwich before I made my phone call.

The telephone was a heavy black instrument about the size of an anvil. In those days, an operator answered a few seconds after you picked up the receiver.

"Operator," purred the familiar voice on the other end of the line.

"Hello, Mrs. Porteous," I answered.

"Well, hello Alvin," Mrs. Porteous said. "How are you today, honey?"

"I'm fine," I replied. Then I took a bite of my sandwich. I wished I had taken the time to pour a glass of milk.

"Who would you like to talk to, honey? Your daddy isn't at the clinic right now - he had to run to the hospital. Ed Holtz had another heart attack. Gracious, he had had nearly as many heart attacks lately as he has dairy cows! I think he just needs to push himself away from the dinner table more often."

"Yeh," I said.

"Just listen to me," Mrs. Porteous declared. "Now, who would you like to talk to, honey?"

"Do you think I could kind of talk to the fire department?"

"Why do you want to talk to the fire department, honey?"

"Well, I think something is kind of on fire…"

"Is your house on fire?" Mrs. Porteous asked urgently.

"No," I said. "Our house isn't on fire…"

My mom grabbed the telephone from me. She did not look happy about being awaken.

"Elsie, this is Val," she said in a commanding voice. "What's this about a fire?"

She listened for a second, and turned a questioning look at me. I reached tentatively for the mayonnaise sandwich, but placed it back down on the table when I saw Mom's expression change from irritation to comprehension to alarm in a matter of a split second.

Mom stared over my head at the gray smoke rising in the distance outside the kitchen window.

"Send a fire truck!" she shouted.

The George Burns Club was reduced to embers, and several trees surrounding it were also singed. My brothers and their friends sidled up as if they just happened by, to witness the fire with Mom (who held Olive) and I and the rest of the neighbors.

That night at the dinner table, my parents cross-examined us, but Orman, Tooey, and I had closed ranks by then.

Our parents employed the age-old strategy of postponing their interrogation for a few days, when we imprudently assumed we were off the hook. That night, at dinner, Olive was more active than usual in her high chair, clapping her hands and goo-gooing good naturedly, pouring milk into her mouth from an arms length away like a Snagglepuss cartoon. She reminded me of a baby bird in a robin's nest, tipping her head back and holding her mouth wide open hungrily while Mom fed her. Eloise sat alertly at the base of Olive's high chair, her radar tuned to any tidbit knocked from the tray.

"Say, Alvin," Dad said, jovially. "That must have been some fire in Bradley's lot the other day…"

"Yeh, Dad! It was really neat!"

Both Orman and Tooey kicked me underneath the table.

"Neat as in tidy?" my dad asked pleasantly, baiting his hook.

"Ha! Ha!" Tooey laughed. "That's a good one, Dad!"

Orman and I joined in the laughter. Olive laughed too, clapping her hands in delight.

Dad just smiled knowingly. We knew our gooses were cooked. (Or is that geese?)

In a way, Olive saved our skin.

She had been experimenting with the English language lately, making "Da-da" and "Ma-ma" sounds, and a real good impersonation of a motorboat – which had been hailed as signs of intelligent life. But she hadn't actually spoken yet.

Suddenly, she pointed a forefinger right at me, and spoke her first word.

"Sniffy!"

I stopped, startled, like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck. And sniffed.

The room erupted in pandemonium. Everyone jumped to their feet.

"She spoke!" Mom cried – there were real tears in her eyes. "My baby said her first word!"

"What did she say? What did she say?" Tooey taunted. He knew exactly what she had said.

Dad swung his only daughter from her high chair and held her high in the air.

"Sniffy! Sniffy! Can you say 'Sniffy', honey?"

"Sniffy!" Olive repeated, pointing at me still.

I slipped under the table and slunk out of the room.

Mom called Grandpa Weaver that night to tell him the news, resulting in his flying out from Little Rock, Arkansas the very next day, and buying Olive her first pony. My sister learned to ride a horse before she learned to walk, the legend is told.

The George Burns Club incident was forgotten, but my nickname haunted me the rest of my life. As soon as Grandpa Weaver arrived he started calling me Sniffy; word quickly spread at school, nailing me with the dreaded nickname for good. To this day people in our town still say things like: "You remember the time Sniffy practically burned down Bradley's lot?"

Tucked deep inside is a memory. I was looking for my mom. I went down to the basement. There was a space behind the stairs where we stacked lumber. Mom was bending to retrieve something behind a stack of wood. I saw her take a drink from a bottle in a brown paper bag. She had a guilty look like the way a kid looks when they get caught sneaking cookies, so I went back upstairs without saying anything. Later I came back and looked under the stairs again. The paper bag contained a bottle of brown liquid like Grandpa Weaver drank all the time.

Sometimes Mom and Dad would fight at night. Dad would yell at Mom and Mom would cry and fall down on the floor. Once they had a fight when Orman had a friend over and it frightened his company and embarrassed my brother badly. The next morning we found Mom's watch on the living room floor and gave it back to her and she started to cry.

Mom would be happy or sad and we never knew which. Dad would get really mad at her. One time they asked us boys to come into the living room.

"Your mom and I are having a hard time, and just in case we separate we thought we would ask you boys if you had a preference who you would want to live with," Dad said. "Although the final decision would be ours."

When they asked me whom I wanted to stay with, I said, "Well, as long as you guys are going your seperate ways, how about if I just strike out on my own, hmmm?"

I'm not sure if (as Dad claimed when he retold the story at their 50th anniversary celebration) I actually saved my parents marriage, but at least they never put us kids on the spot like that again.

That is all I can remember about that stuff, anyway. I want to skip ahead to the second grade now. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all, but some of the stuff ahead wouldn't make any sense if I didn't say something.

I was in such a hurry to start the second grade I couldn’t stand it.

The summer of 1962 passed painfully slowly…

Dad made some major improvements to the house. He enlarged the garage to a two-car, and poured cement on the roof to create a large patio outside the kitchen where Olive would ride her tricycle and we boys and our friends would skateboard, when the craze hit.

I spent a number of nights at Marshmallow’s, sleeping in a tent pitched in the front yard, next to the woodpile. His cousin Margaret taught us some good old campfire songs like:

                Whistle while you work

                Nixon is a jerk

                He bit his weenie like Mussolini

                Now it doesn’t work!

Marshmallow's cousin Margaret also inaugurated a custom called Slug-a-bug: whenever a Voltzwagen passed by someone shouted "Slug-a-bug!" and punched your arm hard enough to practically dislocate your shoulder.

Dad took us salmon fishing in the ocean that summer. Crossing the Columbia River bar made Orman seasick and he spent the whole cruise throwing up in a plastic pail. Tooey, Marshmallow, and I tossed a few hundred dollars worth of sturgeon eggs off the back of the boat to the seagulls before Dad nabbed us.

Marshmallow and I opened a car wash in my driveway and mowed half the lawns in our neighborhood. Once Dad volunteered to pay me half a cent for every weed I pulled in our yard; I weeded every lawn within three square blocks. I earned enough that summer to get a bigger bike, a Huffy, and put $3.87 in my savings account (a practice that would evolve into a lifelong modus operandi). I yearned for the day I could have a paper route like my older brothers: Orman delivered The Oregonian, a morning newspaper, and Tooey delivered The Longview Daily News in the afternoon after school. Tooey was always in hot water for not touching the dinners Mom made. It turned out that half the customers on his paper route invited the friendly feller inside to join them for supper and/or dessert, which explained his dwindling appetite at our dinner table!

Mom and Dad spent August watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on the Huntley-Brinkly evening news program. Dad got into it, removing his shoe and pounding it on the kitchen table right along with Kruschev. Our parents put us through a Bomb drill, where we crouched beneath the windows, while visions of mushroom clouds danced in our heads. To tell the truth, the Egg kids weren't real interested in the news. All we watched on television the summer of 1962 was McCale's Navy, Bonanza, and F-Troop.

The first thing that hit you when you walked into George Washington Elementary on the first day of school was the heavenly aroma of fresh varnish on all the gleaming wooden floors. Everyone was wearing brand new 'school' clothes. Virgin sneakers made excellent squeaky sounds on the polished hallways.

Before the bell rang a bunch of us boys went out to the playground to claim our new territory. There was a mound of dirt over by the picket fence that acted as the western boundary of the playground, where the second grade guys hung around last year. But now that they were third graders they all rotated to an old stump next to the swamp on the southern edge of the playground. The third graders who were now fourth graders abandoned last years stump and made the shadowy area behind the gym their territory, and so on.

Nicky Folger was sharing some of the knowledge he had acquired over the summer. "If you sneeze, burp, and hiccup at the same time… it will KILL YOU!"

"Uhn uh!" Ricky Rice argued.

"Uh huh!" Nicky insisted.

"Uhn uh!" Ricky repeated.

"Huh!" Nicky huhhed, sticking his face in Ricky's face.

"BREAK IT UP!" Mr. Pells yelled from a second story window in the school building.

Steve Nickles said, "If you say, 'Rabbit, rabbit,' the second you wake up on the first day of the month, you will get granted one wish. Rabbit, rabbit. It has to be the first thing off your lips. You can't even think anything else first."

"Oh, sure," several of us snickered. Steve Nickles wasn't exactly considered the coolest kid in the class, but we all ended up saying "Rabbit, rabbit," the first day of every month for practically the rest of our lives anyway.

Marshmallow said, "If you mix Coke, Pepsi, and Hires Root Beer… it will EXPLODE!"

"No way!"

"My cousin did that," Galen Doubty, who had been standing just outside our circle, weakly asserted. "Practically blew his thumb off."

"DOGPILE!" Ron Krebs shouted. The next second Galen Doubty was buried beneath a mountain of squirming second grade boys.

"KNOCK IT OFF!" Mr. Pells hollered.

Then the bell rang, so we headed inside.

The best part of Mrs. Baker's classroom was the desks. They were wooden desks, with folding seats, and iron sides that attached to two long boards that were fastened to the floor like railroad ties, forming each row. I took a seat in the back of the room, right behind Marshmallow. I noted, with some satisfaction, that the name 'BUTCH' was carved on my desktop.

Mrs. Baker stood in front of the room, her back turned, writing on the blackboard. Without turning around, she instructed me to move to a desk in the front of the classroom, within striking distance of her own desk.

Our teacher was about five foot four, had short, wiry brown hair, a lean, muscular body, and she ALWAYS wore black. She had cat-eye glasses, and either there were mirrors in the corners of the frames or she had eyes in the back of her head. Mrs. Baker was the kind of teacher you had to respect. Like you have to respect wolverines.

Mrs. Baker faced the class and smiled brilliantly. "Before we start our studies, let's go over a few rules," she said, firmly. We knew from that moment that it wasn’t going to be easy to get away with stuff in second grade.

Orman and Tooey read a report in National Geographic Magazine about an African safari. For every safari there was a kid who carried all the guns, baggage, and provisions on his back for the great white hunters. They called him, "small boy".

That’s what they called me, too. Whenever we were watching TV, Orman or Tooey would call, "Small boy! Change the channel!" Or, "Small boy! Fetch some toast and cocoa!"

For some reason, I never questioned their directives. I always liked serving people. Off I went to the kitchen, preparing platters of golden brown cinnamon toast, mugs of hot chocolate, bowls of perfectly popped popcorn.

I always ended up with the dishes, too. We were supposed to share the K.P. duties. Mom said, "I’ll do the cookin’. You boys are responsible for clearing the dishes." By ‘boys’, she included Dad. But he almost always got called off to the hospital on an emergency or to deliver a baby; heck, he even made house calls in those days.

Now, Orman always appointed himself the surrogate sheriff in Dad’s absence. He’d boss us around, assign tasks, and generally make the job ten times more complicated than was required – at which point I’d dismiss the lot of them and finish on my own.

When Tooey’s turn came around, he would talk so much and work so little, wandering off every five minutes to tune the radio or go into the bathroom or plunk himself down in front of the TV, "just until the next commercial," that I’d eventually step in and finish the job before he got back.

When Olive got old enough to help with the dishes she devised the most ingenious method to get out of work ever. She would dawdle away very, very slowly, languishing over every plate and utensil, rinsing them under the faucet for fifteen or twenty minutes sometimes, while she stared vacantly out the window. Finally I would grow so impatient with her progress that I would scuttle her off to the TV room (where she felt she belonged in the first place) and finish the damned dishes myself.

I was, of course, capable of my own diversionary tactics. When Mom served Brussels sprouts or, worse yet, liver, I would slowly chew away on a single bite for a half hour or so until Dad would bellow: "It’s impossible! You can’t be chewing on a single mouthful of food that long!" That’s when I would turn and open my mouth up wide like a baby bird, revealing a revolting wad of chawed food. Victory!

Maybe the best stunt we ever pulled was later that fall, when Orman, Tooey, and I were assigned the task of raking the leaves falling from the larch trees in our yard. Our father was so compulsive that he made us climb the trees and pick the leaves off the branches that wouldn’t fall on their own.

We did our usual thorough job, but left one leaf remaining on the tree that stood outside the dining room window. We leaned a ladder against the base of the tree, and watched Dad fidget through dinner, nervously glancing outside at the bare larch with one leaf clinging to the top branch.

We were eating spaghetti that night. Olive kept shouting, "Spetti!" and flinging noodles in all directions.

Dad ate quietly, glancing abstractedly out the window every few seconds. We all waited for him to make his move, trying to keep straight faces.

Finally Dad stood and excused himself from the dinner table. He went outside, leaned the ladder against the larch, and climbed up to pluck the last leaf from the top of the tree. Then he returned the ladder to its proper place in the basement, and came back to the dinner table as if nothing had happened.

"Spetti!" Olive announced happily. "Louise," she cooed, pointing to our black and white dog, Eloise, who was lapping up all the noodles that fell off the baby’s plate. "Mine!" she cried.

We all started laughing. Dad laughed so long and hard, he snorted. Mom had to sit down she laughed so hard. Orman almost choked on his milk, which set Tooey and I laughing even harder. Olive clapped her hands and cried, "Da! Da! Da!" It was the kind of laughter that went around and around the table, filling the whole house.

A rash of practical jokes plagued our second grade class.

It all started innocently enough.

Mrs. Baker was always after Sherry Maidenhead for chewing bubble gum in class.

"Sherry!" Mrs. Baker would call, pointing to the garbage can beside her desk.

Sherry would dutifully shuffle to the front of the classroom, blowing one last bubble on the way. Sherry always chewed two or three pieces of Bazooka Bubble Gum^® at a time, to achieve a maximum bubble.

She wasn’t a big girl – sometimes her whole head would disappear behind a huge pink satiny globe of gum. But Sherry was an expert bubble blower. Her bubbles never exploded and stuck to her face. She sucked each bubble skillfully back into her mouth every time with a sensational SNAP!

"Sherry," Mrs. Baker would repeat with tireless patience, while waiting for her to get in a last few chews, snapping the gum like cap pistol pops.

Mrs. Baker grimaced wearily.

Sherry’s wad of pink bubble gum landed each time in the bottom of the garbage can with a loud, "Clunk!"

Other people chewed gum, of course, but Sherry Maidenhead was the most frequent repeat offender.

"You look like a bunch of cows chewing your cud," Mrs. Baker lectured us.

"Wouldn’t that be a herd of cows?" Shannon Moon challenged.

"She didn’t raise her hand!" Jo Ann Henderson tattled.

Once in a while Sherry would beat Mrs. Baker to the punch, saving her gum in the pencil tray on top of her desk for recess. On one particularly infamous afternoon, someone substituted Sherry’s wad of gum with pink Play-Doh^® when she wasn’t looking.

"Gaaaa!" Sherry shrieked, spitting the pink clay messily onto the floor.

Even Mrs. Baker had to laugh a little. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it.

The next day somebody put chewed up gum in the underarms of all the second grader’s jackets hanging in the coatroom.

"Eeuh!" Gabrielle Meany shouted. "Both arms!"

"This is deplorable," Mrs. Baker said. We even had a discussion group about it by sitting "Indian Style" (pre-political correctness days) on the floor and raising our hands about disrespecting other people’s property and why chewing gum leads to juvenile delinquency.

We made a list on the blackboard:

1. Lacks dignity
2. Messy
3. Bad for your teeth
4. Can stick in your hair
5. Sven has to scrape it off the bottom of lunch tables
6. Habit forming

"Come on, class," Mrs. Baker urged. "We can’t spend all day on this distressing subject! Take out your spellers and turn to page 24…"

The very next day the absentee list was modified with the names George Washington, Elvis Presley, Willie Mays, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Benedict Arnold.

"This is serious," Mrs. Baker informed us.

"This is sacrilege!" Marshmallow shouted, obviously infuriated by the mention of his favorite baseball player.

What would happen next, we all wondered, dangling in the clutches of a madman?

Then someone replaced all the chalk in the chalk trays with mushrooms. Someone put a salamander in Mrs. Baker’s top desk drawer. Galen Doughty’s goulashes got filled with peanuts. Steve Bale’s comb disappeared while playing tether ball (which may have been an accident). The hysteria mounted.

Finally, after a good talking-to by Mr. VanOver, the Principal, Mrs. Baker urged, "Now, we will all place our heads on our desks. If the guilty person will come up to my desk, there will be no prosecution."

I peeked. It took a moment, then Carol Stanway, the best student in our class, went up and whispered her apologies to our teacher.

Not another thing was said about the incident.

"What happened in school today, Alvin?" Dad asked, as usual, at the dinner table one evening.

By then, I had decided Mrs. Baker was an all right educator. She had a tough method of teaching: drill, drill, drill. She was all over the classroom, making sure each pupil understood their lessons. Arithmetic. Reading. Spelling. Vocabulary. Penmanship. Etiquette. She wasn’t mean, exactly, but she sure was firm.

One time Ricky Rice raised his hand and asked, "Why do they call them coat hangers? We hang more than just coats on them. Why aren’t they called sweater hangers? Or pants hangers?"

"I think you’d do better to concentrate on your studies, instead of asking irrelevant questions," Mrs. Baker said.

"What’s ‘irrelevant’ mean?" Ricky replied.

Mrs. Baker made us all look it up in the dictionary, and add it to our spelling list.

Mrs. Baker rewarded hard work with satisfied smiles, took great pleasure in each students’ success, or made you do it over and over and over until you got it exactly right. She hung learning aids all over the room, as well as our projects, which she smattered with gold star stickers and encouraging commentary. She played the piano real good, too.

"Alvin?" my mom said. "Your father asked you a question."

"Oh, you know," I said. "The usual."

"No, I don’t know," was Dad’s weary response.

That was my dad. He was such a stitch! When you said something was cool, he would say, "Yes, positively Arctic." If you said something was neat, he would ask, "Neat, as in tidy?"

One night I looked around the dinner table and asked, "Where's Olive?" Her high chair was empty.

"Olive is upstairs," Mom said, "with the chicken pox."

"Who's that?" I asked.

"She's in quarantine," Dad explained.

"Where's that?" I asked.

My confusion stemmed from the fact that the evening meal at the kitchen table was the one time when our whole family got together, every day, without fail. Dinner was a sacred ritual. You had to have a pretty good reason to be excused from the dinner table. Only a force of nature such as a tidal wave, medical emergencies, or a baby being born could delay dinner.

"Pass the potatoes, please," Orman interrupted. "Hey, Dad! Guess what?"

My topic had been temporarily tabled. I drummed my fingers nervously and waited my turn.

"We get to watch TV in school!" Tooey blurted.

"It's for the space launch, Dad," Orman explained.

Another Mercury astronaut was to be launched into outer space. When John Glenn orbited the earth the previous January, it had been a big victory for the American space race. Since then, a new lexicon of outer space terms had been introduced: weightlessness, space capsule, thrusters, liftoff, reentry, Space Age.

"What do you think of that, Alvin?" Dad asked.

"Cool, Dadio," I said slowly.

"You are a baffling child," Dad sighed.

I twiddled my fingers languidly and wondered whether I should reintroduce the subject of chicken pox. Mom brought it up again.

"Your sister is very contagious. You boys can't go anywhere near her," we were warned.

"I already had the chicken pox," Orman said. "In Chicago. So did Tooey, remember?'

"That's right!" Mom exclaimed. "So that means Alvin is the only one we have to worry about. Besides Olive, of course. Alvin, you must not go anywhere near your sister until her chicken pox clear up."

"Oh darn," I said. "How long is that?"

"About a week."

"I'll try, Mother." I had hoped the quarantine would last a year. Or at least a month.

The morning of Walter Schirra's space launch I came downstairs dressed for school, Dad looked at me, and said, "Uh oh, sport…"

Always the professional, Dad listened to my chest with his stethoscope, pushed a tongue depressor down my throat, and shined a tiny flashlight in my ears and eyes.

"Sorry pal," he concluded. "You've been poxed."

Soon, I too was quarantined to my quarters, reduced to the indignity of pajamas in daytime. I lifted my pajama top and stared at the spots on my stomach. Sheesh! The shame of it all.

Plus I was missing an unparalleled opportunity to watch television during study time.

Soon I was settled in bed. I was pretty sleepy. I remember my mom stroking my forehead, then it was dark.

I had a dream that there was a field of horizontal lines running parallel to each other, like a big TV screen, in my head. Then one line would slip out of alignment, and by the time I got it straightened out, another line would go awry, and so on. If you've ever fiddled with the horizontal hold knob on a TV set you know how frustrating the dream was, except it was my own brain waves that I couldn't control.

"Alvin?" It was my dad. "Hey, pal."

Was I ever glad to wake up. I sat up in bed and scratched my elbow.

"Try not to scratch," Dad said.

"It itches," I said.

"Be brave, son," Dad said, in a John Wayne voice.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"It's about ten thirty. I just finished my rounds, and wanted to see how you were feeling."

He took my temperature and let me fool with his stethoscope while he went downstairs, returning swiftly with a glass of ginger ale and a tiny transistor radio.

"I thought you might like to listen to the coverage of the astronaut." Dad turned on the radio so that I could follow the mission along with Walter Cronkite.

"Hey, Dad?"

"What?"

"Aren't you afraid of catching the chicken pox?"

"No, son. When you spend as much time around sick people as I do, you get immune. Can I get you anything else before I go?"

"My baseball glove." Dad retrieved it from the windowsill and handed it to me. I liked to sleep with my baseball glove sometimes.

I stretched out flat on my back and listened to the radio, staring at the ceiling. Wally Schirra was now on his second orbit in Sigma 7. I wondered whether his capsule would fly over our house. If I went up on the roof I could probably see him.

Eloise came in the room and sniffed at the side of my bed. I got out of bed, put her out in the hall, and closed the door. I didn't want her to catch chicken pox.

A while later Mom came up to check on me and explained that dogs were immune to chicken pox. So Eloise stayed in the room with me the rest of the time I was recovering.

In late October, Marshmallow and I were discussing our trick-or-treat strategies while walking home from school.

"Who are you gonna be?" I asked.

"Superman!" Marshmallow exclaimed.

"Good choice," I said. I wished I'd thought of that first.

"Who you gonna be?" Marshmallow asked.

"I'm gonna be a ghost."

"Which ghost?" he asked, suspiciously.

"Casper," I admitted, with slight embarrassment.

"Casper?" Marshmallow groaned. "Don't be Casper. That's so sissy."

"No, it's not," I defended myself. I liked Casper the Friendly Ghost.

"Hey! I know!" Marshmallow exclaimed. "Why don't you go as Mighty Mouse. Then we can be Superman and Mighty Mouse!"

"Why don't you be Mighty Mouse?" I said.

"I already bought my mask," Marshmallow explained.

"Oh, all right," I conceded.

We stopped to throw some rocks in the ditch next to Hill's swimming pool.

Sploosh! Sploosh!

Our goal that Halloween: to collect as much candy trick-or-treating as was humanly possible.

"Okay," Marshmallow said with authority, like John Wayne in a war movie. "We deploy at six o'clock."

"Check!"

"We start in my neighborhood, working our way south. We'll go as far as Sportman's Cannery on the ditch road, then work our way back on the ridge road."

"Check!"

"Carry an extra gunnysack in case the first one fills up."

"Roger!'

"When we get to lower Seaview, keep your eyes peeled for hoods." 'Hood' was slang for 'hoodlum'.

We devised a three-step plan to insure a huge haul:

1. Ditch our moms. (The previous year our mothers took us around the block in our immediate neighborhood, and that was it. We only got about ten candy bars, half of which our dads ate.)

 

2. Get as big a bag as you could carry.

 

3. Dress in clothes that allowed you to run away really fast if any big kids tried to steal your candy.

"One more thing," Marshmallow added. "We have to bring Tiny Star with us."

I stopped dead in my tracks. "What!?!"

"I have to," Marshmallow apologized. "My mom's making me. She and Mrs. Star are bridge partners."

"But he's a first grader!" I protested.

"He's not so bad," Marshmallow said. "I've played catch with him a few times. He's pretty good."

"Well, he better not slow us down," I reluctantly agreed. I was being selfish, of course. It wasn't just that our candy-collecting plan might be jeopardized. I didn't want to share my best friend with anyone else.

So Halloween night Marshmallow and I started our trick or treating at the Star house. There was a jack-o-lantern with a candle glowing inside beside the front door.

"Well, now!" Mrs. Star said in a Southern accent. "Superman and Super Mouse!"

"I'm Mighty Mouse!" I peeped, behind my plastic mask.

"I stand corrected." Mrs. Star was smart and friendly, and had a good laugh. Her husband ran Roy's Market, a small grocery in Long Beach. He was the best butcher on the peninsula, my mom always said. A man of few words, he contrasted sharply with his perky wife.

She placed a Mountain Bar in each of our gunnysacks. An excellent beginning to a promising evening.

"Mi-yike! Your friends are here!" she called.

I winced. Tiny Star came to the door in a cowboy outfit, complete with chaps.

"Yahoo!" his mom exclaimed. "Ride 'em, cowboy!"

She handed him a plastic glow-in-the-dark pumpkin, about the size of a prison ball, to carry his candy. "You boys be careful, you hear? Don't go near any haunted houses!"

I liked Mrs. Star. She had big round bosoms.

As soon as we got outside, Marshmallow handed Tiny his own burlap gunnysack. "You can ditch that thing," he suggested, pointing to the pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat container. Tiny hid it in the mailbox.

We hit the Stanway's, the Elliot's, the Beasley's, Hill's Hotel, and tacked over to the ditch road. Frogs croaked cheerily. Up ahead, we could see other trick-or-treaters crisscrossing the street. Already our plastic masks were steaming up inside. Those narrower-than-narrow rubber bands holding the masks to our faces broke practically the first time we breathed hard.

We hit every house on both sides of the street, and by the time we got to Seaview our bags were already getting heavy. Tiny held his own. He was tougher than he looked. We felt superior to the kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Whenever we saw big kids ahead we quickened our paces to distance ourselves from them.

When we ran into kids we knew, we compared which houses gave the best treats.

"Yeh, the Johnson's are giving popcorn balls, but they make you sing!"

"Mrs. Julio has chocolate cupcakes!"

"Yuk! They smash in the bag!" Tiny complained.

"You dummy!" Marshmallow explained. "You're supposed to eat them right away."

"Oh," Tiny Star said, humbly. The kid had a lot to learn.

Some people gave little waxed paper bags stuffed with penny candy. We avoided houses that handed out apples. Unless they were caramel apples, of course.

There was one place in Seaview where everyone went, even the older kids. In fact, when we got within a couple blocks of Sportman's Cannery, the traffic of costumed kids picked up noticeably.

Sportman's Cannery was the Mecca of trick-or-treaters.

Mrs. Levers was famous for her generosity. She actually gave out bottles of soda pop! The only thing was, you had to work for it.

When we walked up the sidewalk, spooky voices, wild animal sounds, and sinister laughter played from a phonograph on the porch. A huge stuffed owl glared at us from the porch rail.

"Come in, kids," cackled the doorman. He was wearing a white tuxedo with tails, with padding underneath to make it look like he had a hunchback. His head was covered with a rubber frog mask. He also wore white kid gloves.

He motioned us inside with one hand, bowing deeply. The parlor was dark, and fake cobwebs covered much of the furniture.

"Hee! Hee! Hee!"

Mrs. Levers looked exactly like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. She stirred a big black cauldron that was filled with dry ice, making smoke spill over the sides each time she stirred the pot.

"Igor, fetch some sodas for our guests," she ordered the doorman. "But first…"

She pointed a long, crooked finger at us. I wasn't sure if the warts on her hands and face were real, or fake. Anyway, it was pretty creepy.

"…you must do a trick. You first," she croaked, poking Marshmallow in the tummy.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat," Marshmallow recited. "How I wonder where you're at."

"Lovely," the witch laughed. One of her front teeth was blacked out.

"Now you, cowboy!"

Tiny was trembling visibly. He looked like a trapped mouse.

We all waited. I was afraid the little feller would wet his pants.

Suddenly, Tiny took a deep breath, whipped out a lariat, and spun it expertly over his head. It was pretty impressive. Marshmallow, Mrs. Levers, the frog doorman and I all applauded.

Igor limped off and returned carrying three bottles of Orange Crush between the fingers of one hand.

"Not so fast!" the witch shrieked. "You haven't done a trick yet, Alvin Egg."

I sang "Teddy Bear", shaking my pelvis in imitation of Elvis Presley.

On the way out we saw Nicky Folger and Ron Krebs waiting to go in. Their costumes were hard to figure out. They had black eye masks that made them look like raccoons, wore French berets, and carried little black suitcases.

"What are you guys supposed to be?" I asked.

"We're safecrackers," Ronny bragged. Nicky just grinned.

Cydni Cleavey and Sherry Maidenhead came clomping up the sidewalk. Their costumes came from their mothers' wardrobes. Huge hats with phony fruit sat atop their heads. Cydni had a fox fur around her shoulders, Sherry a feather boa. Costume jewelry dangled around their necks, arms, and wrists. Their high heels were about five sizes too big for their feet.

"Hi, Alvin," Cydni said. "Can I see your candy?"

I opened my gunnysack. It contained about forty pounds of candy.

Cydni shook her head. "You are such a man," she marveled.

I blushed underneath my Mighty Mouse mask.

"Where is your candy?" Marshmallow asked the girls.

Sherry snapped opened her big black purse. It was full of candy bars.

Cydni opened her purse. She pulled out a squirt gun and squirted me in the eye.

"Hey!" I cried.

"Got ya," she said, blowing on the end of the barrel. I did not know it, but she was flirting with me.

"Come on, you guys," Tiny urged.

"We better go," I teased. "It's past someone's bedtime."

It was a snotty thing to say. I would regret it someday, when Tiny Star wasn't so tiny.

We dragged our gunny sacks back towards home. We had so much candy by now that we even skipped a few houses.

"Do you think we should go to William's house?" Marshmallow asked.

William was an old man who chased kids away from his vegetable garden every summer. Sometimes he would yell at kids who were just walking by on the street. The ditch running next to his tool shed had some of the biggest frogs in town, but William always ran us out of there, too.

"Sure," I said.

We got about halfway up to the door before William yelled, "You kids get out of my yard!"

We stopped running about three blocks later.

"Hey. Do you hear something?" I asked.

"I don't hear anything," Marshmallow giggled. He thought I was kidding.

Tiny Star's eyes shined in the dark like a frightened fox.

We started walking, then stopped again.

Footsteps.

We walked a little faster. The footsteps behind us increased their pace.

"Run!" I yelled.

Marshmallow and I were pretty even runners, but Tiny Star, even with his huge bag of candy, shot ahead of us and kept going. Man, he was fast!

The big kids behind us made "Bwaa-wah-ah!" sounds. Our candy bags were dragging us down. Finally we stopped and faced our pursuers.

"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" Chick Mitchell said, menacingly.

"Oh, great," Mashmallow muttered.

We lowered our masks. Chick Mitchell was flanked on either side by Butch Jasperson and Duck Meany. Duck was Freddy Meany's cousin. Butch and Duck were gods in our eyes. One of their more infamous exploits was pushing a donkey through the emergency exit of the old movie house in Ilwaco, leaving the braying beast silhouetted against the screen.

"Hey!" Butch exclaimed. "It's that Sniffy kid!"

Just to be hospitable, I sniffed.

"Look at the size of those sacks," Duck Meany observed. "What did you kids do, hold up a grocery store?"

Marshmallow giggled proudly. I kept quiet. I didn't like the way Chick Mitchell was looking at me.

"Let me see that," he sneered, grabbing my bag. He started pawing around my burlap sack, so while he was distracted I stomped on his foot.

Unfortunately, this had no effect whatsoever, other than Chick Mitchell grabbing me by the shirt collar and shaking me back and forth vigorously a few feet off the ground. Marshmallow took the opportunity to kick him in the shins.

"Put the kid down," Butch Jasperson ordered.

Chick Mitchell dropped me on the ground and rubbed his ankle. Duck Meany helped me to my feet and brushed me off a bit.

He lit a cigarette. "Hey, what happened to that other little kid that was with you? He took off like a bat out of hell."

"I guess you scared him," I said, looking right at Chick Mitchell.

Chick Mitchell lunged at me again, but Butch held him back with one hand.

"You little pecker!" Chick Mitchell vowed. "I'm gonna cream you some day!"

"Oooooooo!" Marshmallow taunted.

"You too, Fatso!" he swore. "Come on, guys. Let's split."

Butch put his hand on my shoulder, friendily. "Ces't la vie, Sniffy!"

We walked as fast as we could, without running, in the opposite direction – hoping the big kids wouldn't change their minds. When we thought they were far enough away we yelled, "Happy Halloween!", and ran the rest of the way to my house.

We stopped on the front steps to look over our loot.

"Where do you figure Tiny went?" I asked.

"I'll bet he's home by now!" Marshmallow laughed. "That was close, huh?"

"Yeh."

"Were you scared?"

"Yeh! Duh."

"Duh," Marshmallow echoed.

"Oh, shut up!" I said.

"Oh, shut up!" Marshmallow repeated.

"I mean it. Cut it out," I warned.

"I mean it. Cut it out," Marshmallow giggled.

"I'll trade you an O'Henry bar for a Pay Day," I suggested craftily.

"Okay! I'll trade you a Hershey's for that Baby Ruth bar."

"No way… unless you throw in a 3 Musketeers."

"Okay!" Marshmallow agreed.

"Okay!" I echoed.

"Oh, shut up."

"Oh, shut up."

"Shut up!"

"Shut up!"

"You!"

"You..."

"What would you like for Christmas, Alvin?" my parents asked, as if the answer would effect the way they went to the bathroom for the next three months.

"Well," I said, "I would like a pair of Casper the Friendly Ghost slippers."

"Uh, huh," they said, with the accent on the 'huh'.

My poor parents tried every retail outlet in Washington and Oregon, including Gucci's, Nordy's, and Red Goose Shoes. They even tried the Sear's catalogue, Speigal's, and HeathKit. No one carried Casper the Friendly Ghost slippers.

On Christmas morning I opened a package labeled: To Alvin from Santa. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, were a pair of Casper the Friendly Ghost slippers. Orman had cut an image of Casper the Ghost from a Harvey comic book and pasted it inside a Bell jar lid, then pasted them to a pair of J.C. Penny bathroom slippers.

Even though I only wore my Casper the Friendly Ghost slippers for about five minutes before they fell apart, I always remember Orman's making me those slippers whenever I want to think kindly of him.

It rained all the time. By Christmas vacation the beach was flooded. Puddles overflowed with rainwater and became ponds, some of them big enough to float a boat.

"Avast, buccaneers!" Tooey shouted. "Shiver my timbers!" he screeched.

"Oh, blow up," I mumbled.

Tooey stood at the bow of our raft, waving a crude wooden sword in the air, made from two cedar sticks nailed together. I was delegated to the stern, pushing our log raft across The Big Pond with a long, heavy wooden pole.

Our vessel was constructed of three long logs that had been tossed over the high water mark by a high tide, then dragged and finally floated to The Big Pond and lashed together with rope, nails, and scavenged boards. It was a little wobbly, but did float, most of the time. My sneakers squished soggily with every heave of the pole.

"Haul on the bowline!" Tooey hollered. "Ar! Ar! Ar!"

"You blockhead," I muttered under my breath. "There is no bowline." I briefly contemplated mutiny.

"Hey!" Orman hollered. He had his own raft. It was better constructed than ours was. Orman's ship was four logs wide, and even had a mast. It was so much better, in fact, that he wouldn't let anyone else ride it. "Hey!!!"

He should have shouted 'ahoy'.

We rammed the side of his raft. Our ship shuttered, and the logs wobbled precariously.

"Batten down the hatches!" Tooey cried. We kept a hatchet and a bag of nails on board for just such an occasion. We hammered the boards that had popped up in the collision back down again.

Orman glided off unharmed. "Lubbers!" he cursed.

Mary Moon had the best raft. She had a way with wood. She built an exact replica of Huck Finn's river raft, constructed of pine planks, with a movable tiller. It was about five feet wide and eight feet long. The deck stood above the water six or seven inches, and had a pup tent tethered to the top.

Mary Moon discovered Pirate Island. Ordinarily, Pirate Island was a sandy peninsula attached to the north shore of The Big Pond. But it rained so much that year that water completely covered the isthmus, forming an island a short distance off the shoreline.

We laid a wobbly plank across the short distance separating Pirate Island from the shore, and beached our rafts on the other side of the island. We leaned some driftwood together to form a clubhouse, and ran a Jolly Roger flag up a bamboo pole. Viola: Pirate Island!

We had countless pretend sword fights with sticks, pretend gun fights with sticks, and duels at ten paces with stick rifles. I was forced to walk the plank about a million times. We invented a variation of king-of-the-hill where one team would be on the island and the other team would try to get them off the island. Lots of imaginary blood was shed. Sometimes we pretended we were giants; we would float little pieces of wood in the water and bombard the boats with rocks. One afternoon we played Indian attack.

"I know, let's build a teepee!" Tooey shouted.

"This is supposed to be Pirate Island," Alice Moon said.

"Well, pirates could live in a teepee, I suppose," Mary Moon said.

"The pirates and Indians in Peter Pan loathed one another," Shannon Moon pointed out. She was, as usual, dressed in black, with about an inch of purple eye shadow above each eyelid.

"That's also true," Mary mused.

"I know!" Tooey yelled. "Let's build an igloo!"

Everyone stared at him in disbelief.

It wasn't too long before outsiders invaded our island paradise.

Freddy Meany and two of his cousins, Roddy and Boone, tried to penetrate our stronghold by launching a homemade canoe constructed of barrel hoops nailed to a two by four, the shell covered with a plastic tarp, and wrapped with about three rolls of duct tape. But it capsized and sank upon launching, much to our mirth.

We let them play with us, anyway. In fact, they helped us invent a new game known as 'treasure'. One team of pirates buried something (a nickel, a pencil stub, one of those porcelain animals that came free with Red Rose Tea), and the other team of pirates ran around the dunes, digging hundreds of holes, trying to find the buried treasure.

Mary Moon gave me a ride on her raft once. "You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft, Alvin," she said, quoting directly from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. " Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't."

Words of wisdom, which I remembered for the remainder of my days.

"Manners were very important," Mrs. Baker told her class. "Not just in school, but with your family, your relatives, and your neighbors, as well."

Her second grade class, for the most part, stared back dully.

JoAnn Henderson waved her hand urgently in the air.

"Mrs. Baker!"

"Yes, JoAnn," Mrs. Baker replied, following proper protocol.

"I've had etiquette lessons already."

"I'm sure you have JoAnn," Mrs. Baker said, while the boys in the back of the room made fake gagging sounds. "This will benefit the rest of the class."

Mrs. Baker was wearing an orange dress. I had identified a pattern. In September, she wore black; in October: red; November: blue; December: green.

We all were submitted to lessons in properly introducing people, how to correctly excuse oneself from the dinner table, as well as dire warnings about wearing clean underwear in case you got hit by a bus and had to go to the emergency room.

There were, of course, innumerable false starts…

Gabe Meany: "How do you do?"

Cydni Cleavey: "How do you do?"

Gabe: "How do you do?"

Cydni: "How do you do?"

Mrs. Baker: "Grrrr…"

Diane Pickles: "Ron Krebbs, this is Nicky Folger. Nicky Folger, this is Ron Krebbs."

Ronny: "How do you do?"

Nicky: "Pantyhose!"

Mrs. Baker: "Stop it!"

Steve Nickles: "After you, my dear Alfonse!"

Galen Doughty: "No, after you, my dear Alfonse!"

Steve Nickles: "No, I insist. After you…"

Mrs. Baker: (gnashing of teeth)

"Everyone take your seats," Mrs. Baker finally said, exasperated.

Shannon Moon raised her hand. "I have to go to the bathroom."

"You should say, 'Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom, please,' " Mrs. Baker corrected.

I felt my hand rise above my head, as if I had no control over it. I knew better, but I could not stop myself. Actually, being a class clown is less a hindrance than a calling.

"What do you say when you fart?"

There was a moment of stunned silence, before the snickers started.

Mrs. Baker gave me an icy stare.

"Why don't we say, 'Forry?' " I asked innocently, trying to recover.

"Sorry?" Mrs. Baker said.

"No, forry. Like a combination of fart and sorry."

You can imagine how that went over.

Mrs. Baker led me down to Mr. VanOver's office by my ear. Just as we were leaving Shannon Moon jumped up.

"Mrs. Baker!" Shannon pleaded. "I still have to go to the bathroom!"

Mr. VanOver and Mr. Pells interrogated me in the furnace room. After I explained what happened, they left Sven the Janitor to guard me while they ran down to the faculty room, where they could crack up in private.

Sven's mustache was so bushy it blew up and down as he talked.

"That's an interesting theory," he admitted.

"It's very useful," I expounded. "You could say 'smorry' for one of those silent smelly farts."

"I see," Sven said. He looked down at the floor and slowly shook his head. I'm certain he grasped my brilliance.

That night, at the dinner table, I got the business from my brothers.

"What are you talking about?" Mom asked, placing a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches on the table. When Dad had a late surgery, we got to eat kid's food.

"Alvin got kicked out of class for saying 'forry!' " Tooey taunted.

"What? Kicked out of class? You're only in the second grade!" Mom worried. "What did you do?"

"For saying forry," I sighed.

"What? Forry?"

"Forget it," I mumbled.

"I won't forget it," Mom insisted.

Tooey pressed his lips to his upper arm and made a loud farting noise by blowing.

"FORRY!" he and Orman shouted in unison.

"Wait until your father gets home," Mom warned me, wearily.

Olive was old enough now to sit at the table. She talked, too. "Forry!" she exclaimed, cooking my goose. "Forry! Forry!"

The photographer who took our class portrait arranged us in two long lines on the bottom steps of the school, with Mrs. Baker standing on one end. He was a very overweight man, which made him sweat profusely with the exertion of lining us up, even though it was very cold out. He had a skinny mustache, like a Frenchman, that he kept tugging at. The taller students stood in back; I, of course, was front and center. He asked me to hold a blackboard that read:

MRS. BAKER
SECOND GRADE
GEO WASHINGTON
ELEMENTARY

I was wearing a genuine Roy Roger's cowboy belt with a shiny silver buckle that I wanted displayed prominently in the picture, but the blackboard got in the way and the photographer kept hissing at me each time I raised or lowered it so that my belt buckle showed. He also had to tell Steve Nickles to stop combing his hair about ten times. Just when he had us lined up and dashed back under the black cloth behind his portrait camera, Ricky Rice reported: "It's snowing!"

Everyone looked up.

"Curses!" the photographer exploded from behind his black hood.

"Class!" Mrs. Baker implored.

"Where?" Marshmallow demanded.

"I didn't see anything," Shannon Moon said, suspiciously.

"A snowflake landed on my nose, I'm telling you!" Ricky Rice insisted, clenching his fists.

"Hey! It is snowing!" Debbie Carpenter squealed.

A few faint snowflakes fluttered to the ground.

"IT'S SNOWING!!!" everyone responded at once, jumping up and down.

"Children!" Mrs. Baker scolded. "Be still!"

It was no use. We were delirious with joy. Some of us had never before seen snow.

For the rest of the morning everyone's attention was concentrated not on their studies, but out the windows. The kids nearest the windows reported every few minutes.

"It's sticking!" Gabrielle Meany cried out in the middle of our spelling lesson.

Instantly, everyone flocked to the windows.

"Sit! Sit Down!" Mrs. Baker ordered. "Oh, fiddle," she sighed, and surrendered to the window to watch the snowfall with the rest of us.

By recess a light layer of snow covered everything, enough for the first barrage of snowball fights. The school building emptied completely. The playground looked like a Civil War battlefield.

Of course, all the snow that we tracked back inside made the hallways, floors, and stairs a muddy mess. The radiators in each classroom were covered with soggy gloves and stocking caps. Sven the Janitor toiled bravely, wearing a martyred expression. The rest of the faculty looked miserable, as well. It was as if the entire student population had simultaneously contracted an epidemic case of the fidgets.

Meanwhile, we all began hatching battle plans for noon recess. Some of the keenest military strategists of all time, rivaling all the American Armed Forces and the Pentagon combined, went to our school.

The snow fell harder and harder as the morning dragged on.

Just before lunchtime, Principal Van Over announced that the school would dismiss early due to the weather conditions. The front entrance doors of the building burst open, and a hundred hollering kids spilled out.

It was beautiful. Everything was white: the trees, the ground, the rooftops, the steeple on the Baptist Church, the fire hydrants…

Wham!

I shouldn't have let my defenses down. Snowballs sailed in all directions. It didn't matter what grade you were in, whether you were a boy or a girl, rich or poor, big or little – everyone was fair game. Suddenly there were no class distinctions. Marshmallow and I bombarded my brothers, who gleefully fought back; then someone shot at us from the opposite direction and we all joined forces to fight them off. Bitter enemies joined hands to build snow blockades. Even Mr. Van Over and Mr. Pells came out to join us in the fun, laughing like madmen. As soon as someone formed a stronghold, everyone else would attack. Reinforcements were called in, spies infiltrated and turned traitor, alliances were forged and broken and captives taken, everyone laughing and yelling at the top of their voices while the snow swirled around overhead.

It snowed all afternoon and all night, and heavy flakes were still falling when we woke up early the next morning. Tooey got dressed first and returned from outdoors crowing, "The snow is knee high!"

Nobody had the heart to point out that Tooey's knees weren't very high in the first place, but it was impressive news just the same.

Mom immediately tuned the radio to an Astoria station. My brothers and I listening tensely through announcements that school was canceled in Astoria, Seaside, Tillamook, Gearheart, Jewell, Clatskenie, Naselle, Gray's River, Chinook, Ilwaco, Long Beach…

"Yippie! Yahoo!" the Egg boys danced around the kitchen, screaming like a bunch of banshees.

We could barely contain ourselves long enough to eat breakfast. But since it was only six fifteen in the morning, and it wasn't even light outside, we couldn't go anywhere yet, anyhow.

As soon as daylight dawned, we donned several layers of clothes and struggled into rubber waders.

"Now, before you boys run off, I want you to build a nice big snowman outside the living room window for your sister to look at," Mom insisted.

"Aw," I muttered, although it turned out to be kind of fun. Orman and Tooey taught me how to roll a snowball on the ground until it got bigger and bigger and took all three of us to push into place. Tooey and I collected gravel from the driveway for the snowman's eyes, and broke a couple branches off a tree for arms. Orman ran inside for a carrot nose and Dad's old fishing hat, to top things off. We were rewarded for our efforts by the sight of Olive waving and clapping her tiny hands at the window, the sweetest smile on her face you could ever imagine.

Then we heard some kids playing out on the beach, so we slogged over to see what they were up to. Freddy Meany, his twin cousins Boone and Roddy, Mary, Alice, Shannon, and their little brother Matt Moon, and even our arch enemy Chick Mitchell waved at us from atop the largest sand dune out front, which the kids in the neighborhood called The Big Damn Dune.

"Come on!" they called. "Hurry up! Get up here!"

My boots were a bit big. A couple times my boot sunk so deep in the snow that my foot pulled loose minus the sock. Has this ever happened to you, dear reader?

When we got to the top of the hill everyone was standing there with their hands on their hips, like they were Lewis and Clark, surveying the Northwest Passage, or something.

From atop The Big Damn Dune you could see clearly in all directions: the dunes stretched in all directions, for miles it seemed, coated with a white layer of deep snow, as smooth as clouds. The ocean murmured in the distance, covered with dense gray snow clouds. All was white.

But the kids standing atop the tallest, steepest sand dune on the beach weren't interested in the scenery. They were interested in one thing only: VELOCITY!

It snowed so seldom where we lived, there probably wasn't a single sled on the entire peninsula. Not to worry: Mary, Alice, the Meany twins, and Chick Mitchell held big black over-inflated automobile inner tubes under their arms. They were plotting a daredevil course down the steep side of The Big Damn Dune that would make most roller coasters seem timid.

"Bombs away!" Boone yelled, launching his inner tube over the edge of the snowy slope. He threw himself on top of the tube and slid like a seal all the way down the hill, about the length of a football field.

Mary Moon followed, sliding faster and further. "Yaaaaaaaaaa!"

Everyone started screaming excitedly.

Chick Mitchell, giggling maniacally, scratched the snowy ground with his feet, like a bull readying itself for attack, before launching himself over the edge of the sand dune. Gosh, he was in incredibly good humor! He slid farther than the others.

We were on to something here.

Over the next hour we packed the snow with our inner tubes until the course was as slick and slippery as an iceberg.

"Hey!" Chick called cheerfully. "Let's build a ski jump!"

We laid a scrap of discarded plywood over a fat log in the middle of the course, and packed snow over it.

They made me go first. I slid down the hill with blinding speed; when I hit the jump, my stomach lurched. What a feeling! I was in orbit. Then BAM! I hit the ground! Disney couldn't have created a chillier effect.

After we all tried it, my brothers and I set off in search of our own inner tubes. We trudged through the snow to the service station, singing:

Whistle while you knit

Nixon is a twit

(Orman's verse)

Whistle while you sleep

Nixon is a creep

(my verse)

Whistle while you procreate

Nixon is a potentate

(Tooey's verse)

About six blocks from our house, next to the highway, was Worthington's Mobile service station. There was a flying horse with neon wings on the roof. When we slogged into view, Mr. Worthington was leaning wearily on a snow shovel. He always reminded me somehow of Popeye the Sailor Man.

Mr. Worthington had had quite a run on inner tubes that morning. However, if we three shoveled both lanes (regular and Ethel) for him, he would fix us up with three genuine used B. F. Goodrich inner tubes.

We agreed and shoveled snow from the front of the gas station while Mr. Worthington listened to Scandinavian Hour on the radio in his heated office. Not once did a customer stop for gas. Highway 101 was frozen solid. When we finished, he gave us our inner tubes, plus three Mountain Bars from the collection of stale candy bars he kept behind the counter. What a guy!

By the time we got back to The Big Damn Dune, it was swarming with kids, not just from our school, but from the Ilwaco, Ocean Park, and Chinook schools. There was now a long waiting line to slide down the jump. Everybody standing in line were laughing and hollering at the kids flying down the slope. Chick Mitchell and Mary Moon had added two more ski jumps and a wicked curve at the end of the run that practically caused you to hurl.

What a blast everyone was having! Marshmallow and Tiny Star showed up with a gigantic inner tube from a dump truck - five or six kids could slide on it at once. After it got dark, our dad came out with his camera and started taking pictures of kids flying through the air on inner tubes. Parents from all over the neighborhood showed up and some of them tried the slide. Charlie Moon rode again and again, screaming like a crazy man, while Dad clicked photos.

Charlie Moon went back to his house and loaded his '57 Chevrolet with firewood and his wife. He drove right out over the frozen surface of the sand dunes, hooting the horn, and started a bonfire on top of The Big Damn Dune. Mrs. Moon filled a huge cauldron with steaming hot chocolate and miniature marshmallows.

We played till almost one A.M. There wasn't a single fight, not even an argument, nobody even crowded in line (there were a few injuries, but that was expected). For one day the whole world, it seemed, got along real good.

Many an enjoyable afternoon after school was spent viewing Heck Harper's Cartoon Roundup. We had a black and white TV with an eight-inch screen, housed inside a huge wooden cabinet full of vacuum tubes that glowed hypnotically. We received three channels from Portland (when the weather was right we pulled in a couple channels from Seattle to the North, but they were sort of snowy).

Heck Harper was a singing cowboy. Didn't he have a great name? I always wished my name were Heck. Or even Huck, instead of Alvin. I would even have settled for David, or Jeff. Heck Harper could spin a lariat, play the harmonica, quick draw and twirl a six-shooter on his finger. He wore a cowboy hat, chaps, and spurs - which to me, at least, made him a 100% genuine cowpoke. Except his horse was a sock puppet named Beaulah.

The cartoons he showed were: Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, Betty Boop, and those bouncing ball cartoons. The bouncing ball cartoons always began like an ordinary cartoon; then just when you got interested some round object like a baseball or the moon would transform itself into a beaming face that announced, "Hey, kids! How about singing along, hmmm? Just follow the bouncing ball!"

The lyrics to corny old songs familiar only to your grandparents ran across the bottom of the television screen, like The Bear Ran Over The Mountain or Camptown Racers. I never sang, of course (I was into Chuck Berry), but if Mom were in the room she would stop whatever she was doing and sing along. Afterwards she would smooth out her clothes, as if shaking herself from a wizard's spell. "Well," she would explain, blushing, and continue doing whatever she was doing in the first place.

The Betty Boop cartoons had music by Cab Caloway & His Orchestra - strange surrealistic routines like Minnie The Moocher. I did not know until decades later that I was watching art.

In between cartoons, in the winter of 1963, they continually plugged the Portland Zoo. There was a cartoon of elephants and giraffes and beavers dancing around to the tune of:

          All the animals in the zoo

          Are jumping up and down for you

          Asking you and your class to plan

          A visit to the zoo as soon as you can

          Storybooks that really talk you turn on with a key

          Tell fascinating things about the animals you see

          Storybooks and zoo keys together guide you through

          A world of keen excitement awaits you at the zoo!

I was hooked. Visiting the Portland Zoo became, if not an infatuation, at the very least a fixation.

"Hey, buckaroos!" Heck Harper announced one afternoon. "The Portland Zoo has a new baby elephant."

The camera zoomed in for a close up. Heck Harper had extremely expressive eyebrows.

"How would you like to win a trip to the Portland Zoo with your whole class?!?!!! All you have to do is name the baby elephant!!! Send your entries to me care of KGW Television, Box 2, Portland, Oregon." (Zip codes had not been invented yet.)

"Ten second place winners will receive free zoo keys!" Heck Harper expanded. "Entries must be postmarked by March 1^st. And now, another cartoon…"

I didn't care about the next cartoon (although usually I sat with a pad and pencil, trying to draw the cartoon characters before they disappeared from the screen). I wrote right away.

"And now," Heck Harper continued, "we've got birthdays for several of our viewers out there in TV land. Let's all sing the "Happy Birthday Polka" to Mary S. in Lake Oswego, Bobby in Beaverton, Marion A. and Margaret W. from our own Rose City, and Marilyn P., all the way out in Lincoln City!

"Happy birthday, happy," he sang, accompanying himself with his guitar, in 4/4. "Happy birthday, we'll keep going, until your growing is through…"

Or something like that.

A few weeks later my mom handed me a certified letter, postmarked Portland, Oregon.

I had won.

That night at the dinner table my brothers could not suspend their disbelief.

"What did you name it?" Orman asked, aghast.

"Packy," I replied smugly.

"Don't you see?" Mom jumped in. "Packy? Pachyderm? Is genius!" she exclaimed.

Was I ever a hero at school. Principal Van Over arranged for a yellow school bus to drive us to Portland. Our whole class (including Mrs. Baker and Mr. Pells, who came along to help with the discipline) embarked from George Washington Elementary at 8:00 a.m, Sven the Janitor driving. Just as we were pulling from the parking lot, the bus lurched to a halt, admitting two additional passengers: Mom and Olive.

Some of the guys joshed me a bit. I slid a little lower in my seat, but I didn't mind too much. In one of my pockets was a genuine Heck harper billfold, with an autographed wallet-sized photograph of the singing cowboy and his puppet/horse. The other pocket held a magical zoo key: an oversized plastic key shaped like an elephant. Let them laugh. I was sitting pretty.

Mrs. Baker (who was wearing white this month) led the class in a sing-along as we wove our way through the woods of Naselle and Deep River. When we got to Longview we stopped for a potty break, and looked at the Squirrel Bridge. Longview had a lot of trees, and a lot of squirrels. So they built a miniature suspension bridge over the street where the squirrels could cross safely, without getting squished by cars. Which to us kids ranked right up there with the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China as an Eighth Wonder of the World.

We were equally impressed by the freeway, two lanes of smooth concrete in either direction (with a speed limit of sixty – even though we cried encouragement to Sven, he refused to drive over fifty-five) and all the signs of advanced civilization on either side (McDonald's drive-ins, Kentucky Fried Chicken joints, miniature golf courses). Kids ran from one side of the bus to the other in order to see everything, causing Mr. Pells to bark at us like a dog.

The girls in my class adopted Olive and played with my baby sister like she were a doll. Mom and Mrs. Baker chatted non-stop, which was slightly worrisome. The guys traded baseball cards and argued over who was the best baseball player.

"Don Drysdale!" Steve Nickles insisted.

"Mickey Mantle!" Ricky Rice countered.

Dennis Holtz held out for Roger Maris.

"What about Whitey Ford?" I asked, just to be obtuse.

"Whitey Ford?" several of my classmates echoed, disbelievingly.

"Ty Cobb," I tried.

"Ty Cobb was a bum!" Mr. Pells yelled.

"Willie Mays, man!" Marshmallow insisted, loyally.

When we passed Jansen Beach, the huge amusement park on the outskirts of Portland, everyone pressed their faces against the windows, their eyes practically popping out of their heads. As we cruised by, we watched people hurling around the huge, rickety wooden roller coaster. Most of us had never seen anything more wonderful in our whole lives.

It was a long bus ride. We finally pulled into the Portland Zoo parking lot a bit before one o'clock in the afternoon.

"Now remember!" Mr. Pells warned us from the front of the bus. "No shoving, fighting, yelling. Pick a partner. Stay with the group – no wandering off. Any trouble – you go straight back to the bus."

"Yay!" everyone screamed, streaming down the steps.

I was planning on partnering with Marshmallow or Ricky Rice, but my mom said, "Take your sister's hand, Alvin."

"Oh, Mom," I moaned, but I did as I was asked.

Olive kind of worshipped me at that stage, anyway. She skipped happily along, pointing at the animals in their cages.

"Lion," she babbled. "Monkey! Penguin! Giraffe!"

I had to admit, she was pretty smart for a little kid.

At each exhibit, everyone drew aside and let my sister and I in front to use my zoo key. The zoo key was a pink plastic key shaped like an elephant; when you placed the elephant's trunk in the keyhole of a big black box next to the animals cages, a recorded voice told all about the animal we were looking at. It was magic.

Naturally everyone longed to try it. I found myself more popular than I had ever been in my life.

"Please, Alvin," even my most serious rivals begged.

I wielded my Machavilian power shrewdly, allowing every classmate at least one turn. I even let Olive use the zoo key a time or two, holding her up by the armpits, her tiny white baby shoes dangling a couple feet off the pavement.

Nothing prepared me for the glory I felt seeing the baby elephant I had named. Packy was one of the first baby elephants born in captivity. His mother, Rosy, was famous throughout the Northwest.

Packy was about three and a half feet tall, with wrinkly skin and a short trunk that resembled a garden hose. There was fuzzy hair on his forehead. His feet had perfectly formed toenails. He smiled and waved his trunk at the class, as cute as only a baby elephant can be, like he was really happy to make our acquaintance.

There was a temporary plaque next to the cage:

Once I got to shake President Kennedy's hand, at the dedication of the Tongue Point Job Corp. base outside Astoria, Oregon in 1963. In 1964, while attending the Seattle World's Fair with my family, I stood in the crowd cheering Elvis Presley down Future Boulevard during the filming of It Happened at the World's Fair. And in 1965 I attended a Beatles' concert with Marshmallow and his sister Cheryl in Portland.

But having my name associated with the first baby elephant to be raised in captivity in the United States was unquestionably the greatest thrill of my childhood. Especially sharing it with Mrs. Baker's entire second grade class.

In the spring my brothers and I returned to Pirate Island to find it overrun with tiny green tree frogs - hundreds of them, jumping all over the place.

"Jumpin' shit!" Orman shouted. He had begun experimenting with swear words lately.

There were so many frogs on Pirate Island (actually, the warm weather had reduced our island to a peninsula) that you had to be careful where you walked.

"I know," Tooey plotted, "let's catch a bunch of 'em and sell 'em to kids."

"That's a great idea!" we readily agreed.

We ran back to the house and grabbed two five gallon buckets from the garage.

"Dad won't mind our using these, will he?" we failed to ask, and headed back to the Big Pond before all those frogs disappeared.

We caught about nine hundred frogs. They kept jumping out of the buckets so Orman and Tooey took off their shirts and draped them over the openings.

"That ought to hold them all right," Orman announced.

Then we carried the buckets of frogs home and put them in the basement.

"Where are your shirts?" Mom asked when we came upstairs.

"Uh," Tooey explained. "I forget."

"Look, Mom!" I said, in an effort to distract her. I pulled a tree frog from my pants pocket.

"Alvin, take that thing outside. You two," she ordered, "march upstairs and put some clothes on."

"All right, Mom," we said in unison, dispersing.

That evening at the dinner table, we tried to keep the conversation rolling to drown out the sound of the frogs croaking down in the basement.

"What is that?" Mom asked, suspiciously.

"I don't hear anything," Tooey said.

"Me either," Orman confirmed.

"Froggy!" Olive sang.

"Alvin, I thought I asked you to get rid of that frog."

"I did! Honest!"

"Those frogs are really loud tonight," Dad observed, twisting in his chair to look toward the beach.

"It's coming from the basement!" Mom declared.

"Boys?" Dad asked.

"Yes, father?" Orman answered.

Mom's chair was right in front of the door to the basement. When she opened it, three frogs hopped over the threshold.

"Oh. My. God." Mom gasped.

There were about a hundred frogs on the basement steps. Several hundred more were jumping around the basement - on the floor, the shelves, Dad's workbench.

Olive was delighted. "Froggies!" she laughed.

Our parents weren't particularly pleased, however. They banished the three of us to the basement to capture the frogs and return them to their native habitat.

We hunted until dark, then Dad brought down some flashlights and joined us. We kept losing them behind the furnace and under the subpump.

"Is Mom pretty mad, Dad?" Tooey timidly asked.

"Not exactly. She is in the process of getting smashed," he explained.

It didn't help when, a week later, a frog worked its way up the pipes and emerged out the kitchen sink drain while Mom was washing her hair.

There are, to this day, a few green tree frogs living under the subpump in the basement of my parent's house. Whenever we touch down for Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas or to celebrate birthdays, you can still hear…

It appeared on the blackboard:

                      A.E.

                        +

                      D.C.

No one knew how it got there, or who put it there.

“Alvin has a girlfriend!” Dennis Holtz razzed.“Alvin has a girlfriend!”

“I do not!” I muttered.

Pretty soon the whole class was in on it. Whispers, giggles, and catcalls followed.

I slunk in my seat, in utmost misery. I thought anxiously: who could it be? Who was D.C.? All I could think of was Dicky Carter, a sixth grader. That couldn’t be right.

“Class!” Mrs. Baker called, clapping her hands. “Class!”

It was May. Mrs. Baker was wearing a purple outfit.

“Class, I’m passing back your last spelling test. I want you to write each word you missed twenty times, and use it in a sentence.”

Several hands waved frantically in the air, eliciting our teacher’s favor.

“Debbie, would you hand out the papers?” granted Mrs. Baker.

Ugh! Debbie Carpenter. What a self-seeking, servile flatterer.

When Debbie Carpenter handed me my spelling results, she smiled eagerly, displaying a missing front tooth, and far too many freckles for my taste.

“Hi, Alvin!” she gushed.

Debbie Carpenter.

D.C.

It had to be a mistake.

It had to be!

Later, I was out on the playground, engaged in a killer game of tetherball. There were four of us, two on a side: Marshmallow and me, vs. Ricky Rice and Dennis Holtz (who was about six foot eight). The score was 186 to 2.

“Hey, Alvin,” Ricky Rice taunted. “You got a shadow.”

I glanced to the side, and there was Debbie Carpenter. She was smiling right at me. Then she laced her fingers together, turned her hands upside down, and wiggled her fingers. If anyone besides Debbie Carpenter had done that, it would have been kind of cute.

The tetherball flew back and whacked me right in the head.

“Oof!”

I landed flat on my back. Birds flew in a circle around my head, tweeting, until my head cleared.

"Good grief!" I moaned.

I grabbed two handfuls of grass and flung them in Debbie's direction.

"Scat!" I exclaimed. "Am-scray!"

She merely fluttered her eyelashes at me and wriggled her nose.

When the bell rang, ending recess, she followed me back to the classroom, walking five steps behind.

"Isn't it sweet?" Mrs. Warner, the schools cook commented. "Alvin has an admirer," she sang.

Luckily, the school year was almost over. Debbie Carpenter continued to follow me around, even after school, when she shadowed me on the walk home. I would have thrown rocks at her, if she weren't a girl.

"Stop following me!" I cried in exasperation.

"I can walk on this road," she said. "You're not the only one who lives on this street. It's a free country, you know."

I would rather have been chased down the ditch road by snakes.

"What do you want from me?" I finally exploded.

Debbie Carpenter sidled up to me and squeezed her hands beneath her chin.

"Can I kiss your face?" she said in all seriousness.

"Gaaaa!" I shrieked, and ran the rest of the way home so fast I practically raised a dust trail.

That night at the dinner table Mom announced, "Alvin, I ran into Adele Carpenter at the grocery store today. She was wondering whether Debbie could come over Saturday afternoon while she is shopping in Astoria."

I suppressed a moan.

"Debbie really looks up to you, Alvin. I want you to be nice to her."

Everyone at the dinner table was staring at me: Dad doing his best Ward Cleaver impersonation, Olive imitating Mom's motherly look, Orman and Tooey mugging idiotically.

I thought, just shoot me.

It didn't help matters that Debbie Carpenter confirmed her reservation in front of the entire 2^nd grade.

I somehow managed to suffer the indignity in silence.

Saturday, Eloise and I were holed up in my bedroom, pitching playing cards into a baseball hat in the center of the floor.

"Alvin!" Mom hollered up the stairs.

I pretended I didn't hear.

"Alvin?" Mom called. "Debbie is here!"

"Oh, joy," I muttered.

Finally Mom led Debbie upstairs and knocked on the door.

"Alvin?" Mom asked, poking her head around the door. "Look who's here!"

"Hi, Alvin," Debbie Carpenter said, friendily.

"Hi," I replied, dully.

She came in the room and scratched Eloise behind the ears. "Smart animal," she said.

"Hmm," I hmmed.

"I've got two dogs," she explained. "A golden retriever and a Labrador. Also four cats. A goat. Six rabbits. Four chickens, two geese, six pigeons, and a weasel."

"A weasel?"

"Yeah. Gotta keep it segregated, or it'll eat the hen."

"Hmm," I repeated, a mite more interested than before.

She turned out to be a better at pitching cards than even me. She taught me how to play Trumps, a very grown up card game. She beat me six times in a row; I was grateful, somehow, she didn't let me win.

Mom made hamburgers and potato salad for lunch. Then we played Parcheesi, Chutes and Ladders, and Stadium Checkers the rest of the afternoon.

When it was time for Debbie Carpenter to go home, I whispered, "Don't tell anyone at school, okay?"

"Don't tell anyone at school what?"

"You know. That we… had fun."

"Okay," she said.

"You sure?" I worried.

"I promise," Debbie Carpenter promised.

Soon school let out for the summer. Everything would have been fine if Marshmallow hadn't had to spend the whole summer with his cousins in Minnesota.

I secluded myself in front of the television set for the first half of June.

"There must be someone you can play with," my mother insisted. "What about Debbie Carpenter?"

Perish the thought, I thought.

I began pedaling my bicycle past her house several times a day. Finally Debbie Carpenter's mom spotted me and waved from the kitchen window.

The next time I came around the block Debbie Carpenter was standing by her picket fence.

"Hi, Alvin," she called.

"Oh! Hi, Debbie." I acted like I was surprised.

"You want to come over?" she asked.

"Oh, well, I got to go to Marshmallow's," I lied.

"I thought he was in Minnesota for the summer," she said, sensibly.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I forgot."

"Hmm," she hmmed.

So I parked my bike against her picket fence and entered Debbie Carpenter's property.

“Come on!” she said, laughing. We raced around the side of her house, chased by two happy hunting dogs, into the big back yard. It was like a barnyard, with a chicken coop and cages of rabbits, pigeons, and as promised, a weasel. A bearded nanny goat with stubby horns sidled over and stared at me with her strange sideways amber eyes. Chickens clucked, ducks quacked, geese honked.

All the animals had names. Debbie introduced me around and let me feed the goat, whose name was Nancy, some alfalfa.

Debbie’s mom stuck her head out the window. “Don’t taunt Nancy, now. You’ll sour the milk!”

“We won’t, Mama!” Debbie laughed.

That summer, Debbie taught me how to throw a baseball better; how to hypnotize a chicken; and how to make homemade ice cream. I witnessed a cat having kittens in a cardboard box in the garage. I found it hard to believe that a gray cat could sire seven kittens, each a different color than the mother.

We opened a lemonade stand, sold one glass for five cents, and drank the rest ourselves. We ran an experiment, and discovered that cats always land on their feet - whether you drop them from the roof, or an inch off the ground.

I grew attached to one of the kittens, a pure black shorthair with eyes like an Egyptian statue. As soon as the kittens were old enough to leave their mother I carried her home squiggling inside my jacket.

“Can I keep her, Mom?” I begged. “She can catch mice!”

“We don’t have mice,” Mom mentioned.

She picked the black kitten up and cuddled it, purring, in her hands. “It’s not much bigger than a mouse, anyway! What should we name you, puss?”

“I already named her,” I explained. “Dweezle.”

“Weasel?” Mom said.

“No, not Weasel. Dweezle!” I insisted. “Sheesh, who would name a cat Weasel?”

To my chagrin, all the other Eggs called her Weasel. Only Debbie Carpenter and I called Dweezle by her proper name.

Rumors started circulating in early August about my third grade teacher, Mrs. Anderson. My brothers warned me that she was super strict. Freddy Meany had quite a few horror stories to tell as well.

One day Debbie Carpenter and I climbed a tree in Bradley’s lot to eat a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Mom had prepared for us.

Eloise was waiting loyally at the base of the tree, guarding our bikes.

“Here, girl!” we called down, tossing her our bread crusts.

“Hey, did you ever notice that your arm smells like a peanut butter sandwich?” she asked.

I sniffed my forearm. “My arm doesn’t smell like a peanut butter sandwich.” I let her smell my arm.

“Well, my arm does,” Debbie said. I sniffed her arm. It did smell like a peanut butter sandwich.

“Maybe you accidentally smeared some peanut butter on your arm when we were climbing this tree,” I suggested.

“I don’t think so. My arms smell like peanut butter sandwiches even after a bath.”

“Do your Mom’s arms smell like peanut butter sandwiches?” I asked.

“No, but my Dad’s arms smell like peanut butter sandwiches,” she said.

We pondered the perplexity while chewing our sandwiches solemnly.

“What do you think it’s going to be like at school this year?” I asked.

Debbie didn’t say anything.

“Aren’t you worried about Mrs. Anderson?” I asked. “She’s supposed to be really mean.”

Debbie Carpenter still didn’t say anything, just stared out through the branches, like she was listening to the ocean or something.

“Well, what do you think?” I prompted.

“I’m not going,” she said.

“You’re not going to school?” I laughed. “What are you going to do, watch TV all day?”

“I’m not going to school here,” she said. “We’re moving.”

“What?” I didn’t believe her.

“We’re moving to San Diego,” Debbie said. She wouldn’t look at me. “Dad’s in the Coast Guard. He got transferred. So I guess I won’t have to worry about mean old Mrs. Anderson.”

“Wait a minute!” I exclaimed. “Can you do that?”

When the Carpenters’ moved to San Diego at the end of the summer, Debbie wrote me a farewell poem:

As long as the ocean roars

As long as cats fall on their feet

As long as houses have doors

As long as birdies go tweet-tweet

As long as flowers grow in daylight

As long as darkness brings the night

As long as pencils have lead

You'll be in my head.

The telling thing was -­ I was secretly relieved.

A lot of things went sort of sour the fall of 1963.

Our third grade teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had a short fuse, shorter even than Dad's. She was forever getting upset and snapping things in her frustration: pencils, sticks of chalk, rulers (usually broken over kids heads!). She slammed things, too: doors, windows, desk lids (usually with your fingers or head in them). She was very short and stout, had thin, frizzy hair that was neither blonde nor brunette but somewhere in between, and wore a pierce-nez that fell off fifty or sixty times a day, every time she sneered. She could scream as loud as an air raid siren.

Mrs. Anderson was an excellent teacher, but a ferocious person. Reading, writing, arithmetic: she scared the subjects into you. The most painful subject was penmanship. We practiced penmanship for hour at a time, writing and rewriting cursive letters, row after row, on rough lined paper with bits of wood floating in it so when your pencil hit the chunks of wood the paper would tear and you'd get yelled at. She used to come up behind you when you were studying and thwak your ears; all the boys in her class had red ears all the time. Ricky Rice used to study with his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth; once he got thwaked and almost bit off the end of his tongue.

Yet she read us some of the best books: Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Tom Thumb, Toby Tyler, The Little Lame Prince, Treasure Island, Little Women, and stories by Hans Christian Anderson. When she was reading, Mrs. Anderson would practically purr, putting feeling in each line, as melodious as a musician.

I was always showing off, so much so that she used to call me 'T'. T for Trouble. Get it?

"T! Come up to the chalkboard!" she would shout.

She then would draw a small circle on the blackboard an inch or so higher than my nose, and make me stand on tiptoe with my nose pressed against the chalky surface as punishment.

My dad could be strict, too. One time, it was a Wednesday, Mrs. Anderson sent me home with a math assignment that I got a D on, and told me to make my parents sign it.

My dad always had Wednesday off. When I got home Mom was in the kitchen, but I could hear Dad in the basement, using his power tools.

"Mom, would you sign this?" I asked as casually as I could.

Mom looked at it, and handed the paper back to me as if it were a disgusting piece of used toilet tissue.

"You better show this to your father," she said.

I slunk to the basement door as fearfully as if I were facing a firing squad. The sound of Dad's power tools were as loud as bombs. I tiptoed downstairs and stood a few steps behind him, trembling, while he finished ripping some boards with the table saw. The basement was dark and dank.

"BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!" the saw roared.

"BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!" it roared again. "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!"

Wood chips flew everywhere. Sawdust coated Dad's hair, eyebrows, and face. It made him look sort of spooky. Finally he switched off the saw and acknowledged me.

My ears were ringing. "Hi, Dad," I said, my voice shaking.

"What have we here?" Dad asked.

I showed him.

He stared at my math assignment for the longest time.

"Well, Alvin," he finally spoke. "Do you want to be a loser your whole life?"

I was devastated. I wished he had struck me, instead.

"No, Dad," I whispered.

He seemed to have forgotten how young a person he was talking to.

"Because if you keep this up," he warned me, wagging the paper in my face, "you will be."

I didn't say anything. My eyes stung.

"I wouldn't want that to happen," he said, solemnly.

I couldn't help it. I started sniffling. I felt really bad.

Dad seemed surprised. "I didn't mean to make you cry," he said, softly.

"I'm not," I blubbered, wiping my face with my sleeve.

"You better go upstairs," Dad said. "Why don't you go practice your multiplication tables?"

By dinnertime I could recite my multiplication tables up to my elevens. Tooey came up to my room after dinner and helped me with the twelve's.

Hey, Alvin," he kidded me. "You're built upside down. Your nose runs and your feet smell."

"Butt face!" I laughed gratefully.

For a while there, I thought I would be given up for adoption. Once I learned my multiplication tables, mathematics became somewhat simpler; at least, it gave some order to the proceedings. I still didn't like it.

If only I could have helped Marshmallow memorize his multiplication tables.

He had such a hard time with math that Mrs. Anderson was always hollering at him. Her scolding just rolled off him like water off an oilskin. So a couple months into the school year she pulled the plug on him and made Marshmallow take the second grade over again.

I stared at his empty desk for weeks. We stilled played together at recess, and on weekends, but something happened to our bond after a while. We never really talked about it, but it was like we got unhitched. If you ask me, it was an even greater tragedy than the Kennedy assassination.

Everybody remembers exactly where he or she was when they heard the news of President Kennedy's death. I was standing in line for lunch, and heard it over Mrs. Warner's radio. Mrs. Warner was openly weeping. No one knew what to do.

School shut down for the rest of the week, and we all watched the shootings and the funeral over and over and over on our TV sets.

The only thing that saved me was the Beatles.

The first time I heard the Beatles was over a tiny transistor radio while camping out in Marshmallow's tent the previous August. We were lying there on our sleeping bags, Bobby Vinton finished "Roses Are Red (My Love)", when BAM!

"SHE LOVES YOU YEAH, YEAH, YEAH! SHE LOVES YOU YEAH, YEAH, YEAH! SHE LOVES YOU YEAH, YEAHH, YEAHHHH, YEAHHHH!!!"

"What was that?" I asked when the song was over.

"I don't know," was Marshmallow's bewildered reply. You would think the radio had just announced a Martian invasion.

To my delight, the disk jockey played "She Loves You" eight times in a row. Cheryl looked out the kitchen window and saw our silhouettes bouncing around inside the tent and came out to investigate.

"What IS that?" she shouted, with a heavenly smile on her freckled face.

"Beatles!" we bleated.

It was love at first listen.

Immediately after that I started combing my hair down. I had a crew cut, so my bangs were only an eighth of an inch long. Thus began a lifetime battle with my mother over my hair length.

When school started that fall, they released "I Want To Hold Your Hand." It played everywhere. Beatlemania had begun. Pat O'Day, the KJR disk jockey, locked himself in the studio and played "I Want To Hold Your Hand" eleven hours straight before being forced to resume playing Perry Como.

A couple months after President Johnson took office and the flags were raised from half-mast, the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show. The newspapers and television were full of stories about their arrival at Kennedy Airport, the screaming hordes of fans, and girls fainting all over the place.

By then everybody had a favorite Beatle. John was my favorite. Laura Moon liked Paul. Marshmallow liked Ringo. George was probably the least favorite, but Shannon Moon liked him. Tooey and I made a special trip to Poole's Record Shop in Astoria to buy the singles. Orman still clung to his Johnny Mathis records.

The Sunday night that the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, everyone watched. I remember our entire family watched. My parents didn't exactly get it. "You call that music?" Dad grumbled.

The next day at school it was all anyone talked about. Television commentators were blabbing about how immoral it was, I guess because some girls wet their pants. What squares!

After that, anything English was 'in'. Kids at school started faking English accents. Girls got sent home for having their hemlines an inch above their knees. Diane Pickles cut her hair to look exactly like Ringo. It was so fab.

Then my mom fell out the window.

We lived in a real tall house. One night my brothers and I were watching Bonanza in the TV room. Orman heard something and left the room. Tooey and I kept watching television; it was the episode where Hoss thought he saw a leprechaun.

Orman heard Mom calling for help where she lay in the back yard, after falling from the third floor window. We weren't aware what was happening until I ran out to the kitchen during a commercial and saw the ambulance drivers preparing to put someone who was all wrapped in blankets on a stretcher. There was a strange somber silence to their movements.

Dad said, "Alvin, go back into the TV room and wait with your brothers."

"Okay."

I went back and sat on the couch next to Tooey.

"Hey, where's my sandwich?" he demanded.

"I don't know," I said quietly.

"What's going on out there?" Tooey inquired.

"I don't know."

Orman came quietly into the room. "Mom jumped out the third story window," he said, gravely. He looked really annoyed.

"Why'd she do that?" Tooey asked. "Did she jump or did she fall?"

"I don't know," Orman answered, looking even more irritated.

"Did she die?" I asked.

"No, she didn't die!" Orman snapped.

He seemed so upset we didn't say anything for a while after that. We switched channels and watched The Untouchables.

When Dad came home he told us, "Your mother had a bad accident. She fell out the third floor window and is in the emergency room. We've got to take her to the hospital in Portland. Mrs. Hudson will come over and watch things 'til I get back."

"I'll bet she was loaded," Orman said.

"She slipped. It was an accident," Dad said.

I didn't understand what Orman was so mad about. I didn't understand what loaded meant, either.

We went to school like normal the next day. Orman told Tooey and I not to say anything. Mrs. Hudson cooked and cleaned the dishes without saying anything, either. I couldn't tell if she was showing sympathy or disapproval.

When Dad got home he told us, "Your Mom's neck is broken. She also broke her back, and collapsed a lung. She'll be in the hospital for a good spell - but she will recover." He sighed and said nothing else.

That's how I ended up in my grandparent's apartment, the following summer, on Aberdeen Street in Chicago.

My grandparents were waiting for me at the terminal gate in O’Hare Airport.

Grandma Egg was a short, stout woman with curly gray hair, a faint mustache, and thick legs squeezed into tightly laced Dr. Martin’s. Her dress, which covered every square inch of her body, was puce, the same color as the crayon in the Crayola box that never gets used much. She was wearing white gloves and a hat with a black net camouflaging her eyes and forehead.

Grandpa Egg wore conservative clothes also: gray slacks, white sports shirt, cardigan sweater, brown shoes, a Tyrolean hat, and holding a pipe. Except for his wavy white hair, he reminded me of Fred McMurray on My Three Sons.

I emerged from the plane reluctantly. Two pretty stewardesses sat beside me the entire flight. The flight crew basically granted my every wish. I was given a Delta wings pin, even introduced to the pilots in the cockpit. I carried under my arm my baseball glove, Dr. Science’s Big Book of Answers, and several Superman comic books, presents from Mom, whom we’d visited in her Portland hospital room before I caught my plane. Her head had been completely shaved of her lovely brown locks, and she had to wear a thick foamy collar to support her broken neck.

"Quite a getup, eh?" Mom asked, apologetically.

I probably drove the stewardesses crazy, quoting from my Dr. Science book. "Do you know what causes hiccoughs? Do you know who invented the first pencil? Did you know if all the oceans dried up, enough salt would be left to build a wall of salt 180 miles long and a mile thick?" I volunteered.

The first thing Grandma Egg asked, when I stepped off the plane escorted by two glamorous Delta Airline stewardess and the pilot, who let me wear his hat, was: "Where is your suitcase?"

"Dad checked my bag in Portland," I said, exhibiting the claim check.

"What are you, insane?!?" she shouted. "The baggage handlers are apes! Don’t ever trust the airlines with your luggage!

"Sure," I said meekly. Grandpa Egg looked up at the ceiling tiles.

My grandmother was afraid of everything. When we emerged from the concourse, my luggage intact, she said, "You see those darkies milling around back there?"

"Where?" I asked.

"Don’t turn around!" Grandma hissed. "Jigaboos," she muttered. "Don’t you go near niggers, you hear me!"

What language was this? Where had I landed? Was I safe? What was a jigaboo?

We drove away in Grandpa’s bronze Fairlane 500 onto a six-lane freeway past hundreds of tightly packed houses, apartment buildings, factories, and sprawling cemeteries.

"Grandpa!" I called from the back seat. "Guess who invented the band-aid?"

"Let me see," he mused. The hair on the back of his head was as white as snow. "Benjamin Franklin? Portuguese merchant marines? Einstein?"

"No," I giggled. "Johnson and Johnson!"

"Just like his father!" Grandma yelled. "Mr. Know-it-all!"

"Oh, good night nurse," Grandpa sighed.

We went back to Grandma and Grandpa Egg’s apartment on Aberdeen Street in West Chicago, about three blocks from the stockyards. The air had the same sickening sweet smell as a beauty shop.

When we were walking upstairs to their apartment I started to tell them about our dog, Eloise. "She is so smart. I taught her to catch a Frisbee. One time a flying saucer swooped down on us when we were out in the back yard and Eloise thought it was a Frisbee and jumped up and grabbed it and she got carried away into outer space!"

"You don't say," Grandpa replied, puffing up the stairs with my suitcase.

"Well, I went inside and told everybody, but they didn’t believe me! So I went back in the yard and threw the Frisbee by myself. Well Eloise saw it from outer space and jumped off the flying saucer and caught the Frisbee in mid air and when she landed it made a crater in the yard six feet deep."

"I see," Grandpa said, unlocking the door to their apartment. "Then what happened, Alvin?"

"I took her inside and fed her some dog food."

"Don’t you be telling lies," Grandma Egg warned me, "or I’ll put you in the closet!"

Their apartment was nice because you had everything right there, instead of all sprawled out like our house. Grandma could cook in the kitchen and still watch the TV set in the living room. The couch folded out into a bed where I slept at night. I didn’t like their bathroom, though. There were nylons and a smelly old hot water bottle hanging from the shower curtain rod, which gave me the willies.

Grandpa went to work at a factory where he ran a lathe. Grandma didn’t drive and didn’t like to go out alone (because of all the ‘foreigners', so we usually stayed inside watching television until Grandpa came home to take us to the supermarket or visit relatives. On Saturdays my grandparents took me to the aquarium, the planetarium, Lincoln Part Zoo, or the Museum of Science and Industry. Once they had my photograph taken sitting on a bear at the zoo (a stuffed bear, but you couldn’t tell that in the picture). Grandma was very giving, even if she was in a grouchy mood most of the time.

I was always glad when Grandpa came home. One afternoon Grandma and I were watching a TV show she really liked called Queen For A Day, where unhappy women competed for free refrigerators based on who had the most pathetic lives. Halfway through the show I picked up my Mr. Science book and started leafing through the pages; I possessed the ability to read a book and watch television at the same time.

"Grandma, do you know why catfish have whiskers?" I asked.

"Shhh!" she shushed. On TV, a lady was crying because her house needed painting and her parakeet flew away.

I read about the Taj Mahal, which was built when an emperor's wife died. He wanted to build an identical temple of black marble on the other side of the river connected by a silver bridge, but his son put him in prison instead and for the rest of his life he could only stare at his wife's tomb out a prison cell window.

On TV the game show host introduced a contestant whose daughter needed an operation to remove a sixth toe that was preventing her from becoming a top model.

"Did you know that Eskimos have twelve different names for snow?"

"I’ll put Mr. Science where he belongs," Grandma shrieked.

She grabbed my Mr. Science book, placed it in the closet, and slammed the door.

I sat on the couch for a few minutes - after another crying lady told about her youngest son getting squashed by a runaway steam roller and needing braces, the audience applauded for which woman was the worse off and put a crown on her head - then I went into the closet and closed the door quietly. There was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling that you turned on by pulling a string. So I sat in the closet reading my Mr. Science book until Grandpa came home from work.

"Where’s Alvin?" he asked.

"He’s in the closet," Grandma said.

"Hi, Grandpa!" I called from the closet.

He opened the closet door and blinked at me. "What’s are you doing in the closet?"

"I’m reading," I said.

"He’ll end up just like his father, reading all them fancy la-de-da books," Grandma insisted crossly.

"Oh, good night nurse," Grandpa said to the ceiling.

A couple nights later I was reading in the closet when Dad called long distance. Grandma answered the phone, and after speaking briefly handed the phone to me in the closet. Their phone was a heavy black model that weighed about nine hundred pounds.

"Hi, Dad!" I said.

"Hello, Alvin," Dad said. "What are you up to?"

"Oh, I was just reading," I said.

"What’s that echo?" Dad asked.

"It’s just the phone," I replied. "How’s Eloise?"

When Dad was growing up in Chicago, his mom wanted him to get a sensible job with the city, as a streetcar conductor or a garbage man. But after World War II Dad enrolled at the University of Chicago on the GI bill, and went on to medical school to become a doctor, instead. Grandma thought they put a lot of crazy ideas in his head. In her own way, my grandmother was just trying to save me from myself.

A couple of days later Grandpa announced that he was taking me to work with him. He drove me downtown and stopped in front of the Chicago Public Library, which had huge marble lions roaring on either side of the front steps.

He took me inside and signed me up for a library card, and arranged for the librarians to keep an eye on me while he went to work.

That summer I went to the library two or sometimes three days a week. I started out reading all the Hardy Boy books, then I hit the classics: Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Booth Tarkington (I loved the Penrod and Sam books), Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and the Brontes'.

The best thing I read, and then re-read, was Don Quixote. I really identified with Don Quixote’s love for books. He loved stories about knights in armor and used to spend so much time reading that his wife got jealous and burned his library down. After that he was never the same again and rode around fighting windmills and stuff.

One afternoon Grandma announced, "We have got to buy you some descent clothes!"

I looked down at my wardrobe - faded blue jeans, tee shirt, and Keds' sneakers - and wondered what she was raving about.

"Oh, good night nurse," I said, and locked myself in the closet.

Grandma lured me out with a piece of chocolate cake. Then we went down to the third floor landing to watch out the window for Grandpa to come home.

Several guys sat on the front steps, laughing and smoking cigarettes. They wore their jeans with the cuffs rolled up two inches, the sleeves were ripped off their tee shirts, and they had black leather captain hats atop their oily pompadours.

Grandma curled her top lip back. "Hoods," she pronounced with distaste. Actually, they were imitating English teddy boys, a fashion the early Beatles introduced, before their manager Brian Epstein put them in matching suits. "They belong in jail, every one of them! They probably carry switch blade knives and saps!"

I peeked over the window ledge with growing interest.

When Grandpa pulled up, Grandma dragged me hastily past the teddy boys and practically stuffed me in the car. I peered out the back seat window as we sped off. The hoodlums on the front stoop sneered at us, but failed to provide pursuit.

However, upon our return they jeered, pointed, hollered and whistled as Grandma coaxed me out of the car wearing spanking new knickers, knee socks, sparkling Buster Browns, and a preppy jacket. I only wore the silly cap because she’d forced me into the barber chair.

The teddy boys practically rolled down the steps, they were laughing so hard.

Finally I sprang from the back seat like I was shot from a cannon, clicked up the steps (the Buster Brown’s had horrid hard leather soles), and disappeared into the building, their derisive laughter ringing in my ears, vowing never to emerge in daylight again.

By the time Grandma and Grandpa entered the apartment, I was sitting on the couch with a brown paper bag over my head.

"What’s the matter with you?" Grandma pleaded. "You should be grateful!"

I didn’t say anything. I tried not to feel too guilty under my brown paper bag.

"You take that grocery sack off your head or it’s straight to the closet with you!" Grandma threatened.

"I’ll get the door for you," Grandpa said wearily.

"Don’t encourage him!" Grandma cried.

We both ended up in the closet.

"Oh, good night nurse," Grandpa muttered.

I just wagged my head, rattling my brown paper bag a little, in response.

I had to wear my Buster Brown outfit most of the summer. Grandpa gave me a Chicago White Sox baseball hat to hide my hideous buzzcut.

Still, the tauntings of the teddy boys echoed in my mind. I had to have revenge.

One afternoon, while Grandma Egg was watching The Guiding Light, her favorite soap opera, I snuck downstairs to the third floor landing, leaned out the window, and spat.

Then I watched with growing satisfaction as my loogie landed right on target. The teddy boy I had targeted didn’t know what hit him! At first, anyway. But as soon as he did he roused his buddies and raced, cursing, up the steps toward our apartment.

I ran ahead of them, snuck in the apartment, and hid in the closet.

Grandma was still preoccupied with The Guiding Light.

Suddenly, several fists fiercely pounded on the front door. Grandma opened the door a crack: when she saw the teen-age gang attempting to assault her threshold she grabbed the only thing handy to defend herself, a stalk of celery, and attacked.

"Get out!" she shouted. "Get out of my house!"

Celery leaves flew in all directions.

I had to stay in the apartment for a whole week after that.

Half the summer went by before Grandpa finally took me to Comiskey Park to see my first major league baseball game. We took the subway. The outside of the ballpark looked like a gray pile of scrap lumber. Grandma made us a bag of sandwiches that Grandpa deposited in a garbage can as we entered the baseball stadium. I was wearing my baseball glove on my left hand and my Chicago White Sox cap proudly on my head.

Nothing prepares you for your first glimpse, upon emerging through the tunnel of an open air baseball stadium, of the sea of bright green grass and the blue sky and the sun shining overhead while thousands of people fill the seats and flags wave all over the place and venders hawk beer and peanuts and you stand there all quivery because you just can’t wait for the umpire to holler, "Play ball!"

Chicago didn’t have much of a ball team that year, but they were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers, who did. We had front row seats in the second level, right behind first base. I could see the stitching on Dodgers' first baseman Ron Fairly's glove. Don Drysdale was on the pitching mound (to our great disappointment, the great Sandy Koufax had the day off, but Grandpa pointed him out in the dugout).

I was so happy. The sun was shining. I felt part of the big Chicago baseball crowd. Grandpa bought us both sodas and Red Hots.

Bottom of the sixth: Grover "Deacon" Jones hit a high foul ball right to where we were sitting. The baseball rocketed way up in the sky until it almost disappeared from sight; then it fell, growing larger and larger in my vision until all I could see was the ball, as black against the sky as an eclipse of the sun. I held my glove out.

The baseball plopped in the leather palm of my trusty glove, wobbled slowly up the leather webbingEand dropped out and over the railing into another fans hands.

"Nuts, that was close!" Grandpa commiserated, clapping me on the shoulder.

All I could think was: if only I hadn't taken my eyes off the ball (the Number One Rule of baseball). If only I had leaned the glove back five degrees. If only I had hugged the glove into my stomach as Marshmallow taught me to. If only the sun hadn't been in my eyes. If only the wind had been blowing harder (or softer). If only my baseball glove had been oiled a little less (or a little more). If only I had eaten just one slice of buttered toast at breakfast, instead of two. If only I had been chewing three chunks of Bazooka Bubble Gum like Joe Gargiola's television commercials advised any self-respecting baseball fan do. If only I had rubbed my rabbits foot or kissed my St. Christopher's medal before each inning. If only I had said my prayers every night. If only the moon had been just a bit closer to the earth so the gravitational pull had been more in my favor. If only the Third Law of Thermodynamics could have been temporarily suspended just long enough for me to make that one catch!

Meanwhile, across the continent, Mom made friends with an Episcopal chaplain. He wasn't a pushy priest. He stopped by her hospital bed and said, "Say! Do you mind if I join you for a cigarette?"

He stopped by every day to smoke, but never pushed his religious beliefs. They just smoked and talked about stuff.

"Puff, puff," their healing smoke filled the hospital room.

Orman and Tooey landed jobs that summer.

Orman went to work at Kaufman's Bakery, in Long Beach. He reported to work at 4:00 A.M., kneaded dough for donuts, maple bars, and curlers, rolled Danish pastry, baked and sliced bread, baked pies, washed countless crusty pans, and listened to rotten radio (the Scananavian music of KVAS Astoria still dominated the airwaves in 1963).

Except, he had one outlet: poetry. While cranking out cake donuts, an entirely mindless procedure, Orman composed verse.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

You've got a nose

Like a B-52

Roses are red

Violets are blue

If I had a sickness

I'd give it to you

Roses are red

Violets are fake

If you don't like my poem

You can go jump in a lake

While the donut dough boiled in hot fat, my brother composed:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I'm a schizophrenic

And so am I

Orman never received credit for his inventions. Most of his poems were ultimately credited to Public Domain.

Tooey landed a coveted position at Sportman's Cannery in Seaview, where he gutted fish and swept blood and guts ceaselessly from the concrete floors with a garden hose. Hip boots were an integral part of his working attire.

Tooey loved his work, regardless.

He had so winning a personality that he coaxed huge tips from all the tourist/fishermen, so that he could afford to date Marla Miles, a summer girl from The Dalles who lived four blocks down the street. She had 'big boobs' and 'tender mercies', he informed me by postcard.

Every night after work, he knocked on Marla's door and navigated her to the front porch swing for fortuitous smooching sessions. Evidentially Marla did not mind that my brother carried an aroma of dead salmon and sturgeon that no amount of showering could completely eliminate.

The important factor was: Tooey had money. When their lips gave out they'd cross the highway to Hanna's Pancake Corral for hamburgers and eggs. With Mom gone he could stay out as late as he wanted, creeping home like an alley cat at any hour.

Dad hired a girl named Patty Spooner to help in the house with the laundry and wax the floors. She was one of his patients, a peppy, pretty longhaired lass. Orman, practically ten years her junior, fell headfirst in love with her.

Over the course of the summer he mooned so much over her, he even washed his own underwear and socks in the bathroom sink rather than have Patty encounter his delicates in the laundry hamper.

In August, Patty eloped with Deek Only, who had a gutter repair franchise, leaving the Egg bachelors high and dry, laundry wise. Orman, for his part, bristled at the mention of Patty's name until his dying day.

Dad and Olive traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit Grandpa Weaver.

While there, they visited a Southern diner where they sat on swiveling stools at the counter and ate corn bread and beans. Olive, who was wearing a pretty pink dress with layers of petticoats, tiny white bobby socks, and shiny patent leather shoes, showed off so much, hopping off and on the counter stool endlessly, that Dad finally grabbed her arm and lifted her back on the stool, growling, "Knock it off!" But, unfortunately, dislocating her shoulder in the process.

The café customers stared at Dad like he were Atilla the Hun. Grandpa Weaver took a dim view, too.

Imagine Dad's embarrassment!

Olive returned to the Pacific Northwest in a partial body cast and was waited upon hand and foot by her guilt-ridden dad for the remainder of the summer.

Eloise sat on the red cement front steps all summer long, awaiting the return of her fragmented human family. Sometimes she wagged her tail, hopefully.

Bonk, boink, thwak!

I was sitting in the closet, my back against the wall, tossing my baseball against the wooden floor boards, bouncing off the opposite wall, catching it in my mitt. Again and again and again.

Bonk, boink, thwak! Bonk, boink, thwak! Bonk, boink, thwak!

"Alvin, come out of there," Grandma Egg begged. "You need to pack!"

We were going on a road trip.

Bonk, boink, thwak!

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to your Aunt Janet's in Grand Rapids, then your Uncle Pat's in Columbus."

Bonk, boink, thwak!

"Columbus, Ohio?"

"Um, huh."

"Okay," I agreed, and came out of the closet. In those days, a person could come out of the closet without people implying things.

In the car on the interstate we played Animal, Mineral, Vegetable to while away the miles.

"Animal," Grandpa said.

"Kangaroo?"

"Nope."

"Rhinoceros?"

"Nope."

"Lion? Tiger? Elephant."

"Nope. Nope. Nope."

"For the love of God," Grandma sighed.

"Buffalo?"

"You got it, champ," Grandpa Egg conceded.

"My turn! Mineral."

Minerals were harder. Grandma groaned and gazed out the window, vainly trying to ignore us.

"Rock?"

"Nope."

"Iron?"

"Nope."

"Rope?"

"Rope isn’t a mineral," I said.

"Just testing you," Grandpa said. "Coal? Aluminum? Magnesium? Glass? Wood?"

It could go on forever. Finally Grandma imposed a limit, if you didn’t guess in ten tries then the other person had to tell you.

"Stone? Marble?"

"Kryptonite!" I cried triumphantly.

"Eye, yi, yi!" Grandma Egg whined.

Aunt Janet lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the birthplace of Judy Garland. It was also, my dad had warned me, the Republican capital of the country. I didn’t understand what he meant, but kept my eyes peeled just the same.

At first glance, I found nothing not to like about Grand Rapids. Aunt Janet’s suburban neighborhood, with all the neatly manicured lawns, expensive houses, and smooth asphalted streets, seemed really glamorous to me. Especially compared to my hometown, where some of the side streets were still paved with crushed oyster shells.

When we arrived, Aunt Janet was sunning herself beside the swimming pool in a tight white one-piece bathing suit. Aunt Janet was deeply tanned, had a figure like Gina Lola Bridgeta, and laugh lines radiating from the corners of her big round brown eyes. It was love at first sight.

"Alvin, darling!" she cried, hugging me tightly. I gladly submitted to her cuddling. The scent of chlorine, suntan lotion, and gin made my head spin.

"Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!" she said, hugging Grandma and Grandpa in turn.

Grandma and Grandpa were her parents. Aunt Janet was my dad’s sister. It boggled my mind.

"I know!" Aunt Janet exclaimed, whipping off my baseball cap and putting it on her own head, backwards. "Let’s have a Popsicle! Won’t that be fun?"

Aunt Janet just loved to have fun. I floated in her fragrant wake into the house. I felt as heady as Pepe LePue.

I was standing in the most modern kitchen I had ever seen: gleaming green linoleum floors, spotless Formica countertops, stainless steel sink. Wallpaper pattern: purple polka-dots! It was wild. They had a garbage disposal, an automatic dishwasher, and a HUGE Westinghouse refrigerator.

Aunt Janet handed me an orange Popsicle. Grandma told me to eat it outside.

Just then, the house shook as if from a buffalo stampede. My cousin, Buzz, clomped downstairs and burst into the kitchen with the force of a twister.

"Where is he?" he bellowed, shielding his eyes with one hand and gazing around the kitchen as if he were a whaler searching the horizon for spouts. "Where's mah little cuz?"

Buzz was nineteen that summer. Having graduated high school, he and his buddies were spending the summer racing cars, surfing Lake Michigan, and chasing girls before entering college that fall at the U. of Michigan. Buzz's wholesome good looks reminded me of the cover photo of Jan and Dean's "Deadman's Curve" single.

Buzz hefted me up in the air as if I was a twig. "Whoopie!" he hooted, hurling me up in the air like a volleyball. "Allie-OOP! Allie---OOP!"

Up and down I soared. I was lucky to hang on to my Popsicle.

"Buzz, put your nephew down before you break him," Aunt Janet said.

"C'mon, partner," he drawled, shifting me under his arm. "Let's go scrimmage!"

Buzz hauled me out to the back yard and dropped me on the lawn.

"Well, let me look at you," he said, poking me in the ribs. "Yep," he said, rubbing his chin. "Yep. All Egg!"

He picked up a football and signaled me to go out for a long pass. Much to my relief, I caught the perfect spiral. In my eyes, Buzz threw a football as beautifully as Johnny Unitus.

Then we went up to my cousin's room, stretched out on twin beds, and tossed the football back and forth while listening to Beach Boys records - "Surfer Girl", "In My Room", "Don't Worry Baby" - lush, rhapsodic singles with unforgettable melodies.

After the records were over I lay with my eyes closed, listening to the soothing sound of the needle scraping around and around the fadeout groove and the hissing of distant lawn sprinklers and I thought: this is a moment I will remember for a long, long time.

I couldn't believe my luck. It was like being adopted. Buzz took me to a drive-in restaurant for dinner, where pretty waitresses roller-skated right up to the car to take our order! Then he took me to my first James Bond picture.

Buzz introduced me to spies. There was a black and white photograph taken the first and only time my Michigan cousin visited us in Washington. Buzz, Orman, and Tooey stood beneath the totem pole in the Crosby's yard, wearing cowboy hats (Tooey wore a Davey Crockett coonskin cap), chaps, bandannas around their necks, cap guns pointing skyward. Buzz had a cocky reach-for-the-sky look on his face. At the time there were dozens of popular western series on television: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman, The Virginian, Maverick, Sugarfoot, Have Gun Will Travel, F-Troop, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Sky King (he was sort of a cowboy - he had a cowboy sidekick, anyway).

Now spies were in. The summer Buzz introduced me to James Bond, he also prepped me for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Saint, The Avengers, I Spy, Honey West, and Get Smart.

As we exited the plush lobby of the Fox Theater after Goldfinger, Buzz and I invented a new game: Spy. Whenever we saw anyone who looked the least bit suspicious, we would whisper, "Spy!" The definition of 'suspicious' included, but was not restricted to, people wearing turbans, anyone wearing sunglasses indoors or with bulges in their clothing that might conceal cameras or microphones, women pushing baby buggies, the elderly, the fashion-unconscious, postal employees (particularly suspect), foreigners, and especially, anyone wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt.

Now I have to introduce Uncle Phil. When we got home from the movie he was waiting for us at the kitchen table, playing cards with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Janet. Even though everyone was relaxing, Uncle Phil still wore a dark business suit with his necktie still tightened.

"Spy!" I whispered to Buzz. He cuffed me with his elbow and gave me a scared look.

Uncle Phil beckoned Buzz to his side of the table - and sniffed him!

Buzz apparently passed inspection, because Uncle Phil turned his attention to me and asked, "What do you know?"

What was it about Uncle Phil that brought the worse out in me?

"The plural for goose is geese," I replied, "but the plural for mongoose is mongooses."

"I’m sorry I asked," Uncle Phil said.

"Ey!" Grandma said, smacking her hand against her forehead.

"Oh, good night nurse," Grandpa said.

Aunt Janet did not say anything. She just smiled encouragingly.

I owned the room.

"My cat, Fang, keeps climbing on the counter, and when I tell him to get down - he starts dancing!" Ba-bing!

"I think it’s past someone’s bedtime," Uncle Phil suggested.

I was drunk on Michigan, on my glamorous aunt, on Buzz’s befriending me. I was lucky Uncle Phil didn’t come over and sniff me.

The next morning was Saturday so I snuck out of bed early and went downstairs to watch cartoons on TV. I was curious whether the Saturday morning cartoons in Michigan were any different from those broadcast at home.

They were the same: Beanie & Cecil, Bullwinkle, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear. Just as The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour started, Buzz bounded into the living room.

"Yee haw!" he hooted. "Ah love cartoons!"

"You do?"

"You betcha!" Buzz exclaimed. "Especially Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote."

I had never met a grownup who liked cartoons before.

But Buzz not only liked cartoons, he could imitate the voices and the sound effects! We could barely breath, we were laughing so hard.

"Buzz," Uncle Phil interrupted. "The lawnE

"You should have seen it, Uncle Phil," I gasped. "Wile E. Coyote strapped a rocket to his back and put on roller skates, then..."

I was too overwhelmed by the hilarity of it all to speak, and began pantomiming the action (the coyote’s futile scramble in midair, his weary resignation before the inevitable plunge to earth), while Buzz provided the sound effects ("Beep! Beep! KA-BLOOEY!!!")

Uncle Phil responded like any sensible parent. "Buzz, I want the lawn mowed, raked, and trimmed or you can’t go to the beach tonight. And take out the trash!"

"You know what would really be neat?" I suggested as we dragged the lawn mower and sweeper from the garden shed. "Let’s mow the lawn in two directions, like a baseball field."

"Ah like the way you think, partner!" Buzz responded, peering into the gas tank. "First, let’s go get some fuel!"

I thought Buzz meant gasoline. Instead, we stopped at the A&W for two tall, frosty mugs of root beer.

"Hey, Buzz!" called a pretty female voice from the next car. I looked over at the blue Mustang parked next to us. Three beautiful girls were wiggling their fingers and beaming bright lipstick smiles in our direction. "Who’s your friend, Buzz?"

"Hey, girls!" Buzz boomed. "Get your French fries over here!"

All three piled in the back seat of the "Buzzmobile" and began chattering at once.

"This is Alvin, mah nephew," Buzz proclaimed proudly. "Alvin, this is Mary, Mary, and Mary."

"You’re all named Mary?" I gushed.

"That’s right," one of the girls giggled, tussling my hair seductively.

"We’re the Marys!" they cried in unison.

"I know," one of the Marys suggested. "Let’s drive through the car wash!"

So we did. I had never been through an automatic car wash before. Especially with a car full of squealing girls. I found the experience quite to my liking.

Buzz burned rubber out of the parking lot.

"Ice cream! Ice cream!" the Marys chanted.

We drove through the Dairy Queen and ordered dip cones, a sinfully delicious concoction that came in quite a few colors - Buzz and I had chocolate, and the three Marys had orange, cherry, and lime, respectively.

They seemed to have drive-thru everything in the magic land of Grand Rapids!

Before Buzz dropped the Marys off at the A&W, he invited them to join us for the beach party in South Haven that evening.

Then we went home to mow the lawn. We mowed the whole lawn in one direction, then lowered the blade and mowed every other row in the opposite direction to create a checkerboard pattern like the grounds at Cominsky Park.

While we were working on it a couple of Buzz’s surfing buddies dropped by, so he invited them along to the beach party as well. Their names, no kidding, were Snide and Clyde.

It was shaping up to be quite a party. Aunt Janet bought a new outfit that had Grandma fuming - skin-tight purple crushed velvet bellbottoms, a halter-top with spaghetti straps, and a fringed leather jacket.

"Gee, Aunt Janet!" I piped up supportively. "I think you look great!"

"Thank you, Alvin." When she leaned forward to kiss my forehead, I got an eye-bulging view of my aunt’s amble bosom.

Grandma and Grandpa opted to stay home and watch The Lawrence Welk Show. Some arbitration over my wardrobe ensued; ultimately I was allowed outside wearing my beloved blue jeans and one of Buzz’s oversized Detroit Tigers t-shirts.

The party was in South Haven, an hour or so from Grand Rapids - that is if you drove at supersonic speed like my cousin. The Buzzmobile was as crowded as a clown car in the circus: Buzz, Snide, and Clyde in front; Mary, Mary, Mary and me crammed in the back seat. (Not that I minded being wedged between a pair of Marys!)

One section of highway outside of Holland had a series of steep hills that Buzz rocketed over so fast that the wheels left the pavement; we all lifted our arms and shrieked like we were riding a roller coaster.

As darkness descended Buzz rounded a turn way too fast, failing to decipher a stop sign until it was practically on top of us. Buzz slammed on the brakes and said, "Aw, nuts!"

The car skidded out of control, sliding around so that the view out the front windshield was of the forest spinning past. It would have been nice if life were like a Road Runner cartoon and we had been able to suspend the action for several seconds while the seven of us discussed the best way out of our predicament. Instead all we had the presence to do was shriek hysterically, claw at the upholstery, and stretch our eyeballs as far out of their sockets as our endangered physiology would permit.

Then it was over. The car came to a halt in a cloud of dust, leaning backwards over the edge of the gravel shoulder on the other side of the road. The Buzzmobile’s tail was elevated above the nose, so that we were literally sitting on the edge of our seats.

No one spoke until the dust settled.

"Whew!" Buzz whewed.

The party was at a big beach bungalow on Lake Michigan, outside South Haven. Lake Michigan was more like the ocean than I expected, so immense you couldn’t even see across. I was used to little lakes like Loomis Lake, where my brothers and I went trout fishing. Lake Michigan had breakers and whitecaps; it smelled salty.

There looked to be about a hundred guests. The house was packed with people holding glasses and paper plates of food and hollering helloes at each other. The kitchen counters were covered with good things to eat (I consumed four deviled eggs without blinking, and fed some olives to a friendly dog), while outside a whole hog turned on a spit, and hotdogs and hamburgers were being barbecued.

I sat down in the sand next to the shore with a huge hunk of watermelon and watched a volleyball match that included Buzz, Snide, and Clyde. I had sort of formed the impression that Snide and Clyde were a little dim, but they proved me wrong on the volleyball court.

After barely speaking to one another (or anyone else in the car) the whole drive down, on the volleyball court they communicated their moves telepathically, at the speed of light, practically. They bounced the ball off their heads like a pair of trained seals, and vaulted into the air as if gravity defied them. It was wonderful to watch.

Aunt Janet and Uncle Phil arrived. I could hear them moving through the crowd, hailing acquaintances. Aunt Janet’s laughter carried quite far.

I walked down the shore where some kids my age were digging a hole in the sand. It was a pretty big hole. Only their heads were showing.

"Nice hole," I said.

Dig, dig, dig.

"I like the way you’re using those boards to reinforce the sides," I said. "Very smart."

Dig, dig, dig.

"Can I help?" I asked.

"Get lost!"

"Well, I could do that," I replied, wandering away. The sand was a different color than that on the beach at home. Darker. Coarser.

I went back to the house for another deviled egg and Aunt Janet nabbed me.

"Hey, everybody!" she shouted. "This is my nephew, Alvin!"

A patter of phony applause followed her announcement.

"Alvin, sing a song," Aunt Janet purred.

If I had a hole to sink into at that moment I would have. A percentage of the partying grown-ups occupying the room urged me on with frozen, glazed-eyed grins. Others, Uncle Phil included, glugged drinks. I wondered, very briefly, whether I could pull off "Polka Dots and Moonbeams".

Aunt Janet's arms circled my neck and shoulders, her pendulent bosoms resting heavily atop my head. I felt a warming twinge in my trousers that prompted me to act.

I looked up, admiringly, and sang:

"I took one look at you

That's all I meant to do

And then my heart stood stilllll..."

I fell to the floor, clutching my chest, feigning a heart attack. Riding a wave of surprised applause, I beat a retreat to the beach as fast as my feet would take me.

The evening ended in fireworks. I would never forget it. As the first boom of skyrockets exploded over the lake, the house emptied as the guests turned their attention to the fireworks. The crowd ooed and awed their approval as the glittering explosions lit the sky.

I took the opportunity to return to the kitchen for a few final deviled eggs, since I had basically been shooed from the house following the impromptu performance Aunt Janet foisted on me. Little did I realize that that performance would pale in comparison to the proceedings unfolding in the next few minutes.

I thought I was alone in the house, but as I tiptoed to the kitchen I heard Aunt Janet's distinctively throaty laughter. I cautiously cracked open the swinging door to the kitchen and peered inside.

His head was bent to her bare breasts. I could not see his face, but it was not Uncle Phil. He was outside gawking at the sky.

Aunt Janet tossed her head back and laughed sensually, an expression of pure pleasure softening her face. The man kissed one nipple, which was quite pink, while Aunt Janet caressed the other nipple between her thumb and the first two fingers of one hand. Her other hand had a hold of his dong.

Their clothes were piled on the floor. The man lifted her and they engaged in a long kiss, her legs locking around his hips. As he lifted her up on the kitchen counter and as she helped him inside, Aunt Janet cried out - I was unsure whether in pain or pleasure. I pushed the door open an inch wider to make sure she was okay.

When Aunt Janet saw me, she stiffened. I have to admit, I stiffened too.

But the man had her. She closed her eyes and lost herself to his hammering movements. Her legs drew up and wrapped around his back as she arched her body up to meet his movements. "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" she moaned. "Sweet Jesus!" Through the window behind them, fireworks erupted.

I thought it best to excuse myself at that juncture.

The next morning at the breakfast table, Uncle Phil lowered the newspaper he was reading and turned his attention to his unsuspecting nephew.

"So, Alvin," Uncle Phil asked, as crafty as a fox. "You had quite a time yesterday. Care to share any observations? Hmm?"

The platter of scrambled eggs Aunt Janet was carrying to the table crashed to the floor. She froze in her tracks, turning as white as a sheet. Buzz did a spit take, like Danny Thomas on his television show, spraying orange juice all over the tabletop. Every eye in the room held on the youngest member of the breakfast club.

Boy, I could have gotten everybody in deep doo-doo if I weren't careful!

"Well, Uncle Phil," I stalled.

I remembered an interrogation technique Tooey taught me: always answer an incriminating question with another question.

Besides, there was a danger Aunt Janet or Buzz might pass out if they held their breath any longer.

"What can I tell you? You've been to one party, you've been to them all."

Later, in the car driving across the Michigan-Ohio border, Grandpa told me the Attorney General of the United States could not have diffused the situation any more effectively.

Aunt Betsy and Uncle Pat lived in a little square house in the outskirts of Columbus. Uncle Pat was Grandpa's brother, which meant he was actually my great-uncle. It was easier to call them aunt and uncle.

"Uncle Pat has a problem," Grandma briefed me in the car. "He had a stroke last Christmas, and has not been the same since."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The man is just plain dotty," Grandma said, smacking her lips disagreeably.

"Dotty? Don't tell him that," Grandpa grumbled.

"Don't tell me what don't to tell him!" Grandma shouted.

Uncle Pat looked pretty normal to me. The only unusual thing was how tall he was. He had a long face, a long nose, long chin, even long ears, gangly arms, and long, lanky legs. Grandpa always referred to his younger brother as, "a big drink of water." Uncle Pat reminded me of the Karbunkle character in Don Martin's Mad Magazine cartoons.

Aunt Betsy was effervescent. Her smile would thaw the heart of the Abominable Snowman.

Unto these precious people I was delivered in the late summer of 1964. It was a welcome reprieve from the hysteria of Grandma's household. Somehow, Aunt Betsy and Uncle Pat got my grandparents to actually relax and enjoy themselves. Within an hour of our arrival they were all drinking iced tea and playing bridge. I was free to read. Hot diggity!

The first sign of Uncle Pat's condition occurred at the dinner table. We were slurping our soup when, out of the blue, he said, "Portland, Oregon."

Everyone else kept on eating like he hadn't said anything. I looked around the room to see whom Uncle Pat was talking to.

"Eat your soup," Grandma told me. We finished our soup silently. The only sound in the room was our silverware clinking against the china.

"Westinghouse!" Uncle Pat announced a moment later.

This time, I noticed everyone pause with their spoons in midair, before they resumed eating. Nervous glances were cast back and forth. I didn't know what was going on. It was like Uncle Pat was answering riddles that no one had asked.

"Aurora borealis!"

"Pat," Aunt Betsy said sympathetically.

"Ragmop!" he announced during dessert, popping the 'p'.

"R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P, rag mop!" I sang out, drawing cold stares from both my grandparents.

After dinner, while the other adults did the dishes and talked in low voices in the kitchen, Uncle Pat sat down in an easy chair and began a crossword puzzle from the Cleveland Herald. I tried to hang around and hear what they were whispering but Grandma shooed me out in the living room.

"Alvin, you're from the West Coast," Uncle Pat elicited. "What's a four letter word for fish?"

"Bass? Carp? Clam?"

"Clams not a fish. Starts with a 'T'," Uncle Pat corrected me.

"Tuna!"

"That a boy!" he marveled, jotting it down. "A little dab’ll do ya!" he hummed.

Uncle Pat also enjoyed Solitaire, often punctuating his plays with unconnected comments:

"Pith helmet!"

"Riptide!"

"Centrifugal force!"

"Ruby slippers!"

"Kellogg’s of Battle Creek!"

"San Fran Cisco!"

"Phloem! Xylum! Vascular cambium!"

"IRS!"

"Son of a B!"

I tried to detect a pattern, but there wasn’t any. Sometimes he would say words that made no sense at all.

"Fax machine!"

"Information highway!"

"Zero gravity!"

"ATM!"

"Core dump! Dip switch! Floppy!"

About all I saw of Columbus was when I’d walk with Uncle Pat to the corner newsstand to purchase the daily paper. He would buy each of us a candy bar to eat before we got back to the house. Despite his musings, I found Uncle Pat to be a kindly person.

"How’s that Heath bar, Alvin?"

"Good!" I said, trying not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk.

"Chinese checkers," Uncle Pat replied. "Bosco!"

One morning Uncle Pat asked Grandpa, "Jack, let me borrow your car keys."

"What for?" Grandpa, Grandma, and Aunt Betsy asked all at the same time.

"I want to take Alvin to get the newspaper," he said. "It’s raining outside," he added sensibly, putting on his hat.

Grandpa reluctantly relinquished his key ring.

"It got any gas?" Uncle Pat asked.

"Full tank," Grandpa said, innocently.

"Come on, Alvin," he called.

We drove down to the newsstand, then sat in the car a minute munching our candy bars and looking at the newspaper while the rain pattered against the roof of the idling automobile. The Marichal/John Roseboro bat incident still dominated the sports page.

"Dog paddle," Uncle Pat said.

I kept reading. The Cleveland Indians were 5th in the American League.

"Where to next, nephew?" Uncle Pat asked.

"I don’t know," I said. I really didn’t.

"Have you ever seen Mt. Rushmore?"

We drove all day and night. The thing about riding with Uncle Pat was he read every road sign aloud. He also repeated every buzz phrase he heard on the radio. And some stuff I’d never heard of.

"Springfield! State Route 75! Holy Toledo! Barcode! Texaco! Elkhart! South Bend! Sandy beaches! Stanley Steamer! Gary Cooper! Founding fathers! The WOW Sound of WWOW! Wall Drug 900 miles! Grover Cleveland! I-80! Kankakee! Oscar Meyer! Quad Cities! Marshall Town! Marshall Dillon! Hubble Telescope! Highway 20! Scooby Doo, where are you? Cedar Rapids! Waterloo! King of the highway! Wall Drug 650 miles! eBay! Sioux Falls! Burma Shave! Wall Drug 200 miles! Cross Your Heart Bra! HGX553! Blasting area - turn off radio! Be sure to visit Wall Drug! Dots are in - but not on your skin! Dot com! Wall Drug 15 miles! Wall Drug 6 miles! Uh oh! You just passed Wall Drug! Ellsworth Air Force Base! Rapid City! Custer Memorial! Puff the Magic Dragon! Cheeseburger!"

We stopped, of course, to pee, and to eat meatloaf sandwiches and barbecue. We took a side trip through Badlands National Park and stopped at Wall Drug, naturally. I proved very handy with a road map.

We reached the Black Hills at dawn. Nothing prepared me for my first glimpse of Mount Rushmore. In the morning sunlight, the four granite heads of the Presidents awed us with their size and smoothness.

Uncle Pat phoned home from the souvenir stand beneath the monument. I heard a lot of hollering on the other end of the phone, and I was standing twenty yards away.

"We’re coming straight home," Uncle Pat assured Aunt Betsy, cheerfully.

On the return trip Uncle Pat read all the same road signs in reverse. When we passed the sign that said, "Blasting area," I asked Uncle Pat why we had to turn off the radio.

"Maybe they don’t like music," Uncle Pat suggested, grinning.

"Yeh, that’s probably it," I said, grinning also. I was completely comfortable with my uncle’s logic by then.

For years, even into college and for several years beyond until he passed away in 1979, Uncle Pat used to phone me, sometimes in the middle of the night, and ask, "Alvin? What’s a three letter word for ‘Parisian pal'? Starts with ‘A'."

"Alvin!" Dad called down the concourse.

Dad trotted up to us. He was wearing a long rumpled raincoat.

I was standing with a Pan Am stewardess. She was wearing a short tight dress and a pillbox hat.

"Sorry I’m late," Dad apologized, shaking the stewardesses hand.

"Not at all, doctor," she assured him. "Your son is loads of fun."

"Hi Dad!" I chirped. "Where’s Eloise?"

Portland Airport seemed small compared to O’Hara. The corridors seemed deserted, and the baggage claim consisted of a long window staffed by an old guy in a blue suit.

Eloise was waiting in the station wagon, wagging her tail wildly.

Driving back to the beach, everything looked smaller than I remembered. Even Portland seemed like a small town, compared to Chicago.

I told Dad the best bits of my travels. I didn’t mention the time I spent in Grandma’s closet. I left out the part about nearly crashing in the car with Buzz and his buddies, also.

When we got to the peninsula the sun was starting to set. Dad drove down the Tenth Street beach approach and let Eloise out to pee.

We walked to the edge of the water and watched the sunset. Eloise ran in circles and barked. Dad stretched his arms parallel to the horizon line. "Breathe!" he thundered.

It felt good to be home. Good, and safe. Almost normal.

The biggest difference at home was the huge hospital bed occupying the living room, for Mom. The big bed made her seem even tinier than she was. She wore a green wool cap to cover her shorn head, and had to use a bed pan to go to the toilet.

I felt bad Mom was in such a fix. I also felt immobile to hold her hand.

"What’s the matter, Alvin? Cat got your tongue?" my mother asked.

I smiled sheepishly in reply.

I didn’t feel shy, exactly. I didn’t know exactly what I felt. It did feel good to stand around wondering what exactly I was expected to feel in familiar surroundings again.

"What are those for?" I asked hesitantly. Beside Mom’s bed were several wicker baskets filled with pieces of cloth.

"Well, since I’m stuck in this bed I’m working on rugs for the living room and the dining room," she explained. "We tear these old blankets into strips, then braid them into rugs. You want to help?"

"Sure," I said. Mom set me to work tearing long strips of fabric from the old blankets. I sat on the hearth next to her bed ripping fabric, an occupation I enjoyed. Riiiiip! Riiiiiiiiiiip! I felt useful.

The first few days I was home, Olive tottered after me wherever I went, babbling short sentences. "Go potty! Banana bwed! Yellow-eees!" Eloise followed behind Olive, and Dad said we were like a little parade.

Another person joined our household around this time. Her name was Madonna. Olive couldn’t pronounce that, so everyone else called her Donna. Except me - I thought Madonna was a beautiful name.

With Mom bedridden, we had to hire someone to cook, clean, do the laundry, and ferry us around. Madonna saw that we were well taken care of.

Madonna Miller was very tall and had shiny, short brown hair. She wore the same style of glasses as Edith Head. Her figure was always concealed behind a boundless supply of bowling shirts.

Madonna was a great kidder and sympathizer of kids. She cooked all the kinds of foods we liked (spaghetti, tuna casserole with shell pasta, macaroni and cheese and pork chops, Campbell’s soup and grilled cheese sandwiches), she laughed at the right jokes, and she liked our dog. The perfect criteria as far as we kids were concerned.

I liked to sit on the steps to the third floor and watch her iron our clothes and sheets. She could fold laundry so good they looked like they came from the dry goods store. She even ironed our underwear!

"Madonna, why do they call them a pair of pants when there’s only one?"

"So little boys can ask questions, I guess," she laughed.

She started to fold socks into little balls that were perfect for shooting baskets through the empty coffee can Tooey attached to the door of his bedroom. Madonna puzzled over one sock that didn’t have a mate, then felt inside the dryer and found it.

"I saw a sock in the gutter one time," I reflected. "It must have been one that got away."

She took a puff on her cigarette and laughed smoke.

"Do clouds have feelings?" I persisted, looking out the window. "If a plane flies into a cloud, does the cloud go, 'Ow!'? Don't coulds ever get tired? If people open umbrellas, do rain clouds feel insulted? "

"I have no idea, Alvin," she said.

"How come there are so many people named Steve, but nobody names their dog Steve?" I asked.

Madonna laughed - something you could always count on - and said, "Why don’t you go outside? School starts in a few days Eyou don’t want to waste your vacation indoors, do you?"

She made a convincing point.

I found my best friend and my arch antagonist, Tiny Star, bent over a wooden box in Marshmallow’s back yard. They were attempting to balance one end of the peach crate on a crooked stick; tied to the stick with a piece of string was a carrot.

Marshmallow looked up when he saw me approach and called, "Hey! Hey! Hey!" like Yogi Bear.

Tiny Star sniffed when he saw me.

"Is that supposed to be funny?" I challenged.

Marshmallow defended him. "He has allergies. Honest."

"Sure he does," I muttered.

"I do!" Tiny cried.

Over the summer he and Marshmallow had become better pals. They were both wearing straw beach hats from Marsh’s Free Museum. I felt like an outsider.

"What are you doing, anyway?" I asked Marshmallow, ignoring Tiny’s outburst.

"I’m trying to trap the rabbit that keeps eating Dad’s lettuce," Marshmallow explained. Mr. Marsh had the best vegetable patch in the neighborhood.

"What if the rabbit doesn’t like carrots?" I asked, playing devil’s advocate.

"What rabbit doesn’t like carrots?" Tiny objected.

"Why don’t you try using a hamburger as bait? Or a club sandwich?"

Tiny gave me a withering look of impatience. Marshmallow was too intent on trying to balance the box on the crooked stick to notice. It kept slipping off.

"Oh, shooty!" Marshmallow swore.

"Shooty?" I asked.

"Shooty," Tiny Star stated, stubbornly.

"Maybe the problem is the stick," I suggested. They were using a crooked dogwood branch. I hunted around the woodpile until I found a straighter piece. Then we all set aside our differences in an effort to set the trap.

"What are you going to do when you catch it?" I inquired.

Marshmallow wiped his dirty hands on the seat of his cutoff jeans. "Maybe Mom can make rabbit stew," he mused. "And we can all have a lucky rabbits foot!"

"Out of sight!" I exclaimed. It was an expression I had learned back East.

"Hey, there’s a pizza place opening next to Sid’s Market. Let’s ride our bikes down there!" Marshmallow suggested.

"Maybe we can get hired!" Tiny enthused.

"Yeh!" Marshmallow marveled.

I wished I’d thought of that angle.

We rode our bicycles down the ditch road, weaving lazily back and forth, riding with no hands, and whistling the theme to The Bridge Over The River Kwai.

"Once my mom made a pizza for my cousin Margaret’s birthday," Marshmallow reminisced. "But it was a square pizza baked on a cookie sheet."

"My Mom took me to a pizza parlor in Astoria," Tiny bragged. "They had round pizzas and a guy playing the banjo. That’s what I want to be when I grow up - a banjo player in Shaky’s Pizza. Or a real estate agent," he added, sensibly.

"My dad has a banjo," I said.

Tiny slammed on his coaster brakes. Marshmallow and I came close to colliding with him.

"Can I see it?" he pleaded.

"Per-haps," I taunted. "Someday. Maybe."

I really did not want Tiny Star, or anyone else for that matter, over to my house. Not with my mom in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room. Would you?

"Race you!" I called.

A man was outside the pizza parlor, cutting boards on two saw horses. Behind him, wooden letters across the front of the building spelled out CHICO’S PIZZA.

We parked our bikes, ambled over, and watched the man measure and mark boards and cut them evenly with a skill saw. He eventually put down his tools and looked at us.

"Hi!" Marshmallow said. He did not have a shy bone in his body.

"Hi," the man replied. "And how is Mr. Marshmallow today?"

"Grrrrrrrrrrrrreat!" Marshmallow said, like Tony the Tiger on the cereal commercials. "How’d you know who I am?"

"I know your dad, Junior. You’re the doctors boy," he continued. "And you’re the Star kid, right?"

We shook our heads up and down.

"Are you Chico?" Marshmallow asked.

"Bill’s the name."

"We wanted to see Chico," Marshmallow said, "about a job."

"Well, I’m the man to talk to," Bill replied. "I own this franchise. How would you boys like to take some fliers down to the docks and put them under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the parking lot? I’ll pay you a penny apiece."

Just like that, we were employed and on our way to Ilwaco, pedaling as fast as we could.

Back when, the commercial fishing industry was a booming business. We surveyed the sea of automobiles in the parking lots, row after lucrative row, and rubbed our hands together.

"We are going to get rich!"

That first day we targeted six hundred vehicles; we’d have hit more, but we ran out of fliers.

"This is great!" Marshmallow gloated. "What a gold mine!"

"Too bad the season’s almost over," Tiny mentioned.

We both looked at him like he’d said something obscene about Jackie Kennedy.

When we got back to Marshmallow’s house, the rabbit trap was tripped. The wooden box was laying flat on the lawn, shuttering slightly.

"Hot dog!" we cried, dropping our bikes on the driveway and running around the side of the house to check our catch. Sparky padded over and sniffed the box. Then, to our chagrin, the collie lifted his leg and relieved himself on a corner of the peach crate.

"Sparky!" Marshmallow hollered in horror.

After we collected ourselves, I asked, "How do we work this?"

Marshmallow assumed command. "You lift the box, and I'll grab the rabbit."

"I'm not lifting the box!" I exclaimed. "Sparky peed on it!"

"Oh for crying out loud!" Marshmallow moaned. "Didn't you learn anything in the East?"

"Sure I did," I waffled. I was definitely not touching the urine. "Ancient Secret of the East: Kung Poo!"

I raised one leg at a ninety degree angle and spread my arms and fingers in a pseudo-judo stance - and forced myself to fart.

The maneuver was well received. Both Marshmallow and Tiny Star buckled under, laughing. They giggled themselves silly - then imitated my marvelous moves. We all fell over ourselves, performing Kung-Poo moves. Even my rival Tiny succumbed to the Lure of the East.

Finally our attention returned to the rabbit.

"Okay," Marshmallow announced. "I'll lift up the box. You two gwap the waskally wabbit!"

On the count of three, Marshmallow snatched aside the box confining our quarry. Tiny Star and I both lunged at once. To our confusion, we were holding not a white bunny rabbit - but a white cat!

"Uh oh!" Marshmallow moaned. "Houston, we have a problem!"

"That's Mary's cat," Tiny Star verified.

"I know," Marshmallow commiserated.

"Who's Mary?" I asked.

Mary lived on the next block. We smuggled the cat the block and a half to her door and timidly rang the doorbell.

Mary seemed too glad to see us. Or rather, her cat.

"Oh, wittle Mr. Jinx!" she cooded, kissing the pussycat. "I was beginning to worry."

We smiled lamely, and hid our hands innocently in our hind pockets.

Mary invited us inside. "I just made an angel food cake. Would you like a piece?"

Even though we felt guilty, we gladly submitted to our reward. It felt funny, though, like Marilyn Monroe might have felt, standing at the Pearly Gates, petitioning for admittance.

The angel food cake tasted heavenly.

Marshmallow, Tiny Star, and I returned to the docks six or seven times before school started, earning a total of six bucks apiece.

"What are you going to do with your earnings?" I asked my enterprising friend.

"I'm going to order a Hawaiian pizza," Marshmallow claimed, "and eat the whole thing myself!"

To our surprise, in addition to our salaries, Chico baked each of us our own private pizzas. I had a cheese only, Marshmallow a Hawaiian, (which included pineapple chunks), while Tiny Star's choice was a combination pizza, with olives and anchovies. It was a brave choice, I had to admit: the kid had gumption.

Just before school started, I went over to the Moon household. We hadn't seen each other all summer.

Laura answered the door. She was one of the nicest girls I knew; in fact, she was one of the most important role models I had growing up. She was very intelligent, and very pretty, too. Aristocratic.

She and I shared a love for the Beatles. Laura was the only other person I knew who had all their records. She had seen A Hard Days Night eleven times!

"Hey, hot stuff!" she graciously greeted me.

"Laura!" I hailed. "Did you get any new Beatles stuff while I was gone?"

She led me upstairs to her bedroom. Their house was built out of pine; the whole building shook when you climbed the stairs or slammed a door. There was ivy growing through the wall on the second floor landing - instead of cutting the curling vines away as my dad would, the Moon’s cultivated it as part of the decor. The door to the second floor hallway had a string running through a hole punctured in the doorframe, attached to a blue glass bottle on the other side that acted as a counterweight, pulling the door shut behind us as we crossed the threshold.

Laura’s bedroom was plastered with posters of the Fab Four. She retrieved from her night stand a square cardboard box with a plastic handle on top, illustrated with the comic book characters Betty and Veronica dancing the twist with musical notes swirling overhead, and showed me the singles she had collected over the summer: Eight Days A Week, Ticket To Ride, and Help! The records had glossy picture sleeves of our heroes in funny poses.

We played them all the way through on Laura’s plastic phonograph, both ‘AEand ‘BEsides. I begged her to play Help! over and over. The Ticket To Ride b-side, Yes It Is, was irresistibly melodic.

"I like John best," I said, staring at one of the covers.

"Me, too!" Laura agreed. "We better go downstairs now."

Laura’s sisters Mary and Alice were shooting baskets through a basketball hoop attached above the bathroom door. They stopped when they saw me and said howdy.

"What did you learn back east, Alvin?" Mary Moon leered, not unkindly. "Anything?"

I brightened at the opportunity. "I bring secret of the East - Kung Poo!" I laughed gleefully. I lifted my leg and let loose a perfectly timed toot.

It backfired on me. The three sisters stared at me with unanimous distaste.

"You go home, Alvin!" Alice ordered.

In total disgrace, I slunk outside and headed home.

Shannon Moon stuck her head out the kitchen window.

"Mucho loco," she sneered.

The Beatles were also influencing my hairstyle. I started combing my hair down over my forehead. Of course, my hair was only about a half inch long, but by using about four pounds of Butch wax I was able to achieve very short bangs. I though it looked groovy.

Neither my mother nor my father agreed. My parents were never very supportive on the hair issue.

A lot of the kids at school started letting their hair down. Which led to countless family discussions along the lines of, "Well, if all the kids at school jumped over a cliff, would you?"

Steve Nickles was one of the only holdouts. He maintained his Elvis Presley hairstyle, constantly combing and molding his blonde pompadour. "Why can’t you get a nice haircut like Steve Nickles?" I must have heard a hundred times.

Perish the thought.

Elvis was out. The Beatles were in.

My brothers were not entirely invisible at this time. They sure kept themselves busy, though.

They both had summer jobs. Orman still worked at Kaufman’s bakery, which meant getting up at three thirty in the morning. When he finished in the early afternoon the sweet smell of glazed donuts and cinnamon followed him home. One day Tooey called him Sweet Smelling Wellington, and struck a nerve.

Tooey: Sweet Smelling Wellington!

Orman: Shut up!

Tooey: Sweet Smelling Wellington!

Orman: I’m gonna slug you!

Tooey (dodging punch): Sweet Smelling Wellllllllington!!!

Tooey held a coveted position at Big Gee’s Go-Cart Track, one of Long Beach’s biggest tourist draws. The go-cart track occupied half a city block, with a windy asphalted course lined with piles of tires. Whenever anyone veered off course, Tooey would run over with a crowbar and realign the tires and/or restart their engines.

His friend Herman Herman was the main mechanic. He maintained and fueled the fleet of go-carts. If Herman took a shine to somebody (both he and Tooey were obsessed with girls), he would adjust the governor on the Briggs & Stratton engine so it would drive faster.

How they strutted around, these cocky devils, with a greasy red rag hanging out of their back pockets!

It was an enviable job, but it had its drawbacks.

Ed Gee, the owner, was a notoriously cranky person. He was real rough on the guys, constantly chewing them out in front of customers. His wife, Mrs. Gee, who resided in the ticket booth, also bellowed orders. "Slow it!" she would shout at the drivers, loud enough to be heard over the engines.

Tooey learned to take the abuse, preparing him to succeed in the world of commerce at an early age. The minimum hourly wage in those days was three dollars and twenty-five cents.

Their jobs were winding down. The day after Labor Day most of the businesses in Long Beach boarded up their windows until spring. When the town closed for the winter, you could fire a cannon down Main Street and not disturb a soul.

Mr. Pells would be my teacher for the next two years. He looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln!

His classroom housed both the fourth and fifth grade. Mr. Pells had such command of the classroom he could teach both at once.

"Fourth graders! Spelling test. Take out a piece of paper and number it from 1 to 20."

"Mr. Pells," Jo Ann Henderson called, waving her hand frantically. "Can I collect the papers when the test is done?"

"Yes, Jo Ann," Mr. Pells sighed. "Fifth graders, take out your history book and turn to page 24."

"Mr. Pells?" Cary Kary said. "I left my history book on the bus."

"Look on with Karen."

Karen Loomis shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

Mr. Pells turned back to the spelling test. "Okay, the first word is apartment: My mother lives in an apartment. Apartment." He turned to the other side of the classroom. "Chuck, please read the first three paragraphs of chapter two aloud."

"I can’t find it," Chuck Udd complained.

"Page 24. Top of the page. Starting with "The Louisiana purchaseEquot;

Mr. Pells turned back to our spelling test. "Number 2. Elephant: The elephant likes peanuts. Elephant."

He helped Chuck, who was stuck on a big word. "Sound it out, Chuck. Gov-ern-ment. Government."

"The third word is ladder: I leaned the ladder against the house. Ladder."

"What is it?" Ricky Rice asked.

"Ladder," Mr. Pells repeated. "Ricky, clean out your ears!"

He strode to the blackboard and pulled down a map of the United States to show the area of the Louisiana Purchase. "Balloon," he said without turning around. "The balloon was red. Balloon."

I liked it because if your subject got boring, you could listen to the fifth grade lesson.

It seldom got boring, though. Mr. Pells made every subject interesting, and made sure every student learned their lessons. If he didn’t think you were trying, you might get your knuckles whacked with a ruler. He put a sign underneath the clock that said:

TIMES PASSES.

WILL YOU?

One of the fifth graders was named Warner S. Garnersnake. His parents were descendants of the Chinook Indian tribe. His mom had a long flat forehead and nose, molded by tying a board to her face when she was a baby, a sign of royalty to the Chinooks. His parents had a circus in a bare lot in Long Beach, consisting of three Shetland ponies that you could ride around in a ring, a popcorn machine, and a baboon in a cage.

Warner S. Garnersnake had an extremely facile nose. His nose did not have any cartilage in it, and when he ran his nose flapped against his face like a turkey wattle. He had another funny habit: when his pencils wore down he would lay them to rest - Warner S. Garnersnake had a pencil graveyard on the edge of the playground.

He also was an extremely slow eater. Most the kids choked down their lunches as fast as Springer Spaniel puppies, so they had more time to play, but Warner S. Garnersnake was always the last to leave the lunchroom, causing the cleanup crew to stand around waiting to scrape his tray and clean the tabletops with soapy sponges.

This was a particular pain when Mr. Van Over instituted ping-pong games in the cafeteria at noon recess. The teachers stretched ping-pong nets across the lunch tables, and organized a school-wide ping-pong tournament. Since it rained so much where we lived, it was an excellent activity.

But we always had to mill around, waiting for Warner S. Garnersnake to finish his food, wasting valuable tournament time. Warner S. Garnersnake had been taught to chew each mouthful of food fifty times, and to never rush.

"Hurry up, Warner!" we all heckled him.

While a bunch of us stood around waiting on Warner S. Garnersnake, bouncing ping-pong balls up and down in the air with our paddles, I made an unprecedented wager.

"I’ll bet I can put a ping-pong ball up my nostril!" I proposed.

"No way!"

"Way!"

"My cousin tried that once!"

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"Hey everybody! Alvin’s going to stick a ping-pong ball up his nose!"

Soon I was surrounded by a dozens interested gamblers.

I managed to insert the ping-pong ball up my nose all right, collecting a pocketful of marbles, three quarters, two bottle caps, and a bullfrog for my feat. For a few minutes there, I was the talk of the town.

The difficulty came removing the ping-pong ball from my nostril.

It was stuck! I had a ping-pong ball wedged up my right nostril, and it would not come out.

I tried to blow it out by covering my other nostril with my thumb, Ricky Rice tried knocking it out with his fist (very painful), and Mrs. Warner, the school cook, tried a lubricant of lard and twisted and squeezed my nose with a garlic press. Nothing worked.

Finally the principal, Mr. Van Over, drove me to the doctor.

Who was my Dad!

They stretched me out on the x-ray table. Dad had a big bright light strapped to his forehead. Alice O’Keefe handed him sterile instruments from a stainless steel tray, and tried not to laugh.

"Alvin, stay still!" she warned me. "This is a very delicate operation!"

I stared up at my father and said, "You have beautiful eyes!"

"Where did I go wrong?" Dad asked the room.

The worse thing was, Mr. Van Over took me back to school - but I wasn't a hero any more. Warner S. Garnersnake had inserted a ping-pong ball up BOTH his nostrils, and successfully extracted them. Warner S. Garnersnake was the big ping-pong-ball-up-the-nostril-champ-of-the-school and my groundbreaking efforts were forgotten!

Not only that, my right nostril was all stretched out for about a week after that like a wart hog snout. I had learned the price of fame at an early age.

Our elementary school was one of the OLDEST buildings in the state.

It was full of surprises, like the hole in the stairs that kids could fall through and disappear forever. The cafeteria had iron chains and shackles installed in the walls. Then there was the evil Boiler Room, where kids got swats.

The school was so old-fashioned that we didn’t even have electric clocks, buzzers or intercoms. A big iron bell hung at the top of the stairs outside Mr. Pells' room. Somebody had to run out and ring it between classes.

Now that my homeroom was upstairs, I was finally eligible to ring the bell. I had waited a long time for this.

I was so excited when my turn came that I could barely concentrate on math or history or much anything else. Finally, Mr. Pells looked at his watch and nodded.

The hallway was vast and deserted. My footsteps echoed eerily. When I yanked the string to ring the bell for recess, the string broke and fell to the floor at my feet.

I didn’t know what to do! Just then, Dennis Holtz walked by on his way to the bathroom. Dennis was always in trouble with the teachers, but he was really a good guy. He made a cage with his hands and gave me a leg up, but the bell was still a jillion miles away.

Mr. Pells caught us in the hallway and started hollering.

"Dennis!?! What are you doing out of class? Get yourself down to the Boiler Room, Mr! NOW!!!"

I was so scared, I just stood there petrified. Then Mr. Pells came over and lifted me up in his long arms, so I could tie the string back together. His breath smelled like spearmint gum.

CLANG!

"Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!" all the kids screamed, as they poured out of the school building for recess.

"All right now!" Mr. Pells exclaimed, handing out huge pieces of paper, the kind with little chunks of wood pressed in the surface and dotted lines across the bottom of the page to somehow correct your penmanship if you write as big as a giant. "I want you to draw a picture."

Hot dog! I was a good drawer. I drew every chance I could. It is safe to say I would choose drawing over math any day.

Lately I was in a boat phase. I drew boats with huge hulls and rows of portholes filled with smiling passengers, gigantic smokestacks billowing curling smoke - flowing (for greater realism) in the opposite direction the boat was traveling. For today’s assignment I added a fenced in area on the deck filled with zoo animals: zebras, giraffes, lions, and bears, even penguins. I drew a double row of portholes, because this was a luxury liner, and peppered the sky with parachuting Marines.

At the end of the period, Mr. Pells held up my drawing so everyone could see.

"Tell us, Alvin. What did you do over the summer vacation?"

I had been so busy drawing that I’d neglected to pay attention to the teacher’s instructions. I didn’t get the whole assignment. I thought he just wanted a drawing.

"Ummm - I went to France."

Everyone’s eyes in the room zoomed in on me. I could tell Mr. Pells was very impressed.

"France?" he asked. "Really? Students, we have a ‘Continental' (Mr. Pells put quotes around the word with his fingers) in our midst!"

Murmurs of awe rose around the room.

"How was the voyage, Alvin?"

"Well, let’s see..." I said, stalling, "I got on a biiiiiig boat... and got off in France!"

Mr. Pells, who had never shown quite as much interest in me before, said, "Alvin, did you steam out of New York?"

"Yeh, steamed," I repeated.

"Whom did you go with?" asked Mr. Pells.

Much murmuring occurred when I indicated I had traveled solo.

"What was it like?" Jo Ann Henderson sighed.

"Well, everyone was French..."

"Duh," Nicky Folger sniggered.

"They talked French. And cooked a lot of French food."

"What did you eat there?"

"Oh, French fries. And French toast. Snails."

"Snails!" everyone screeched. "Yuck!"

"Calm down class," Mr. Pells cautioned.

Dozens of dizzying questions followed. Did I travel alone? Did I climb the Eiffel tower? Where did I stay? Did I see the Mona Lisa? Did I wear a beret? Did I meet Charles de Gaulle? Why didn’t I send some postcards, anyway?

Sitting across the aisle from me, Shannon Moon glared at me. I prayed she wouldn’t blow my cover. I wanted to get a good grade.

She approached me at recess.

Shannon Moon: "You didn’t go to France."

"Did so."

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

"Liar. You went to Chicago."

She had me there.

"Don’t tell," I whispered, I begged. "I don’t want to get a bad grade."

Shannon Moon: "I won’t tell. But you have to play with me."

Now what was that all about, I pondered?

When I got home, Maddonna was waiting for me in the kitchen, like a cat outside a mouse hole.

"Bonjour, Alveen," she grinned.

I stopped dead in my tracks. How did she know? It was like Madonna had radar.

"You gonna tell Mom?" I sighed.

"We’ll see," she said, wisely (you’ve got to admit).

That night, while we were sitting down to dinner, my brothers chanted:

to the tune of "The Arabian Nights".

Was there an underground movement dedicated to making me look foolish, or something?

Luckily, the incident eventually blew over.

A couple weeks later, I noticed Mom knitting, a serene smile playing across her face. When she finished she called me to her bedside and presented me with a wool beret.

"There you go," she said, cocking the black beret at a jaunty angle on my head.

She observed her craftsmanship, smiling as mysteriously as the Mona Lisa.

"Parlez vous Francais?" she smirked.

"Non," I replied, warily.

"Mom, can I stay over at Dennis Holtz’s place this weekend?"

"Dennis Holtz? I didn’t know you knew Dennis Holtz," Mom replied nervously.

"Yeh, he’s really a good guy!" I said. "He lives on a cattle farm. There are horses and everything. I might even get to milk a cow!"

Mom may have been an invalid, but she was way in charge of everything from her hospital bed. She had a phone installed next to her pillow.

She managed to talk to Mrs. Holtz while juggling a cigarette between her lips. "Hello? Elenore? This is Val. Much better, thank you. That would be wonderful. He’d love to! Are you sure it won’t be a bother? Well, of course. Naturally. I'll pack his church clothes. And we'll have to have Dennis over! Why, thank you. All right, bye now!"

So Friday after school I rode the school bus home with Dennis Holtz.

We stepped off the bus and there before us was... the Holtz Ranch! A perfect farm - almost identical to my sister's plastic Fisher-Price^® Family Play Farm - with a big red barn, a gigantic grain silo, and right in the middle a gleaming white farmhouse with a wide-open welcoming front porch. The Holtz ranch had been awarded the Darigold/4H Blue Ribbon award for the most outstanding farm in Pacific County for the past five years. The vegetable patch was arranged in precise, weedless rows, every flower bed meticulously manicured, hoses expertly coiled, the driveway clear of debris, all enclosed by neatly whitewashed fences. The Holtz Ranch made Disneyland look like a ghetto.

"What do you want to do first?" Dennis asked. "Have you ever hypnotized a chicken?"

I had not.

1. Make the chicken stare at the ground, any way you can.
2. Draw a straight line on the ground from the tip of the chicken's beak to a point at least twelve inches away. (Hint: you can draw a line in the dirt with a stick, like we did - or if you are in an urban neighborhood you can draw a straight line on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk.)
3. The chicken will remain HYPNOTIZED, staring at the ground, until a loud sound breaks the spell.

"I don't believe it!" I whispered.

"Check this out," Dennis breathed. "Several chickens can be hypnotized at once for spectacular results!!!"

"Really?" I asked. I imagined a chorus line of chickens performing Oklahoma.

Moving around on tiptoe, we arranged half the chicken population in a semi-circle of frozen poses before a familiar voice broke the spell.

"Dennis!" hollered Herman Herman.

The chickens scattered.

Herman Herman strutted over. "Your mom will tan your hide if you upset the egg count."

"Gee whiz," Dennis grumbled.

I scuffed my toe innocently in the dirt, trying to wipe out the incriminating lines we had drawn.

When he wasn't in school, Herman Herman worked for the Holtz's. He was Mr. Holtz's right hand man. He ate with the Holtz family and slept in the bunkhouse. The Holtz's provided Herman with more stability than he found at home with his own clan. He was a heck of a ranch hand, and had the broad shoulders and chiseled muscles to prove it. Herman Herman had been earning his own living since he was twelve years old.

"Come on," Herman said slyly, "let's show Alvin here the grain silo."

I wasn't sure if the suggestion was in my best interests, but I went along with it anyway.

When I craned my neck and looked straight up the side of the grain silo, it seemed to soar up into the clouds. There was a long aluminum ladder leading up to a tiny opening about a mile high.

"You first," Herman Herman offered, gallantly.

I glanced apprehensively up the long ladder. Dennis stood by, looking innocently in the opposite direction, whistling. So I started clambering upward, trying not to seem scared. But I was scared. Petrified!

Step by step, I made it to the top. The air seemed thinner up there. The window in the side of the silo was a lot larger than it looked from the ground, vast and dark, smelling sweetly of corn.

I dared look down only once - Herman and Dennis were mere specks. I gripped the sides of the ladder so tight my knuckles turned white.

"Okay, Alvin! Come on back down!" Herman Herman hollered.

That was easy for him to say.

"Jump!" Dennis Holtz screamed. "Jump! Jump!"

I reached one foot down, but could not find the next step. My toe probed the open air. I was afraid to loosen my death grip on the ladder to lower myself any further. When I glanced down for just an instant to see where to place my sneaker, the distance to the ground made my head spin. Fortunately, my friends could not hear me whimpering from that height.

"Jump!" Dennis yelled again. His ability of mouthing off at inappropriate moments was a quality Dennis had cultivated as fruitfully as his parent's pea patch.

"Ha! Ha!" I hollered.

Down below, Dennis and Herman Herman started fighting.

"Shut up!"

"Ow!"

There were no two ways about it; I had to reach the next rung on my own. I squeezed my eyes shut, loosened my grip a bit, let my left leg dangle... until my foot finally felt a solid surface.

Whew! The next step wasn't quite as scary. After that, each step got easier. When I finally landed on earth, Dennis and Herman Herman were still scuffling. Herman had him in a half nelson, followed by a mega-wedgie.

"All right! I give!" Dennis laughed, readjusting his briefs.

"Gee, Alvin. Glad you could join us," Herman Herman teased. "Come on, girls. We've got plenty of chores to do before supper."

How I hated being condescended.

"Giddy-up!" I giggled. Little did I realize just how prophetic my remark would prove.

Brushing off the seat of his jeans, Herman Herman led us briskly toward the barn. It was the biggest building I had ever been in - bigger than the gym, or the Catholic Church. Empty in the early afternoon, the milking stalls were vacant; water evaporated in patches on the recently sprayed cement floors; a few flies buzzed lazily in circles.

It was cool and quiet. The air smelled earthy in there. The odors of detergents mixed with the aroma of manure. Herman Herman paused to coil a hose properly. He had a physique like Paul Newman in Hud.

The barn was partitioned in half, one end divided into milking stalls, the other end consisting of half a dozen horse stalls and a large tack room. I looked up and was startled by the number of birds nesting in the rafters - swallows, starlings, even owls - the fluttering of their wings echoed eerily above.

The tack room was in the back of the barn. Herman Herman leapt athletically over the lower half of the French door, then unlatched it for us mortals. A second French door on the opposite wall opened into the corral, where I heard horse hoofs and heavy breathing.

The tack room was filled with big bales of hay and alfalfa, barrels of oats, an assortment of saddles, bridles, harnesses, horse blankets, curry combs, hoof picks- just about everything equestrian you could think of. I liked the feel of the place. The floor was covered with sawdust.

"Here you go, Alvin," Herman Herman nonchalantly announced, piling a heavy leather saddle, blanket, and bridle in my outstretched arms. I wasn’t prepared; the weight of the load felled me to my knees, to the merriment of my companions.

Regaining my footing, I wobbled out the back door to the corral. My feet instantly sunk in mud, interfering again with my equilibrium. When I tried to pull my foot out, my stocking foot pulled free from my sneaker, which stuck in the muck. I did a balancing act equal to a carnival acrobat, juggling the saddle and tack while I retrieved and replaced my muddy shoe.

The corral contained four horses that stared warily at me. My tenderfoot status telegraphed itself instantly to the livestock. The horses looked haughty, even a little hostile, to me. Tall, too.

"Say," I asked one of them. "Why the long face?"

I had never ridden a horse before.

Dennis helped me saddle Cosmo, a reticent mare, whom he promised was gentle.

I waited while Dennis and Herman Herman saddled and mounted their horses. Dennis rode a spotted pinto named Bean. Herman Herman commandeered a gigantic ebony mount called Gunner. I distinguished myself by placing the wrong foot in the stirrup and mounting poor old Cosmo backwards!

We moved on out, my esteem as deflated as a leaky balloon. Cosmo kept starting and stopping and starting again and stopping again, or trying to turn around and head back home.

"Nice horse," I tried, but we still lagged behind my colleagues. Dennis dropped back and rode beside me, offering riding tips.

"Just relax," he advised, helpfully.

We rode out across the tussocks, what they called the South Fork, checking the fences for holes. A couple hundred cows, both beef and dairy, grazed across the wide property. Sometimes Herman or Dennis would break off to chase a stray back to the herd. After a while I gained enough confidence to lope along after them, too. If I squeezed my legs a little, Cosmo would canter; even though she was an older animal, she had a lot of spunk.

"Race you!" Dennis yelled, trotting up to us and swatting Cosmo’s behind. Cosmo leapt forward, nearly spilling her rider.

"Hold on, Alvin!" Herman Herman called. "Loosen your reigns!"

This made about as much sense as turning a car into the skid on black ice, but I wasn’t in the position to debate the issue. I leaned forward, allowing the horse to stretch her neck out further, and felt her incredible power as we thundered across the range. I bounced up and down in the hard saddle at what seemed a billion bounces a second. My poor b-b-b-butt!!! It was a harder paddling than even Mr. Van Over handed out!

Dennis and Herman Herman galloped up on either side and slowed us down to almost a trot. We took a lazy left turn over the ridge, where a small creek tricked through the trees, slowing the horses some more. Finally we were able to dismount and give the animals a well-deserved drink.

When I swung off the horse, my legs felt as rubbery as if I’d been on a boat.

"That was fun!" I declared.

"Ah’ll tell you, Alvin," Herman Herman chuckled. "For a minute there, I thought you were goners. You were lucky old Cosmo didn’t drop you off in the next county!"

He was joshing me, of course. I had passed their initiation - but I would never match the skill with which Dennis and Herman Herman handled horses. I was lucky just to keep up with them.

Riding back, Dennis pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and played while we plodded along. His sad cowboy melodies seemed to soothe Bean, Gunner, and Cosmo.

Dennis was adopted. Folks said when he was little his parents used to tie him to chairs and beat and burn him, or lock him in the cold damp basement for days without anything to eat or drink. That’s where the authorities found Dennis after his birth parents abandoned him. Maybe that’s why his harmonica playing sounded so sad.

Back in the barn, I learned how much work it was to clean a stable. While Dennis and I hauled hay and filled water buckets for the hungry horses, Herman led the fourth horse in the corral to it’s stable. He was a skinny, swaybacked Arabian with gray hair peppering his dark coat.

"Who’s that?" I asked.

"That’s Dad’s prize-winning racehorse, Daisy," Dennis said, with reverence in his voice.

"Don’t you boys forget," Herman Herman warned us, "the number one rule on this farm is: don’t mess with Daisy. Don’t even think about riding him. Daisy was the Grand Champion rodeo horse in Pacific County for ten years running. His studding fee is ten thousand dollars!"

"Gee!" I geeed.

That night at the dinner table, exhausted after feeding, sweeping, shoveling, and grooming the variety of livestock that comprised an award-winning farm, Mr. Holtz asked me, "Well, Alvin. You think you wanna be a farmer?"

Mr. Holtz seemed extremely serious. I weighed my response carefully.

"Alvin?" Mrs. Holtz inquired, kindly. "Wake up, honey!"

I had fallen asleep at the Holtz’s dinner table!

That night, Dennis and I stayed up long past curfew, reading comic books in his bedroom by flashlight. Dennis Holtz introduced me to Spider-man! Dennis had an orange crate of comic books hidden deep in his clothes closet. The box was covered with a thin layer of "Bible Stories in Comic Book Form," the only kind of comics Mr. And Mrs. Holtz allowed in their stern, Pentecostal household. Digging deeper in the box, Dennis produced his cherished collection of Spider-man comic books.

Huddled together under the covers, Dennis acquainted me to Peter Parker, a high school genius who got bit by a radioactive spider on a field trip. Somehow he got changed into a half-spider/half-teenager, which made his life very difficult.

I was mesmerized by the uniqueness of Spidey’s double existence. Why, it was Tolstoyan in its complexity.

Under Dennis Holtz’s tutelage, I was introduced to the sordid underworld of New York City, where nefarious villains like Sandman, Mysterio, The Living Brain, and The Green Goblin plotted ingenious bank robberies and jewel thefts, only to be thwarted by the impervious Spider-man who, as his alter-ego Peter Parker, couldn’t get a date with the girl he desired because she was totally obsessed with Spidey! It was a predicament Dostoevsky would have died for.

In addition, Peter remained psychotically devoted to his antediluvian aunt, who looked scarier, frankly, than the rest of the villains Spider-man battled against.

In those days, comic books cost twelve cents (or two for a quarter, counting tax). I had a pile of Superman comics under my bed. The thing I thought was cool about Superman was he had blue hair. In his closet he had a bunch of Superman robots, whom he would send off on simple missions like dedicating bridges or accepting the keys to the city people were constantly offering, when Superman was too busy saving the world. I always visualized having robots in my clothes closet that I could send to school to take math tests for me.

"We should probably go to sleep," Dennis yawned, around 2:30 a.m.

"Sure," I assured him; then stayed up until four thirty to find out how Spidey dealt with Dr. Octopus, The Evil Enforcers, The Terrible Tinkerer, The Vulture, Dr. Doom, The Lizard, and (especially) Betty Bryant.

The next day was Saturday. Mrs. Holtz prepared an amazing breakfast that would have put my dad to shame. There were pancakes, scrambled eggs, home-made pork sausage AND bacon, hash browns, trout, applesauce, peaches, okra, fried green tomatoes, and I kid you not, possum.

In addition to being warned not to touch a single hair on Daisy’s head for the fourth time (I was still confused why the Holtz’s gave the mares male names and the stallions female names), both Mr. Holtz and Herman Herman took us aside that morning. Mr. Holtz bought a new Cadillac for Mrs. Holtz’s 20^th wedding anniversary present. The car was stashed behind the barn, covered in tarps.

Stay away from the vehicle, we were instructed in no uncertain terms!

Dennis and I waddled across the driveway after breakfast.

"What do you want to do?" Dennis asked.

"I don’t know," I pondered.

"You want to smoke a cigarette?" Dennis suggested.

"Ick!" I said.

Dennis snuck into the kitchen and took a cigarette from his mother’s purse.

"Where should we smoke this?" he inquired.

"How about the new Cadillac?" I ventured. See, I possessed very poor judgement.

Dennis and I slipped under the canvas covering the Cadillac and sat upon the virgin leather upholstery of the new car.

Dennis pushed in the cigarette lighter and lit the fag.

"Ah," he sighed, expelling smoke. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should!"

I had been assigned to watch out the drivers side rear view mirror, which we had adjusted to be visible under the tarp. When Mr. Holtz walked around the corner of the barn, I frantically flashed hand signals.

Mr. Kool took another luxurious puff. My semaphore was not translating very well.

"It’s you dad!" I squeaked.

Dennis began to choke on the cigarette. Suppressing his coughs, he crushed the lit cigarette between the seat cushions of the front seat and slid to the floor. He reached up one arm and frantically tugged me down next to him.

We stayed there until the danger passed, then wisely saddled our horses and lit out across the tussocks again. We were never coming back.

By lunchtime we started to get hungry. We turned the horses around, and noticed a black plume of smoke rising in the distance.

"What’s that?" Dennis asked. Tears trickled down his cheeks.

When we drew closer we could see that the smoke was issuing from the Cadillac; Mr. Holtz and Herman Herman pulled the smoldering front seat from the vehicle, and were dousing the leather interior with garden hoses.

For some strange reason, our punishment consisted of not being allowed to attend church with the rest of the family the next morning. Mr. And Mrs. Holtz drove off down the driveway Sunday morning, nary a smile between them.

"What do you want to do?" Dennis asked.

"I don’t know," I replied, honestly.

Dennis owned an old stopwatch. We decided to time ourselves racing our horses up the Holtz’s long driveway.

After a few heats, I said, "That race horse of your dad’s must be pretty fast."

"Daisy?" Dennis asked.

We saddled Daisy and led her to the starting line. Dennis climbed into the saddle; I climbed on behind him, facing backwards, grasping the great racehorse’s tail with both hands.

Dennis activated the stopwatch, and dug his heels into Daisy’s flanks.

The next thing we knew, we were lying in the driveway.

"What the hell happened?" Dennis swore.

"Uh, oh."

Twenty feet down the driveway, Daisy lay on her side, her tongue protruding from her mouth.

Daisy was dead.

So were we.

Dennis' dad never quite forgave us. He did not say a single word while Daisy’s carcass was dragged down the driveway by the renderer.

Mr. Holtz probably spoke two words to me the rest of my life. I was still allowed to visit the Holtz farm (after being grounded six months), and became a better rider because of it. One Christmas Mrs. Holtz gave me a King James Bible.

My parents were not quite as tongue-tied. "It is inconceivable," my father proclaimed, "that you could have destroyed as much property in one weekend as the combined Allied forces on D-Day!"

I was so sorry, so shamed; so grounded.

Regardless, Dennis bopped up to me on the playground Monday morning like nothing happened.

"Hi, Alvin," he said. "What are you doing next weekend?"

Every time my parents told me they had a surprise for me, I knew I was doomed.

When my parents announced they had a surprise for Orman, they put braces on his teeth. When they told Tooey they had a surprise for him, he got orthopedic shoes. When Mom said, "We have a surprise for you, Alvin," I knew I was going to hate whatever my parents were plotting, I mean, planning.

"Your father and I have enrolled you in piano lessons!" Mom proclaimed, as pleased as punch. "Consider it an early birthday present!"

I withheld comment, a tactic that puts grown-ups at a disadvantage. Mom lit a cigarette and inhaled half of it. "Alvin, I expect an answer," she prompted, exhaling a long stream of smoke.

"Yes, Mother," I said, placing a brown paper bag over my head.

She inhaled the rest of the cigarette. "You’ll thank me for this some day," she sighed, her voice sounding as mournful as Eeyore the donkey.

They told Tooey the same thing about his corrective shoes, which he hid in the ivy outside our house and replaced with sneakers before he left for school in the mornings.

In Orman’s case, my parents put braces on his teeth in the autumn as an advance Christmas gift. The next Christmas Eve Orman, Tooey, and I went down in the basement and removed the braces with a hacksaw, a chisel, a pair of needle nosed pliers, and wire cutters. "Here’s a surprise for you!" Orman announced, baring a ghastly gory grin, to the horror of our poor parents.

Mrs. Tilden, the piano teacher, had to be ninety if she were a day. She conducted her lessons in the back of the gymnasium during noon recess, in a closet barely big enough for her Holland grand upright piano. Basketballs and prison balls banged against the wall and shook the room throughout each lesson. I considered Mrs. Tilden’s piano classes a form of punishment devised by adults to pay for all my past, present, and future sins.

Mrs. Tilden shared my piano bench, forcing me to keep scooting down until I almost fell off the other end. The room reeked of Tou Va Chez, the same perfume contestants of What’s My Line were given as a consolation prize. Her long dangling earrings were as gaudy as chandeliers.

"No! No! No!" she barked repeatedly. "Haven’t you been practicing? A serious student of the piano should devote an hour a day to practicing the scales!"

As if.

Every afternoon after school Mom struggled to make me practice. I slumped at the piano in the living room, half-heartedly plinking the black keys with my right index finger, my chin resting in the palm of my other hand.

"Alvin, sit up!" Mom pleaded. "Get your elbow off the piano, dear. Most children would be grateful for the opportunity to take piano lessons," she encouraged from her hospital bed, half way across the room.

I honestly did not know how she stood it. Compared to the torture of my piano practice, being stretched on the rack would be far easier to endure. It would be a pleasure, in fact.

The worse part was the putrid material Mrs. Tilden made me play. There was one piece I particularly loathed, called Piccolo Pete. It was an obnoxious song about some freak called Piccolo Pete, who walked down the street. I can’t remember anything else about him because it was the worse piece of crap of a song I had ever heard in my whole life.

What kind of a name was that, Piccolo Pete? I could never figure out why it was played on the piano in the first place. Shouldn’t it, by all rights, be performed on a piccolo?

Piccolo Pete had words, but when I tried singing them Mrs. Tilden scolded, "No singing, young man! I am a piano instructor, not a voice teacher!"

So I practiced the wretched thing a billion times, making the same mistakes in the same places over and over and over again because I hated it so much and just wanted to shoot baskets and dodge prison balls like a normal kid.

Finally Mrs. Tilden announced, "Marvelous! I want you to perform Piccolo Pete in the fall piano recital!"

The only other person I knew who played the piano was Mark Dean. Don’t you think it’s funny when someone has a first name for both a first and last name? Anyway, Mark Dean was from Aberdeen. His grandmother, a soft touch named Hazel, lived three doors down; neighborhood kids knew Hazel was always good for a cookie.

Aberdeen was a tough town. Mark was only fifteen, but he smoked cigarettes, drove illegally, and had long blonde hair like Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. One night Mark Dean lost his left arm in an accident when he was hit by a logging truck while riding a stolen bike along a dark highway. Regardless, Mark played the piano like Horowitz, even one handed. Mark had an open invitation to stop by our place whenever he was in town and play our piano.

Mark got along really well with my mom. They would visit for hours, chatting and smoking cigarettes together. For some reason, Mom didn’t mind Mark’s long hair, and Mark didn’t seem the least bit fazed that Mom was confined to a hospital bed in the middle of the living room. He would serenade her with his one-armed arrangements, filling the house with classical music worthy of Carnegie Hall.

One day Mark chanced by while I was in the middle of murdering Piccolo Pete.

"Alvin! Stop torturing that piano!" he cringed.

Mark had acquired a prosthetic arm. It was made of plastic and stainless steel, attached to the stump where his elbow had been, and had a hook that opened and closed kind of like a hand.

Now, there was a rock and roll band at the time called Paul Revere and the Raiders, made famous by weekly T.V. appearances on American Bandstand. Mark Dean told me he was in a local band called Captain Hook and the Pirates.

"Really?" I fawned. I was very impressed.

"Yeh," he admitted modestly. "We really stink," confessed the classically trained pianist.

"You know, Alvin," Mark said encouragingly, seating himself beside me on the piano bench and sweeping his good arm up and down the keyboard in a perfect arpeggio, "music is just a bunch of notes."

I had no clue what he was saying.

"Can you teach me to play Louie Louie, Mark?"

"Rock and roll is easy," he said. "You just need to know a few chords."

"I haven’t learned about chords yet," I confessed.

"This is a chord," Mark demonstrated, striking several keys at the same time.

A heavenly sound rang out and resonated through the whole house, through my very soul, in fact.

He spread my fingers and helped me form my first chord. "C," he instructed. "C-sharp. D. D-sharp. F. F-sharp. G is easy. A and B. B-sharp. Get it?"

I got it very quickly. Soon I was pounding out a sloppy version of Louie Louie!

"Boogie-woogie!" Mark demonstrated. "Vary the tempo. Pedal adds echo or sustain."

I learned more in a half hour with Mark Dean than I had in two months with Mrs. Tilden. Enough to be dangerous.

"Where are you going, Alvin?" the kids taunted me as I hurried toward the piano room at the back of the crowded, noisy gymnasium. I couldn’t wait to show Mrs. Tilden what I had learned.

I was so excited I couldn’t even sit down. I cracked my knuckles and proceeded to pound on the keyboard, wailing "Wop bop a doo lop, ram bam boom!"

"Stop that!" Mrs. Tilden shrieked. "Young man, cease this horrible racket!"

I couldn’t stop. I was on fire. I imagined myself Jerry Lee Lewis, Jelly Roll Morton, and Little Richard all rolled into one!

When Mr. Van Over tore open the door to see what all the screaming was about, the kids stopped playing basketball and gawked in silent amazement at my bizarre performance.

I got so carried away I started doing hand stands on the keyboard, kicking my legs up in the air behind me, bellowing "Tooty fruity! Aw rooty!" before Mr. Van Over and Mr. Pells dragged me off to the boiler room.

"Get out!" Mrs. Tilden screamed. "Don’t you ever dare darken this doorway again, Alvin Egg!"

At least I didn’t have to worry about playing Piccolo Pete at the fall piano recital.

"I give up," Mom sighed despondently when I got home.

"Alvin, what’s wrong with you?" Mom pleaded from the hospital bed in the middle of our living room. Dad was absent, rushed to the hospital to try and treat Mrs. Tilden’s skyrocketing blood pressure. "You have been in nothing but trouble the past few months. What are you thinking? Where’s my little boy?"

I stared at my feet. I was thinking about a Little Golden Record I used to play over and over on my red plastic phonograph on the kitchen floor while Mom and her friends laughed and played Mahjong at the kitchen table. It was a musical version of Pinnochio; there was a silly little song the puppet/boy sang repeatedly:

I thought about crossing the living room to the piano and crooning it for my dear mother. But then I thought better of it.

"I’m Alvin," I sighed. "I’m bad."

"I think you had better go up to your room until your father gets home," Mom said, lighting a cigarette.

I went upstairs and played Jailhouse Rock about fifteen times in a row to make myself feel better.

After that, everyone started calling me T. Capital T, for T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

"T!" Dad would call. "Where’s T?"

 Chapter Three: Nineteen Seventies

We were now a four stereo family.

Twenty, sometimes thirty minutes would pass without seeing a single car. Occasionally a driver would stop and offer me a ride, but I’d usually decline (unless it was a pretty Clatsop College coed). I wasn’t going anywhere fast. I just liked walking. Liked the sound of my footsteps in the dark. Didn’t sound the same in the daytime.