This
morning, I was thinking about when I was a kid, about the farm across the
river from ours and the folks who lived there.
Things were a lot
different in my recollection than they are now. The old-timers of the
Ozarks had only a slightly different concept of land ownership than the
Native Americans did; that is, land's only value was what you could
produce on it. Owning six or eight hundred acres didn't mean that
you were wealthy. I recall that the son of the man that owned the largest
single piece of property in the state of Missouri (over 16,000 acres at
the time) was one of my classmates. In retrospect, I can see that
the family must have been fairly comfortable, but not the sort of thing
you'd expect now. They didn't stand out in a small Ozark community
in the early '50's.
The farm I was thinking about was all that large, about six hundred acres,
mostly in woods, but there was enough open meadow to make a meager living
from a few head of beef and dairy cattle.
From our house,
you could see the house and barn about a mile across the S. Jack’s Fork valley. You could see that, and some of the fields, and if it was a clear
and quiet morning, you might hear Goldie yodeling as she tended
her milk cows.
I used to think that this was fantastic that; a human could make such
sounds, and that they would carry so far. Gene Autry used to yodel quite
a bit in those days, but that was on the radio. Who knew if his voice
would carry that far in the open air?
Anyway, I was remembering those folks across the valley,
practically the only neighbors I knew until I was six or seven. They were
Bill and Goldie Pringle.
This was during a period when much of my life’s knowledge and experience
came directly from Donald Duck. Nobody in Duckburg was what you’d call “normal”,
not if “normal” meant being like Dick and Jane’s parents. Dick and Jane
were such out-of-it, goody-two-shoes losers, compared to Donald Duck.
(The truth is, I hated
Dick and Jane and their whole family. Everybody was always smiling -
these days you'd assume they were stoned - and their idea of big yucks was
when Fluff would fall into the sewing basket or something equally banal.
But I digress.)
Bill and Goldie fit right into my world-view, because they were so much
like cartoon characters. Bill was a short fat little man, about the size
of Santa, to my mind. Like a cartoon character, he always wore the same
clothes: a battered old fedora that looked like he’d been born in it, bib
overalls with a red or blue bandanna hanging out of one back pocket, and
work shoes that usually had open wounds on the sides. During the winter,
or for a trip to town, he might get all dolled-up by adding a blue
chambray work shirt and socks. He always had a crooked pipe which he was
always relighting or refilling with Prince Albert tobacco, source of as
pungent a smoke as civilized man has ever known. Somehow, he managed to
always have the stubble of beard.
When my father would take me to Bill and Goldie’s I knew that I had to at
least feign an interest in whatever the men were doing, otherwise I might
wind up spending time with Goldie.
She was a nice enough old lady, I guess, but unlike Bill and most all the other
neighborhood
cartoon characters, Goldie made it clear that she was very real due to her
tendency to hug small children to her bosom.
This in itself was a traumatic experience as Goldie’s bosom was vast and
all-encompassing, and frankly not as inviting as the reader might at once
suppose. For if I once found myself plunged into it’s musky depths where
neither light nor oxygen could penetrate, I was stuck there for as long as
she wanted to express her pleasure with me. It was her way of
congratulating me for being six.
All of the women in my immediate family
smelled faintly of soap and flowers and cookies, whereas Goldie’s being
was saturated with cottonseed meal and dust and various cow-odors.
Goldie also wore the same thing every day: a dress made from feed sacks.
This wasn’t raw burlap, but a light cotton material with a small flower
pattern.
(The feed companies had learned that they could improve sales by
offering something for the housewife as well as the livestock. It was the
free software bundle of it’s day.)
While I was still reeling from my near-death experience, Goldie would sit
me down at the kitchen table, which usually held the dishes from at least one
earlier meal, as well as a large yellow tom-cat who seemed to make it his bed.
There,
she would serve me much-too-sweet Kool-Aid and an equally over-sweetened
cake/candy substance.
You know how cartoon characters are always doing something completely
incredible? Impossible feats are just a part of their daily lives.
That’s what I always think of when I try to imagine how someone could put
so much sugar in something that a six-year-old would have trouble getting
it down.
I regret that so much of
my life has become real over the last few decades - the cartoon was great
while it lasted.
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