Tea; Shy With Guests; Clamp-On Roller Skates; Poem.

While we were going to school in St. Stephen’s School, my brother Joe had a classmate friend that he liked a lot. I don’t remember his name. When school was dismissed, I couldn’t find my brother Joe, so I walked home alone. I didn’t know where he could be.  When I got home, our Mommy asked me where he was, and I said I didn’t know.

Finally Mommy phoned (probably from the store down past the alley) to the school or the convent, asking if they knew where he was. They didn’t know either.

After a long while, my little brother Joe came home, and got a big spanking because he went away without asking if he could go.

The next morning the Sister or Mother Superior also gave him a spanking for going away without permission. Ouch!

He hadn’t asked the teaching Sister to go somewhere besides home. He didn’t even go home to ask if he could go to visit this little friend. These two little boys just left the school as classes were dismissed. They walked together to the boy’s house.

I’m not sure who asked him why he did that, whether it was our Mommy, or Daddy, or the Mother Superior, but the story is: “We went to his house for tea.”

I remember some visitors who had come from another state. It was when we lived in the duplex. The Griscavages lived in their house facing Poplar Street, the duplex was in the next yard away from Poplar Street. I was playing somewhere in our little neighborhood, and when the guests came, my mother may have yelled for me to come home. Most parents yelled for their kids to come home – I guess all kids stay within hollering distance.

I arrived at the back door leading to the kitchen, and must have heard strange voices, because I stayed outside on the stoop (the three or four steps into the house), and my mother called me in. I wouldn’t go in, because I knew that my face was dirty as usual from playing. She finally told me to come in – she must have washed my face somehow with a cloth, before I felt I could come in.

The company was from a distance. Could it have been from Michigan or Ohio? It was an older couple and I was quite shy. My Daddy had an old friend who had lived in Rudno in Slovakia in the same ‘yard’ that my Dad had come from.  They also had friends in the other state. I just remember I was very shy.

We used to roller skate on Chestnut Street on our clamp-on skates. My shin splints would get so sore, but I did enjoy roller skating. I’d go up and down on the street usually between one or two streets. I wasn’t allowed to go all the way down to Main Street, or all the way up to the next main street in Larksville. Sometimes there were many kids skating, and older ones, too.

There was an older girl, probably high school age, called ‘Fuzzy’ that was an acquaintance. I used to see her on Buttonwood Street. She’d say hello now and then. Now I wonder if she was Mrs. Helen Griscavage’s sister. I have been thinking of her once in a while, and recently, too. She had blonde hair and was a nice person.

This poem I wrote in August of 1989:

‘T Is Not I

I’ll try to prove

That I can do it

To show you there

Is nothing to it

That I can write

In any season

And make a poem

For any reason.

Sometimes it flows

Out like a stream

That’s when I think

I’m in a dream

It seems as if

I’m not the one

Who wrote this poem

As I am done.




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