Travelling through the past

I was thinking of my father's Hillman Scout that he drove when we lived in our second home in North Indianapolis until 1964. There wasn't much to it. It was a tiny miniature panel truck, an English truck which is no longer made. Not saved like the Mini-Cooper. Just saved in my memory and a few old photographs.

My father would drive around North Indianapolis with me in the bucket seat beside him. We would roll the vented windows open to give us some cool air in the Summer heat. He kept a grey-leather cased radio in the car and we listened to folk music from a radio station in Indianapolis.

At night, dad would pull out the old Martin guitar which had been my great, great (I really don't know how many greats) grandmother's guitar. We would sit in lawn chairs on the grass in the back and dad would play "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" and "Has Anybody Seen My Gal" and "Goober Peas." Sometimes on car rides to Hopkinsville and Clarksville, we would sing "Goober Peas" and other songs while we drove up the Kentucky Turnpike toward Louisville.

I remember driving through downtown Louisville and going over the bridge from downtown Louisville up to rural Indiana. I specifically remember looking down on the Ohio River and seeing the boats running upriver toward Cincinnati and Pittsburgh or downriver toward Evansville, Owensboro, Paducah and St. Louis or New Orleans. One of the original superhighways flowing beneath the very bridge over which we travelled.

When I was about seven or so, my grandmother Gary and I would spar and pretend to be Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. I always played Cassius Clay, because he was from Kentucky, just like me. Dee Dee would condescend to be Sonny Liston. We would spar until it was time to run into the kitchen and eat a popsickle or drink water from the individual water bottle kept there by our grandmother so that every child would have his or her own bottle.

Sometimes, after supper, we would have chess pie or pecan pie or chocolate pie. I loved pie, still do. My grandmother said that if you ate too much pie your stomach would fall. When I look into the mirror, I sometimes think her prophecy came true.

After Jenny Stuart Memorial Hospital bought her house for expansion, she moved into an apartment in town. Late at night, the man who lived upstairs would get dressed for work. He was a policeman and his heavy boots hit a hard tatoo on the floor above. Thank goodness, my grandmother was deaf and would not hear the footfalls from above.

Ed and Cicely and Frank and I would run errands for Dee Dee, walking over to Giles Grocery Store for something she needed. Later Momma and Aunt Meg might take us to swim in the swimming pool at the club out off the highway to Clarksville. They might even take us to Jerry's for hamburgers. Sometimes we might go to visit the Clarks or Aunt Ruth or Aunt Ease while we were in town.

Sometimes we would drive down 41A to Clarksville and visit Aunt Mamie in her homeon Franklin Street. She always gave us a cold coca cola before we left. Her house was emaculate and way too large for one little old lady. Later, if grandmommie was with us, she might take us down the street to Goode Wilson's pharmacy and give us a dollar to buy a model or a comic book or something to amuse us when we got back to the farm.

The farm was an amazing collection of places to explore. The stables were a place where we could climb up into the loft and look for chicken eggs or chase doves out the barn or look down into the tack room at all the equipment for the mules.

Out in the fields, we might find blackberries in the bog, or go fishing in the pond or go find arrow points in the ground outside the back barn. On the edge of the fields, we might walk into the woods and find the bones of cattle who went to die alone in the woods. Like rudimentary dentists we would take the teeth out of the jaws of the skeletal cow skulls and bring them back to the house to show the adults.

Later, after supper, we would sit in the squeaky chairs under the trees out in front of the farmhouse and listen to the bob white quail call in the trees above us. The adults would talk and Frank and I would take turns swinging on the tire swing hung from a tree out front. It would be summer, but we would always be so cool under the trees in the twilight. Before I-24 was constructed along the western edge of the farm, the air was quiet except for the lowing of the cattle and the sound of the beetles and crickets in the trees.

That night, Frank and I would climb into the bed in the front bedroom and the sound of the airconditioning unit in the window would lull us into a deep, deep sleep. A sleep so deep like nothing I have been able to experience in a long, long time. An honest sleep, without troubles and trials and the worries of today.

Oh to sleep like that again.