Up Yours, Thomas Wolfe

I spent early part of my childhood in one of the smaller houses in the 4500 block of Grand Avenue, located between Tulane and Princeton in southwest Little Rock. It doesn’t look very big and, in truth, it wasn’t. The big front window was formerly flanked by two conical cedar trees, which were eventually cut down for a flower bush. That window opened into the living room. On the west side of the big window were the three bedrooms where Mom, Dad, four boys and three girls daily fought for the one bathroom located in the center of the hall. I still remember the day we installed the showerhead over the tub. It made Saturday night bath time go a lot quicker. A floor furnace was situated in the little square hall around the bedroom doors, where on particularly cold mornings you would find most of us straddled over the grate, the rising heat blowing up our pajamas and nightgowns. In the summer, there was a single large air conditioner on the east side that cooled the whole house. The rest of the time, we relied on open windows. The porch window to the east gave us a view of the street from the dining table, while those looking in could see past it into the galley kitchen and washer/dryer hookup before exiting out the only other door to the outside world, our backyard.For the record, it wasn’t always pink. Sometimes it was a dark brown. It depended on my dad’s mood and his relationship with my neighbors. Fortunately, there wasn’t much to paint… just the porch, the east side of the house and the framework around the windows and under the roof. The rest of the walls of the house were made up of a material similar to our roof, meaning it was covered in tiny glass-like granules, meant to reflect the heat of the sun away from the interior of the house. A friend of mine recently said that material might have been a form of asbestos…always good to know 30 years after the fact.My first memory in this house was climbing out of a crib in the front bedroom to catch my mom watching her afternoon soaps. This is also where the only phonograph record player and radio were located. Sometimes the TV was directly underneath the main window, other times, it separated the living room from the dining area. Since it then faced away from us, we soon became acclimated to eating in the living room and the dining table was relegated to laundry, homework and the occasional game board. I remember the occasional times I couldn’t sleep and snuck out for some late-night viewing. Back then, of course, there were only four stations to choose from and they all signed off after a certain point. Then I was forced to stare at either an Indian-head test pattern or static. I would turn the set off, watching as the glowing screen shrank to a tiny dot before fading away completely in the dark.Other times, I woke up extra early. Usually it was on a Saturday, where I had to suffer through farm reports before the cartoons commenced. On rare occasions, my parents were watching something of special interest. One morning in July of 1969, I poked my head around the corner to see Apollo 11 take off from the Kennedy Space Center on its way to the moon. A few days later man set foot on another astral body for the first time ever. Since it was late at night, I don’t remember if we were allowed to stay up and watch.There was a lot of growing up in that house, not just for me but for all of us, parents included. We learned to cook, some better than others. One time, Mom tried a recipe that called for beer to sauté hamburgers. There was a little too much beer in the mix, so on at least one occasion, some poor cow died in vain. A sister once tried to make brownies that literally bounced off the floor. Another sibling was doing Lord knows what with tomatoes and at least one found its way to the ceiling, where I think it stayed until the day we moved.I still don’t know how Mom and Dad were able to get all us kids up for school without killing at least one kid a day. The girls were allowed first dibs on the bathroom, then the boys. We made our way to the dining room where, depending on the time of year, we had cereal, buttered toast, oatmeal and, occasionally, eggs and bacon. My parents not only cooked for us, but would sometimes feed some kids down the street who they felt didn’t get the nutritional start they thought they needed. We were then all packed into the family station wagon and taken to a nearby parochial school, listening to the Mighty 1090, KAAY, along the way. Not everything was indoors, mind you. There was plenty of play time in the front or back yard or further down the street to play with the Lehmans, the Tedders, the Swindells, the Pattersons and the Greens. Often was the time the grass under the shade of the house was worn down to dirt level by the scamper of growing feet. In the winter, the same shade kept a sliver of ice-hardened snow on the ground long after everything else had melted. Among our favorite games was ‘Hot Lava’ where we took advantage of the two or three swing sets at our disposal and swung off them to stay off the ground, lest we burn our feet. Variations of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘World War II’ often had one or both parents stepping outside to see at least two children lying in a heap on the ground, not daring to show any sign of life until the all-clear was given by the winners. ‘Red Rover’ was also a big hit when there were enough of us, which was often. We got pretty tough trying to break through each other’s line. Street football was also a big hit. We pretty much kept to the ‘touch’ rules, but couldn’t resist the occasional foray into someone’s soft grassy yard where a full tackle was too impulsive to resist. We moved from the neighborhood in the summer of 1973. Rarely was the time we ever found our way back there, but it did happen. This past weekend, I took my family to the Old Mill in North Little Rock for our annual holiday pictures. As we looked for a place to have lunch, the attraction was simply too great for me to pass up. I crossed the Arkansas River to 12th Street and turned at my old Catholic school. As an anchor-reporter in Little Rock two years before, I attended the official closing down of the school after over 100 years of parochial education. The church where many of us received our First Communion remained open, but the windows of the classrooms were now covered in black paint. Finding the house from there will forever be imprinted in my head, having walked that mile or two to the house every day for seven years. A few blocks later, we came into the neighborhood. I mentally noted passing a LRPD squad car doing some investigating before we hit our old street. It had been over 30 years since we stayed longer than a few minutes, but I couldn’t help staring. So much had changed. I expected the row of tall pine trees down the street to be gone or at least pruned to some degree, but not removed completely. Many of the formerly pristine lawns were threadbare and dirty. Cars were parked not only in the driveways, but on the lawns of many houses. City trash bins were left out on the curb, regardless of what day pick-up was. Nearly all the houses had a fence. The street was barely wide enough to allow two cars to pass each other. I pulled into a house at the end of the street to turn around and noticed the place where our neighborhood ‘old lady’ lived. Every street had at least one lady who would yell at the kids to get off their lawns and was never home on Halloween, then would surprise us by being legitimately nice to you around Christmas. Ours was named ‘Old Lady Lydle’. I looked at her house…or rather, where it once stood. I saw a grass-and-debris covered plot of land with a walkway leading to two concrete steps going nowhere.I stopped the car in front of the Patterson’s old house and looked across the street. The house I grew up in was no longer there, not as I knew it. The new owner(s) had expanded the front porch east, enclosed it, replaced the walls with some sort of rock/shale siding and allowed Mother Nature to cut loose on everything else. Where there was a front lawn was now a forest. My wife tugged at my sleeve, motioning forward. Three rather tough-looking guys were sitting on the corner of the Green’s house (now a dirt mound surrounding a fire hydrant) glancing our way. I quickly took a shot of my past with my cell phone and drove off.

Why I'm A Hairy Guy

For the past year or so, I have been striving to do my best as a husband and father, keeping the bills paid with my checks, doing my chores around the house, guiding the young ones with my wisdom and common sense and being as good a partner to my wife as I can. Yet, in this same time period, a lot of questions have come my way regarding the ever-increasing length of my hair…you know, like it was still back in the 60s or some junk. Totally groovy, far out, solid and right on, baby. That’s pretty much where it started. I’ve mentioned spending my youth watching Chad Everett and his flowing locks in the opening segment of ‘Medical Center’ and the Harvey Cartoon where Katnip the Cat sings about his tresses until it started coming out in bunches and he has to rely on Buzzy the Crow to make it grow again. I reveled in reading the exploits of the Mighty Thor, who was never known for his crew cut. Then, there was that poem by George Carlin about ‘being fair with your hair’ and the song by the Cowsills about letting your hair grow until ’it stops by itself’. I used to daydream about how far it would go. Sadly, it was not to be for a long time. My father (who went prematurely bald in his 30s, so I have to rely on VERY old photos to see him with any hair at all) made sure all the boys were close-cropped, parted down the side and sometimes even shaved just above the ears. Fortunately, I seem to have inherited my maternal grandfather’s hair so there was a chance for me later on. In my teen years, I had the chance to let it grow out a little, but not enough to cost me a job or attract the vile ribald jests of some local yokels with whom I had to share the classroom and work area. Even so, one Christmas shortly after graduation, I clearly remember night cruising with my brother and some friends. At that point I had what was properly known as a full-blown Mullet. The exhilaration of feeling the hair on the back of my head blowing up to cover my face was never forgotten. It went out pretty far in college (where I suffered the remark from my mom about being a cross between George Harrison and Charles Manson) until I left the sanctity of home and campus to fend for myself and, eventually, my family. From then on, as a representative of whatever business I was associated, I would periodically head for the nearest tonsorial establishment and suffer the ‘rape of the lock’. At one point, I had a supervisor who was an ultra-conservative paranoid survivalist type who steadfastly refused to cut his own hair until President Clinton left the White House, hence after eight years and a near-impeachment, his hair fell fairly down his back. It irritated me that he, in his position, could pull if off, but required…nay, commanded me to continue the periodic shearing. It was the kind of hair I always wanted, but I can’t say I liked it on the hard-line hypocrite who wore it. (It’s okay…that was a bridge that needed burning.) When I came back to the Ivory Tower that was my alma mater, I took the phrase ‘long-hair intellectuals’ to heart, but first I made sure it was okay with my boss. Folks, I would take a bullet for this guy. I have since avoided beauty parlors, barber shops, clip joints and the like in a last-ditch attempt to see exactly how long I can get the follicles to grow and flourish. I also found something interesting to do with my beard, shearing the moustache off and leaving what one of my son’s GameCube games called a ‘partial beard with soul patch’. I guess it’s the combination that has gotten gums flapping. I feel like I’ve gotten as much attention as my wife’s new car. So who would play me in the movie? Some people think I look like Albus Dumbledore, but I don’t know if they mean the one portrayed by Richard Harris or Michael Gambon. Certainly the reading glasses add to the image. Then there are others who are certain I’m Ian McKellan’s Gandalf from ‘Lord of the Rings’. Of course there are the radical ideas ranging from Christopher Lee in the ‘Star Wars’ saga to Jeff Bridges in ‘The Big Lebowski’.I’d have to add some Grecian Formula to get back to that, though.What does my wife think, you ask? She had gone on record with Tim Curry in his ‘Rocky Horror’ days, but I really think she would like a little Sam Elliot from ‘Road House’.At this point, the hair is the longest it’s ever been. And yet, I have not relived the experience I had that one magic Christmas night. I have, however, managed to partially eat my hair with an errant bite of a Big Mac. Not the same thing.