Bard Of The Lesser Boulevards

To be honest, I’m really not sure what might have prompted it.

It might have been that photograph we ran on the front page of last week’s Johnston County Sentinel of the Stay Golden Inn, the new Airbnb located in the building that had been the home of the Johnston County Capital-Democrat for more than a century. The fact that the historic building has been given both a long-overdue renovation and a new purpose pleases more than I can say, and I wish nothing but success for new owners Carrie and Troy Golden - but it’s difficult to drive past it and not think about the quarter century I spent inside that building, serving as the late Ray Lokey’s “good right arm” (his phrase, not mine) and churning out countless news articles and columns and watching my sons delivering papers up and down Main Street as they were growing up.

Perhaps it was the better part of a month I spent working on our annual Graduation Supplement, which always seems to evoke memories of those four years before I walked across the stage of Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School to claim my own hard-earned diploma.

I suppose it could have been some of my recent online interactions with a variety of old friends - from as far back as grade school, as recent as my fellow authors in the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society, and all stops in-between. For all my complaints about the internet and what we euphemistically refer to as “social media,” I’ll admit I feel a certain gratitude for the role they have played in helping maintain a great many relationships that have meant the world to me.

Possibly it all began with the arrival earlier this year of our second granddaughter, Willow. It doesn’t seem all that long ago, after all, that Melissa and I were the ones bringing Willow’s papa - our younger son William - home from the hospital. Hopefully we were good enough parents that Will and his wife Charlesana might find something positive to take away from our experiences… or, at the very least, that we didn’t do such a poor job of it that they choose to not even bother looking. 

Or maybe - just maybe, mind you - it has to do with the fact that I am staring into the maw of one of those “milestone” birthdays that gives one pause as they contemplate the road they’ve traveled to this point… and the fact that having reached this point means their tomorrows are greatly outnumbered by their yesterdays. That’s not the sort of thing a person generally likes to think about, I’ll grant you - but the fact that we don’t like to think about it seems ample proof that we need to think about it.

Whatever the reason - and upon further reflection, that reason may in fact be an “all of the above” situation - the simple truth of the matter is that I have been in something of a reflective state lately. Seems like there’s very little I’ve been able to say or do or hear or think that has not touched off some unexpected wave of nostalgia.

The odd thing about this recent spate of introspection has been the nature of those memories. Oh, sure, there have been all the usual “greatest hits” - the day Melissa and I got married, the deaths of my parents, the paperwork snafu at the end of my overseas Air Force assignment that kept from boarding that airplane in Greece that ended up getting hijacked - that sort of thing. 

But it seems like most of these recent bulk mail reminiscences have focused more on the so-called “little things in life” - those episodes that didn’t seem all that important at the time, and whose overall significance in the grand scheme of things often still escapes me all these years later.

I remember, for example, walking from that aforementioned junior high gymnasium to the school cafeteria that doubled as the concession stand at the Bradley Central basketball games. There I would buy a can of Mountain Dew and a piece of candy - a Snickers bar, perhaps, or one of those Jolly Rancher Cherry Stix - and listen with amusement as some of my buddies bantered back and forth about their imaginary trysts with some of the better looking girls in our class.  

Lies, every one of them. It doesn’t matter how I knew. I just knew…

I remember the day Dad took the training wheels off my bike and pushed me off on my first two-wheeled trip up the block. I only made it as far as the Simpsons’ place, just three houses up from ours, before losing my balance and toppling head-first into the rose bush in their front yard. 

Those thorns scratched up my hide worse than my Grandma Small’s cat, and that mercurochrome Mom dabbed all over my wounded chest made me look like the sole survivor of the St. Valentine’s Massacre, but I still considered a victory of sorts - enough so that, when I tried again the next day, I actually made it to the end of the block before taking that next tumble…

I remember that phone call Mom received from Grandma Tipps at our house in Illinois just a few weeks after I graduated from high school, telling about how the Swinging Bridge here in Tishomingo had been swept away in a flood. Some of my happiest moments during my childhood visits to Tishomingo were those times Dad and I would climb along the edge of the Swinging Bridge, stop in the middle and wait for someone to cross the bridge in their pickup trick, then hanging on for dear life as Mom stood off in the distance hollering about how we were both going to die when that truck set the bridge to swinging and threw us off into Pennington Creek…

I remember Mom and Dad taking me and my younger brothers to the Meadowview Theatre to see The Apple Dumpling Gang, and how we all liked the movie so much that we decided to sit through it a second time. (You could do that back then, in those days before the popularity of the original Star Wars caused theatre owners to realize how much money they were losing by viewers who showed up for the first showing of the day and stayed all the way through the last show.)

The problem with sitting through The Apple Dumpling Gang that second time was that Mom would start laughing at the funny stuff BEFORE it happened - which, of course, caused the rest of the audience to look at her and wonder if the poor woman was losing her mind. Now that I think about it, that’s probably when I decided I was old enough to sit apart from my parents whenever we went out to the movies from that point on…

I remember the day Melissa and I brought our son William home from the hospital, and were met at the door by Ethan, our family dog at the time - half Australian Shepard, half Saluki and 100 percent loyal. Ethan stuck his head into the baby carrier, which gave us a bit of start at first, but that dear canine gave the baby a little sniff and looked up at us with an expression that seemed to say, “Okay, this is my boy, and I will take care of him.”

And he did exactly that, until the very end of his life. Little wonder, then, that of all the dogs who have been a part of our family over the years - and I’ve loved each and every one of them - Ethan will always be Number One in my heart…

I remember that day during my senior year in college when Melissa called me at the campus newspaper office to share the news that we were expecting Will’s older brother Josh. I was so excited that I blew off my next class and ran out to the car, drove across town and tracked down Dad as he was out walking his daily mail route to give him the news.

Dad, always the joker, got that silly grin on his face and asked, “How did that happen…?”

I remember sitting with my parents when I was little, watching the various Peanuts cartoon specials when they aired on CBS, and breaking into uncontrollable tears when the end credits started rolling…

I remember wanting to cry that very same way when I turned 12 and suddenly realized it would be the last time I could be able to get my free birthday ice cream cone at our local Baskin-Robbins…

I remember that time our seventh grade English teacher assigned us to find a poem and spend a week memorizing it before reciting it in front of the class. I remember, too, the way she smiled when my recitation went off flawlessly - and the way her smile turned into a look of shock when she learned that the poem I’d selected was one I’d found in one of my Uncle Tom’s paperback compilations from Mad magazine…

I remember that time I was doing some research for a column and stumbled across a website devoted to science fiction author Philip José Farmer and his Wold Newton Universe - and realizing for the first time that I wasn’t the only one who had loved that stuff as a teenager, after all…

I remember the guilt I felt in the sixth grade when my buddy Tom Despain had to go to the hospital after I accidentally shot him in the arm with my new BB gun - a relatively minor incident which nevertheless made a lasting impact on my life, in more ways than one…

I remember the first time I ever saw the original King Kong on TV - and the dream I had that night about playing in the back yard with my friend from up the block, Pam Moore, when Kong suddenly showed up and started chasing us down the alley…

I remember the cast party at one of my fellow cast member’s house after our 1980 school play - Revenge of the Space Pandas - and our group sing-along to the drama club’s unofficial theme song: the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” 

While most of the cast stood in a semi-circle, singing with the record, four of us - Mark Hlavich, Kurt Greenbaum, Kevin Wall and myself - stood in the center with make-believe instruments and lip-synched as if we were the Fab Four. I got to be Paul; my “bass guitar” was an old tennis racket we found there in the basement. It’s not easy, being right-handed and trying to strum a left-handed bass tennis racket…

I remember those times when I was a wee nipper when my mother would give me a dollar and let me walk the four or five blocks up the street and around the corner from our house to Kaveney’s store - it was actually Broadway Food and Liquor, but everyone called it Kaveney’s because that was the name of the family that owned it - where I would buy a couple of comic books and a big bottle of Grapette, and still have enough of that dollar left to buy a pretty decent sized bag of penny candy…

I remember the first time I kissed Melissa, just a few days after we started dating, after walking her to her afternoon high school typing class…

I remember the last time I kissed my mother, just a couple of days before her unexpected passing…

I remember watching Sunday morning reruns of the old George Reeves Adventures of Superman series, seeing reporter Clark Kent being as heroic in his own way as his super-powered alter ego, and thinking that I wouldn’t mind being a reporter myself when I grew up…

I remember being a little kid looking at people who were the same age I am now and thinking, “Gee, you’re old” - and eventually becoming an adult and thinking, “Gee, maybe that’s not so old after all.”

And now that I’m finally that age myself, there are times when I look at myself in the mirror and again think, “Gee, you’re old.”

Like I said, mostly the little things in life - but which, when considered in totality, lend credence to the words of one of our great American philosophers: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

True, Mr. Bueller. Oh, so true…

(Copyright © 2023 by John A. Small)