It happened this way.
I was maybe six or seven, and Christmas was due in a few
months. I desperately wanted a bike, come that wonderful day. My dad was a poor
grocer. Well, he wasn’t exactly poor, like the families of my friends were
poor, but he wasn’t wealthy, like the families of my classmates were wealthy. Besides, he had two other kids, and spending all
his Christmas money on one of them didn’t seem fair. Besides, I was far from
the favorite child.
In a quandary I suppose, he and my Sainted Mother came up
with an idea. I guess it was mutual. I wasn’t in on the conversation.
But here was the deal. There was a cotton gin over near
Grider Field, our local airport in Pine Bluff. I guess my dad knew the owner since
he and SM had sharecropped a spot a few miles from the airport before they walked
into an opportunity to buy the store.
Anyway, Daddy worked out a deal with the owner of the gin. I
think maybe his name, the owner, was Chambliss. Maybe not. It was cotton-picking
time, so the gin was operating full time. Daddy would leave the store after the
last truckload of pickers had passed, then go to the gin. He’d put in a few
hours and come home for a little sleep before the trucks hauling the pickers to
the field came by early in the morning.
That’s how he made enough money to buy me that little red
bicycle.
Can you imagine, Dear Reader, the joy with which I met that objet
de désir on Christmas morning? It sparkled and cried, “Ride me. Ride me.” I
just looked on it and wept.
Of course, I had no idea how to ride it. Daddy fixed that
later in the day by holding me until I started and fell maybe 30 times before
I decided that riding beat falling and sped out of sight. It was a love affair
of cosmic proportions.
Then it all went to hell.
I guess the reader knows by now that my father was a good,
good man, one of the best I ever knew. History never quite canonized him like it
did Sainted Mother, but he was a fine American, an honest man, and a good
provider.
He had this annoying habit, though, one he picked up from a
stern old German, who picked it up from a stern old German, who picked it up
from … you get the picture.
In the South we call it “throwing it up to you.” I don’t
remember when I first heard it. I imagine I was with the Hester twins, Robert
and Bobby Joe, and I must have laid the little red bicycle too irreverently against
the porch of the store. That’s the first time I heard it.
“Be careful with that damned bicycle. I worked nights at the
cotton gin to buy that for you.”
The luster wore off our love affair more each time I heard
reference to working at the cotton gin nights to buy me the bicycle. At first,
I just hated the cotton gin. Then the hate began to spread like a covering fog over
the little red bicycle. I’m afraid that it eventually spread to bicycles in
general. I still don’t care for them.
The sad thing was that Sainted Mother even, once or twice,
threw it up for transgressions unrelated to the bicycle. “Now think about how
hard your daddy worked at night over to the cotton gin to buy you a nice Christmas
present.” It didn’t cost her Sainthood, but it did place a couple of notations on her heavenly “Hard Card.”
I tried to learn, but things learned from a stern old German
prove hard to overcome. Still, I do cringe whenever I hear myself say
something so odious as, “Think about all the nights I’ve come home off the road
near midnight from being out making us a living?”
Fortunately, the object of my “stern old Germanisms” pays no
more attention to what I say than a cat being scolded for resting on a kitchen table.
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| If you'll tell me what he said, I'll try to remember how I reacted. It's doubtful, though. |
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