Knots in My Yo-Yo String (9 page)

When you needed new shoes, you went to Chatlin’s with your mother. The salesman helped you try them on until you found a pair your mother liked. Then came the best part. The salesman stood up from his fitting stool and said, “Well, why don’t we have a look,” and off went the three of you to the fluoroscope. It looked something like the big floor console radio in your living room. Six inches up was a step leading to an opening into the interior of the scope. Since you knew the procedure, you didn’t even wait for the salesman to say, “Step up.” You slid your feet into the opening, and then you had to fight impatience. First the salesman bent over and pressed his face to the goggle-shaped viewer. “Wiggle your toes,” he said. You wiggled your toes. He straightened up, nodding. “Plenty of room.” Then your mother looked. At last it was your turn. You bent down and scrunched your face to the viewer and there they
were—your feet—or rather the skeleton of your feet, your bones, your toe bones wiggling in an eerie green glow. “We’ll take them,” said your mother, and already you were eager to wear them out so you could come back to Chatlin’s and do this again.

Other favorite stops were Block’s and Yost’s. Block’s department store had the only Santa Claus I would talk to at Christmastime. For a long while, I was convinced that Block’s was home to the
real
Santa. And though I never bought anything at Yost’s, a dry-goods store on the corner of DeKalb and Main, I stopped in occasionally because of a feature I had never seen anywhere else. The selling floor had no cash registers. When someone made a purchase, the salesclerk took the customer’s money and stuffed it into a small canister hanging above her head. The canister was threaded onto a heavy string that swooped from the sales counter up through a portal on the second floor. Exactly how and why it all happened was a mystery to me. I only knew that the customer’s money was soon zipping up to the second floor, and a minute later down came the canister like a chair on a ski lift with change and receipt. Every counter had its own string to the second-floor portal, so canisters were forever zipping back and forth just out of my reach—and all of this accompanied by tinkling bells. It was a show!

My bike was more than wheels for aimless wandering. It helped me answer many needs.

Did I want to cool off? I coasted through the alley between Kohn Street and Haws Avenue, past the Flavorite ice cream plant.

Was I hungry? I pedaled to a mulberry tree. I knew every one in town. My favorite was in Roger Adelman’s backyard. I climbed it often and snacked off the branches, staining my fingers purple.

Did I want a thrill? I rode out to the park zoo, to the top of Monkey Hill. I waited until the road was clear of cars and took off, pedaling hard all the way, down past the monkey cages. My record, according to my speedometer, was forty-five miles per hour, not bad for a single-gear, fat-tired Roadmaster.

Or another kind of thrill? Some days I must have pedaled past Dovie Wilmoth’s house on Haws Avenue ten times, hoping that the beautiful platinum blonde would be on the front porch. If she was, I waved and called “Hi, Dovie!” and kept circling the block. Every three minutes: “Hi, Dovie!” She always smiled and waved back.

When I was thirteen, I was old enough to leave town. My Roadmaster took me as far as Valley Forge National Historical Park, about five miles away. I crossed the Schuylkill on the singing bridge, so called for the sound of tires on the steel grate deck. You could see through the deck to the river below. For hours I rode the winding hills past cannon muzzles and monuments and replicated log cabins. Once, I parked my
bike and walked into a hillside meadow to lie back and get some sun. When I opened my eyes, hawks were circling overhead. Not trusting them to know I wasn’t dead, I got out of there fast.

Sometimes if my planned route for the day took me across the tracks at the dead end, I had to wait for a freight train to pass. I never felt thwarted or impatient about this. In fact, the longer the train the better, and if there were three or four engines, I knew it would be a very long one. By the end of junior high the steam locomotives had given way to diesels. The diesels were neither as terrifying at night nor as exciting in daylight, nor did they leave me with a headful of coal grit.

As the train went by, I counted the cars: boxcars, tankers, flatcars, coal hoppers. By the time the caboose came clicking by, the engines were out of sight and earshot, out beyond the park band shell. I loved the caboose. I was surprised that no one was ever standing at the back rail, coffee mug in hand, watching the world go by.

In those days I was many whats. A kid can be that. Grownups have gone ahead and answered the question: “
What
shall I be?” They have tossed out all the whats that don’t fit and have become just one. Teacher. Truckdriver. Businessperson. But a kid is still becoming. And I, as a kid alone, was free to be just about anything.

So many careers came and went through me: salamander finder, crawfish annoyer, flat-stone creek skipper,
cedar chest smeller, railroad car counter, tin can stomper, milkweed blower, mulberry picker, snowball smoother, paper bag popper, steel rail walker, box turtle toucher, dark-sky watcher, best-part saver. They didn’t last long, these careers of mine, but flashed into and out of existence like mayflies. But while they employed me, I gave them an honest minute’s work and was paid in the satisfactions of curiosity met and a job well done.

When I went roaming by myself on foot or bike, I discovered more than water spiders and foreign neighborhoods. I discovered myself. By myself, not boxed in by rules of play, I was free to think, to wonder, to swoon.

That’s what I did sometimes: I swooned, just thinking about things. Like time. Like space. I tried to imagine, tried to grasp the speed of light. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per
second!
And how about those stars up there? The ones I saw when the sky turned the color of my dungarees. I had heard that these were only the closest ones, visible from earth. I had heard that there were billions and billions more too far away to see, that they went on and on and on until the end of the universe. I tried to imagine zooming out past the last stars and looking around—at what? What does the end of the universe look like? And what about time? What about
before
time?

Thoughts like these did not come to mind as I flipped baseball cards with Spider Sukoloski or played
street football with Jerry Fox or gunslingers with Johnny Seeton. They presented themselves behind closed eyes on hillside meadows and during the long lazy wait for a box turtle to cross the path. The questions were as elusive as the answers, as delicate as a dragonfly’s wing. They gave me goosebumps. They made me dizzy. I swooned in my sneakers.

But I did not read. Not books, anyway. Now, cereal boxes—that was another story. Every morning I pored over boxes of Wheaties and Cheerios at the breakfast table. I looked forward to new cereals as much for a change in reading material as for a change in breakfast fare.

And comics. I read them by the hundreds.

Mostly I read cowboy and war comics. I bought them at corner stores and newsstands. Then when I was twelve, I got serious. I decided the comic should come to me. I got my first subscription:
Bugs Bunny.
Once a month, accompanied by the metallic flapping of the front door mail slot, the postman delivered Bugs’s latest adventures to me.

My favorite comic character of all, however, was neither man nor rabbit. In fact, I’m still not sure what it was. All I know is that it was called the Heap, and it looked something like a haystack. The Heap never spoke, and the reader never saw it move, but the Heap appeared on the scene when people were having problems. Somehow or other the Heap managed to solve the problem, though it never got credit. As far as most
of the people knew, it was just another haystack in the field.

Of course, I read the newspaper comics too. While I never missed “Dick Tracy,” “Little Lulu,” and “Mandrake the Magician,” my favorite of all was “Alley Oop.”

Another part of the newspaper got my attention as well: sports.

Mostly I read the sports pages of the
Times Herald.
I especially liked the clever writing of sports editor Red McCarthy in his daily column. Until then I had thought there was only one English language—the language I spoke and heard in the West End of Norristown. I was happily surprised to discover that there was more than one way to say something, that the words and their arrangement could be as interesting as the thing they said.

From April to September in the Sunday
Philadelphia Inquirer,
I read the major league baseball batting statistics. They were printed in small type in a long box, row after row of numbers and names, hundreds of them—every player in the majors. To the non-baseball fan, they were as boring as a page in a phone book. I loved it. I wallowed in the numbers. What was Ted Williams’s batting average this week? Stan Musial’s? Richie Ashburn’s? Was Ralph Kiner still the leader in home runs? Who had the most RBIs? Did Mantle have a shot at the Triple Crown? Or Mays? It was like peeking at a race
once every seven days, watching the lead change places from week to week.

Cereal boxes, comics, baseball stats—that was my reading. As for books, I read maybe ten of them, fifteen tops, from the day I entered first grade until graduation from high school. I remember reading a few Bobbsey Twins adventures, and in junior high, sports stories about Chip Hilton, a fictional high school hotshot athlete. I read
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and
Kon-Tiki,
the true story of a man who crossed the Pacific in a raft. That’s about it.

Why didn’t I read more?

I could blame it on my grade school, which had no library. I could blame it on the curriculum, which limited my classroom reading to “See Dick run. See Jane run. See Spot do something on the rug.” I could blame it on history, for enrolling me in life and school before the time of book fairs and author visits. I could blame it on my friends, because like me, the only books they read were comic books.

But I can’t do that.

It’s always handy to blame things on one’s parents, but I can’t do that either. My father had his books on display in the dining room. Thirty times a day I passed his collection of histories and Ellery Queen mysteries. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me, stories like
Babar
and
The Little Engine That Could.
My parents steered me in the right direction.

And the fact is, on those few occasions when I actually did read a book, I enjoyed it. Yet for some reason I would not admit this to myself. Instead of saying, Hey, that was good, that was fun, I think I’ll read another—I would dump my baseball glove into my bike basket and head out the path to the Little League field, and months would go by before I picked up a book again. Reading a book was for times when I was totally bored and lacking anything else to do.

And what about words, which, packed together, made up a book as cells made up my body? I liked them. Yet this was such a naturally occurring, unachieved sort of thing that if someone had asked me in those days, “Do you like words?” I probably would have shrugged and blithely answered, “No.”

Still, whether I knew it or not, words were claiming me. When I visited Hartenstine Printing, where my father worked as a typesetter, I saw words being created letter by letter, one thin slug of lead at a time.

Once, in a comic book, someone with a bad heart was described as having a bum ticker. That tickled me to no end. I kept whispering “bum ticker” to myself for days.

Except for the Heap, my favorite comic book characters were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I liked them as much for their words as their ways. For me, the highlight of a scene was not what happened, but what Bugs or Daffy said about what happened. This is probably
why Mickey Mouse never much appealed to me. His speech was too bland for my taste.

When I was eleven or twelve, my mother and I laughed for months over a corny old vaudeville joke that I kept asking her to repeat. She gave the joke a local twist. It went like this:

Man goes to the beach for a vacation. Goes into the water. When he comes out, he sees a lady sitting next to his blanket.

He says, “Hi, I’m a little stiff from swimming.”

She says, “Hello, I’m a secretary from Norristown.”

(I’m laughing again.)

Occasionally I had to look up a word in the dictionary. Sometimes my eye would stray to the surrounding words. Invariably it stopped at an interesting one, and I read the definition. In one such instance I discovered that I was a gossoon. I clearly remember two feelings attached to these moments: (1) surprise that a dictionary could be so interesting, and (2) a notion to sit down and look through more pages. I never did.

And then of course there was my success in spelling.

All of these items were indicators of an early leaning toward language, but I failed to see them as such. The tickle of a rabbit’s wit, the rattle of alphabet in a compositor’s drawer—they simply took their place among the Popsicles and penknives and bike tires of my days.

With one exception.

In sixth grade our teacher assigned us a project: Make a scrapbook of Mexico. I found pictures of Mexico in
National Geographic
and other magazines and pasted them in my scrapbook, for which my father made a professional-looking cover at the print shop. Then I did something extra. It wasn’t part of the assignment. I just did it.

I wrote a poem.

Three stanzas about Mexico, ending with a touristy come-on: “Now, isn’t that where you would like to be?” I wrote it in pencil, longhand, my best penmanship, on a piece of lined classroom paper. I pasted it neatly on the last page of my scrapbook and turned in my project.

Several days later my mother walked the three blocks to my school. She met with my teacher, who told her she did not believe that my poem about Mexico was my own work. She thought I copied it from a book. (Hah! If she only knew how few books I read, and never one with poetry.) I was suspected of plagiarism.