Rerun: I am from … a while ago
Several recent conversations brought to mind this item I first published in 2009. I probably should have mentioned in the first few paragraphs that all this took place in Oklahoma City between the late ’40s and the end of the ’50s.
The following is a year-old draft that I never got around to posting. I’m posting it now, before I edit out any more of whatever freshness it might have had or end up turning it into a novel:
“I am from … ” started as a meme that raced through the blog world sometime last year. It was supposed to be a relatively short piece, a poem of sorts. But it smacked of the kind of list-making that is a virtual compulsion for me, and my “poem” quickly got out of hand. We old ladies like to reminisce, you know.
So I put it aside, careful to save the memories and promising to get back to it someday to organize, clean up, edit, or whatever. Now, on a cold, overcast afternoon, I’m sitting here watching intermittent snow fall, hoping it doesn’t accumulate to shovel-worthy depths, and playing with my list poem again.
I am from …
The heartland, from Missouri stock, lovingly blended in Oklahoma with a little Old West spice, some Iowa sensibility, and a lot of Southern gentility
The land of Will Rogers, Boomer Sooner, wheat fields and hawks, tornadoes, Oklahoma!
A physician father, a lot like Marcus Welby, MD or Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best, in a Happy Days and Grease world
Feeling like the favorite, even with four siblings
Green-vaulted streets lined with sweetgum and hackberry
A white-painted two-story brick house, built in 1909, with foot-thick walls keeping heat, cold, and wind at bay
A huge old maple in the backyard that stood stoically with wood steps nailed up its trunk, a platform in its upper branches, and my plastic horses stampeding over its exposed roots
A pine outside my second-story bedroom bay window where cardinals nested every spring
Parents who permitted my long parade of pets: dogs named Bippy and Tammy, Penny and Pooch; a science fair rat named Charlie Brown; Easter bunnies, chicks, and ducklings; chameleons from the State Fair Midway; tanks of guppies and goldfish; two blue parakeets; and one white cat
I am from …
Before commercial jets, television, cordless phones, computers, transistor radios, TV dinners, garbage disposers, air conditioning, shopping malls, hair spray and hand-held blow dryers
Eating ice chips out of the back of the truck that delivered blocks of ice for our icebox (siblings argue I was too young to remember an icebox and must have just read about it somewhere; perhaps it was blocks of ice being delivered for use at parties)
There’s more, much more …
