Growing Up Oklahoma: Part 1

My great grandpa had the house built right at the turn of the century when our little town was no more than a fledgling idea.  It was a simple house.  I coulda swore it was the biggest house in town.  It was a two story box with a stone front porch.  The kind just right for a wooden swing and a glass of ice tea.  About a dozen bikes in various states of rust were stacked on the other side.  The backyard was wild, my Granma didn’t have the mind for yard work.  Mowing the front section so the neighbors didn’t holler was all she was up to.

My Granma was not one of them soft grannies, she was a woman of the Depression.  Living in Oklahoma, she never really knew who or what caused it so much.  Her daddy was a postal carrier, one of the few folks in town that had a car, and he had a job through the worst times, thanks be to God as she’d say.  Still she had learned to live lean and had started working at an early age … and had never stopped.

There wasn’t nothing that she wouldn’t do first herself.  The ceiling tiles in the house were all water stained brown.  The plumbing was eighty years old, so she’d grab a ladder and a wrench and get to work.  Oh, it always leaked, but sure enough when you turned on knob if hot water didn’t come out.  She had a lot of cars, but there were two things they each had in common.  Everyone of them was big, ocean liner big.  And eventually, they’d start to groan when the wheel was turned and hiss when she pressed the breaks.  She’d be up under the hood working on them.  It was always the alternator, she’d decide.  This was a self made woman and her house showed every sign of it.

She collected things.  Not so much collected, but rather accumulated.  She picked up everything she ran across and stacked it away in some musty corner for a rainy day.  Her kitchen was her throne room.  She’d holler at us at the base of the steps, “come an’ git it, or I’ll throw it to the dawg!”

Like soldiers on command, my brother and me would thunder down the stairs at full gallop.  So hard in fact that we’d crash into the landing and bounce out into the kitchen.  She hated it when we did that at night as her bedroom was directly under the stairs, but at suppertime she liked it.  Made her feel like her cooking was appreciated.

The kitchen smelled like any good southern kitchen, like grease.  My Granma used it to cook everything.  In fact, the whole kitchen felt like it had an old layer of oil on it.  The dull black iron door knobs or the peeling red counter tops.  And a good skillet is one that is never washed.  If you wash it, you’d lose the flavor.  Sure as can be it would sit dutifully on its assigned burner, back left.  Right next to the coffee can of grease and ashtray for lighting the stove.

The stove with its old fashioned hood was not so much in the kitchen as it was packed into it.  The counters were stacked high with appliances from every decade.  Toasters, blenders, mixing pots, canned food whose label had worn off years ago, tissue boxes bought in bulk, recipe holders with the paper stuck together, dusty vases, ceramic farm animals, enormous wooden spoons hanging on the wall.  And a breadbox that hadn’t been used in twenty years.  We kids knew better than to open it, no telling what could have been left in there.  But as any damn fool knew, you don’t throw away a perfectly fine breadbox.

In the center of the kitchen was our island.  I believe that someone in our family made it.  It was high enough that I couldn’t really see across it.  There was only space cleared for two plates right in front of the foldable high chairs.  The rest of the island was much like the rest of my Granma’s house, cluttered.  There were pencil sharpeners, coffee cans filled with wrenches and nails, red glasses filled with marbles, and old lunch pails filled with more odds and ends.  There was much more to the eye, though, the island was hollowed for shelves on opposite ends.  Within were dusty treasures that I could only guess at past the lining of blackened and forgotten pots and pans.

Back when my daddy was a decent fella he had painted some roosters on the olive green cabinets.  Of course, like everything, my Granma had been right about him from the start.  The roosters were half painted on the other side of the room.  When we had dogs and we mostly did, every inch of the floor would be covered in newspapers, which were stacked against one wall next to our fat little fridge.

She was finishing up at the sink, cast iron and red.  When I played scuba diver in the bubble suds with my figures, I always wondered how it didn’t fall through to the basement.  She turned to the skillet and started portioning out our meal, pilgrim’s breakfast, her favorite.  It was a mix of chopped bacon, eggs, rice, and onions all served in a big heap.  If we were lucky the milk wouldn’t be so off, her fridge more tried to keep the food at ease than cold.

Looking back at the pictures of her when she had just married, my Granma always looked happy.  Now the years of worry had sorta formed a wrinkled scowl that she worn naturally behind her big glasses.  She had the grannie haircut, brushed up in the front and matted on the back of her head from laying in bed to watch TV all night.  When she’d smile though, it would set us giggling right away.  We started eating as if we were starving refugees, our hands and knees still grubby from whatever we had gotten into before watching cartoons upstairs.  She didn’t think to tell us to warsh up, boys was boys and they were dirty.  She’d watch us eat, happy to see us gobble it down like healthy boys should and make idle chitchat with us.

“You two act like you’d never eaten before.”  She was in a good mood, not stressed about bills or my mother.  “Want me to put Hershey syrup in your milk?”  We both nodded vigorously with rice and eggs coming off our chins.  She made good chocolate milk, lots of syrup so that it pooled at the bottom.  We only drank whole milk in her house and we loved it.

“Supposed to hotter than Hell tomorrow,” she was a God fearing woman, but only so much that she’d watch the fancy TV preachers on Sunday in her pajamas.  Cursing was her way of emphasizing.  And it was going to be hotter than Hell, even I knew that.  Hot and humid.

“Where’s your sister?”  We shrugged our shoulders, though we knew she was upstairs watching the girlie cartoons.  She wasn’t hungry because she was sneaking my mom’s fudge rounds.  Once she had eaten one, Wendy pretty much figured that she was busted, so why not eat three.  We knew later we’d get lined up and asked which one of us did it, looted the sacred fudge rounds.  Immunity in exchange for tattling.

She moved into her rooms, which she had locks on each connecting door into her private sanctum of more piles and heaps of stuff.  Eventually, my Granma came back out with a four pack of Cokes.  In Oklahoma, every type of soft drink is a coke.  Go to the grocery store and someone will inevitably say, “I want some cokes.”  The response:  “which kind?”  But these were Cokes, capital C, the good kind, not Shasta, not Sam’s Choice or RC Cola.  They were in the thick glass bottles that you’d get a nickel back for at the recycling place.

We eyed them closely with mouthfuls.  I looked at my brother; he had all the good ideas, like using crayons as missiles on our GI Joe base as we flung them full force from across the room trying to knock over our soldiers.  We’d go through a full box in about an hour.  Between the two of them there was a subtle negotiation going on.  My Granma was nobody’s fool, she wanted something.

“Wanna take us to the park?”  My brother had struck first, I turned back quickly to her to measure her response.

“Might be fun.  Better than you nut heads bouncing around here all day.”  She had her back to us, prepping for the final request.  Humming was her way of singing and she’d cluck her tongue in between her dentures when she concentrated.  She turned and said off handedly, “Go git you sister.”  And quite a request it had been.  My brother, Randy, had clearly declared and proven that Wendy had cooties and was not cool to play with.  She had dolls and horsies, not soldiers and barbarians.  He was weighing it, which way would we go?

“I’ll dress you up as Indians.”  It was the coup de grâce.  I could tell my brother was excited by the gleam in his eyes as he looked at me, so I ran to the base of the steps and shouted through bacon and rice for her to come down.  Of course, she yelled back and we carried on for a bit before she finally appeared.  I told you she had cooties.

When she came into the kitchen, her eyes were searching my Granma to see if she could tell that the fudge rounds had been eaten.  If she knew, she made no sign of it

“We’re gonna head down to the park, so put some shorts on.”  My Granma had finished wiping out the skillet with a paper towel and used that same paper towel to wipe down the countertops.

“We get Cokes!”  I added for extra emphasis.  Wendy seemed hesitant, I couldn’t understand.  She looked at Randy to see if he had decided if she had cooties today or not.  He turned to her and proclaimed:

“Me and Robert are going to be Indians, and you can be the Indian princess!”  Wendy jumped up and down, clapping her hands in delight.

“Pull me in the wagon, like a real princess!”  Even better.

In moments, we were ready to go.  We had all put our shorts on, so short that they barely had an inseam.  My brother and I went bare-chested and barefoot, like true warriors.  My sister had a tank top and was already sitting in our little red wagon, smiling like the world was hers.  My Granma came out with some brown construction paper headbands with a feather taped in the back, one for each of us.  The pack of Cokes was placed in the wagon wrapped in a blue bath towel.  The stacks and stacks in her rooms had once again produced a treasure.  I joined my sister in the wagon with my plastic barbarian sword and my brother took up the black handle to pull us.  My Granma was still looking at us thinking.  Then a moment of inspiration hit and she retrieved her purse.  Now her purse is more like my daddy’s army duffel bag.  Again, anything and everything that a human person could need was stored within.

She produced lipstick and with careful strokes christened each of us with war paint.  I stood completely still, soaking in the brevity of the moment.  My sister and me got one stroke on each cheek, my brother got two.  Made sense, he was the war chief.  Every real Oklahoman has a bit of Indian in them.  We had it from both sides.  Now my Granma couldn’t tell you which tribe we were from exactly, but we knew that we had a great great granma that was full blood.  Anyways, we always rooted for the Indians in the John Wayne films that she watched.  This was an important moment, I was becoming a warrior.

Our war party set forth down the sidewalk.  The rubber wheels crackled over the acorns along the way.  I was in back, alternating between swinging my plastic sword over my head and using like a paddle on either side.  Together, my sister and brother and I war chanted the entire way down the park.

Though the grass was high and I ended up with chiggers up to my knees, I never ran harder or jumped farther or yelled louder than when I was a real Indian warrior that day.  My Granma sat on a bench, reading her pulp romance book with the curled corners and occasionally looking at us climbing trees or beating the tar out of each other with a plastic barbarian sword.  She paid it no mind, after all boys are boys and they will roughhouse.

As the sun dipped and our war party grew tired, we gathered around my Granma on her bench.  I sat on the sidewalk crushing ants with my fingers and we drank our Cokes.  My brother, he always had the best ideas, started us on a burping contest.  Even my Granma squeezed one out, more like a chirp, and we giggled until we were tired.

My brother pulled us back in the wagon like a true war chief should and my Granma followed behind.  I was in back, holding my bent plastic barbarian sword like a fallen comrade.  I looked back at her as she walked.  She was tired from the sun, but glowing nonetheless.  She stuck her tongue at me and I stuck mine out back.  It was her way of saying so much and I understood it completely.

A look crossed her face, a faraway look.  It was a mix of happy and sad.  It was a look that I wouldn’t understand until much later; holding her hand from her hospital bed and fighting the lump in my throat.

I smiled at her with my two front teeth missing and said, “Thank you, Granma.”