The Doll With the Yellow Dress

      When I was young, I didn't have a lot of toys, but I did have two special dolls. The first was made of rubber, soft and smooth. There were two special holes in this doll. One, in its mouth, was a point at which it could drink from its own bottle. The second, on the other end if you get my meaning, allowed it to wet diapers. This was high-tech for dolls in my childhood years.

Aunt Jay

     This doll could easily be dressed because her one purple outfit was very large, unlike the Barbie outfits that kids struggle with so much. Getting the dress on was so easy that keeping the dress on was the problem. It needed to be tied around the middle with an old shoelace for security. From my point of view, the doll and her dress were perfect.

     My Aunt Jay didn't see the doll the same way. She noticed what the doll didn't have. While the lack of hair didn't matter to me, Aunt Jay saw it as a flaw. The doll's large dress was also seen as a problem. Aunt Jay said that the real problem was that the doll had only one arm. The lack of an arm was, I supposed, why that doll ended up in a trashcan where my father was able to rescue it and allow it to become my doll. How could that be bad?

     The Christmas when I was six, Aunt Jay decided that she would solve my doll problem. She came to the house with a large, wrapped box. Inside the box there was a doll so beautiful that I couldn't even see other people in the room once I opened the package. The doll had curly, dark brown hair, a yellow hat and dress with blue ribbons and white lace, and even underpants with lace! There were shoes and socks and the smell of new cloth. What a doll!

Elaine in her father's lap

     This doll could also drink and wet and, listen to this, when she was placed on her back, her eyes closed and when she was picked up, she said, "Mama"
I couldn't get over it.

     My mother scolded Aunt Jay for giving me such a doll saying that I would mess up her hair and lose the socks and shoes (all true) but my aunt said that she had no daughters and my mother should, quite simply, "Hush up." I was shocked at such an argument but knew that with that last command, the doll would stay with me.

     It was wrong to keep it since there were no gifts to give my cousins. Still, every second that I looked at it, my little hands tightened their grip. It was just too much to believe that I would have a new, still in the box, never used by another child doll, just for me.      

     Barefoot with hair awry but full of memories of Aunt Jay, it is in our cedar chest now with its one-armed sister and Rick's old Davy Crocket hat.

Fire and Fear

      The first fire that I remember was the one that consumed the car dealership next to our house in Buffalo in about 1955. Neither building exists now, but then my bedroom was in the back on the side next to the car lot, a Plymouth dealer, I think.  

   Cars were always parked with their rear ends against the chain link fence that stood just a few feet from the side door of our house.   Across the lot was the show room with offices and repair shop.  

     I was asleep but something kept bothering me. Opening one eye to peek made the other eye pop open. The walls of my room were dancing with light. There was noise too - hammering, shouting, whooshing. There were flickering lights outside the window.

     My parents were up, sitting in the kitchen talking and drinking coffee. Standing on a chair at that window, I found the action. There were fire trucks, police cars and people all making plenty of noise.   

     Lights were flashing on the vehicles and flames were clawing into the sky from the roof of that building. 

     My memory, as a six-year-old, is probably of a larger building than really existed but, considering what would be in such a building, it would have been a ferocious fire.

     My mom, not one to coddle, told me to go back to bed. There was nothing there for me to do or see. Back in my flickering room, smelling smoke and listening to the activity, the night slowly crept on and my fear of fire began.  

     In the morning, I learned that firemen had been died in that fire. Fire equaled fear and their fear must have been unbearable. 

     It wasn't much later when my fear leapt higher than those flames on the roof. 

     I was in second grade. My school was the third level of a large, rectangular building. The basement had the kindergarten classroom, stage and gym. The Holy Spirit Church occupied the ground floor, and upstairs were classrooms for grades one through eight. 

     I suppose the alarm rang but my memory starts with opening the classroom door and crashing into smoke. There were stairs to race down. 

     Nuns were always flying up and down those stairs, their long habits trailing behind with billowing skirts grabbing children's ankles. Kids could and did trip on those habits and woe to the kid who knocked over a nun.

     During that escape with smoke coming up the stairwell and classes rushing down and the image of the other fire replaying in my head, dodging the nun's habit, holding the railing and keeping ahead of the big kids suddenly became too much. I fell. 

     Trying to hold onto the railing caused me to turn around so that I went bouncing butt-first into an unsuspecting collection of kids and nuns turning them into a tangle of arms, legs and lost Mary Janes on the landing.

     The kids who were not angry were mean. They told me that all the boys had seen my underpants while I was bouncing down the steps. That was bad in second grade. Add to that the smell of the smoke, the shame of the fall and the aches and pains of bouncing down the stairs and I was one upset, whimpering, lonely little kid.

     Happily, no people were hurt in that fire. The old organ in the basement had caught fire and filled the building with smoke. It was all under control and we were back inside in a short time, but it took two years for the nuns to forgive and forget.

     During that time, when the alarm rang, the nuns would corral all the dangerous kids like me.  

"You get that one!" someone would call, and a nun would rush over, hike her skirts up in one hand and grab me with the other, revealing to the astonished eyes of elementary kids, black stockings on nun-legs.

      I wasn't around any other fires until decades later when the Chevy Vega, a small station wagon that we owned at the time, had its engine rebuilt.

      I was the first to drive it home after the repair when suddenly flames were licking up around the edges of the hood, sending thick, black smoke into the windshield. I stopped, jumped out and ran.

     The fire burned itself out. It seems that, when the engine had blown, the insulation on the underside of the hood was soaked with oil. With engine heat, that oil became a cloud of thick, greasy smoke. The assurance that it wouldn't happen again meant little to me. I was not about to drive that car, so Rick and I traded.

      The next day, my ride was the Volkswagen. Unfortunately, while driving it down a short cut behind the Post Office in Chenango Bridge, smoke started pouring out of the heat ducts under the back seat and from the slats around the hood. I left it in the middle of the road and considered taking the bus for the rest of my life.

     The last time that a fire tried to get me involved a huge, outdoor gas-fired kiln on the Alfred State campus. Lorraine and I were firing it, and it still seems a miracle to me that I was ever willing to get near such a flaming monster. The temperature was climbing very slowly so we were looking in the peep hole often, hoping for signs of change.

      You might never have had such a kiln to deal with so let me say that it has some bricks that can be pulled out so that the potter can look inside to look at things called cones - formulated materials that will bend to indicate that the kiln has reached temperature. The inside of a kiln becomes a roaring fire - all orange and yellow, giving off heat and light as the pots go through the physical and chemical changes that make clay become pottery.

      About a second after replacing the peep hole brick, the kiln exploded and sent a flame about thirty feet into the sky from the chimney and had people from over a mile away asking, "What was that?"

     Had it exploded with the brick out, at least part of the huge flame would have found the peephole as the point of least resistance and my head would have been wrapped in an intense flame.  Stoneflower Pottery, and my future, would have never been.

     Emilie escaped a fire, too. She and two friends were driving back to school from Buffalo when the car in front of them skidded off the road and into a tree.  By the time they stopped, that car was in flames with the driver inside.

     Without regard to personal safety, they ran to the car and worked to open the door. Emilie reached inside, pushing back the fear and the nausea, and unhooked the seatbelt. 

     Together, she and Ethan dragged the driver to safety while Brianna pounded on the door of the house to get someone to call for help. Later, three sets of parents realized how brave their children were and how thankful they were that the car hadn't blown up.

     I don't know if Jay has been around any scary fires. He doesn't tell me about all the dangerous things that he does. I suspect that it's better that way.

My New Red Shoes

      I have new red shoes. Okay, so in the scheme of things shoes aren't important no matter the color but these shoes are part of a story.  

    When I was a small child, there wasn't much stuff in our house because my family didn't have a lot of money. Actually, we often didn't have enough money for important things, so the less important things were second-hand. Lots of our toys were broken, dented, rusty castaways from other families and our clothes were shared and patched.

     Since our family didn't have a lot of money, my mom thought that a good way to save was to have her children share clothes. She would buy new clothes for my bigger, older brother and then, when they didn't fit him, she would give them to me to wear until my little brother needed what was left.

     As reasonable as this may seem, in the 1950s it was a serious problem.  At that time, girls wore dresses. My brothers clothes were pants, striped pullovers and, worst of all, winter hats with earflaps. 

One photo of me shows a small face surrounded by the dreaded earflap-hat, sitting in Santa's lap. Though it was years ago, I remember that since I was dressed like a boy, Santa called me Sonny and gave me a bow-and-arrow set. I cried.

     An important element in this arrangement was that my brother had really big feet so I always had new shoes just for me. Usually they were sensible shoes - plain, brown, Mary Janes or maybe saddle shoes. 

     They fit okay and looked okay. but they weren't anything like the shiny black shoes that other little girls wore to church with their fancy socks. They didn't make me want to dance or skip or smile. They were ordinary walking shoes for ordinary feet on an ordinary girl.     One time though I had a pair of shiny red shoes with yellow straps, blue patches and golden buckles. I felt like the queen of the school in those shoes. It made me feel rich just to own them. My feet would smile up to my knees. 

These aren't the red shoes
but there are few images of me
available.

     I walked around with my head down just to see those shoes move. I loved them so much that I would sneak them on at night and wear them to bed. Now and then, in honor of those wonderful shoes, I purchase footwear in red without regard to their being sensible or useful and that's why I have new, red shoes. 

SEBASTIAN AND THE BUNNY

      My grandfather is a dim memory who died when I was five. His fuzzy picture holds a man sitting at his weathered, square table just outside the back door of the old, white house. 

     A short, round, silent man with a pipe, Sebastian didn't enjoy eating at a table full of noisy grandchildren, so Grandma Anna served him meals under an awning at the back door. He sat with his back to the wall and surveyed his domain, an acre of grape vines and gardens with a chicken coop, a shed and a barn.

     Sebastian taught me what real communication is. He didn't mean to teach me anything but from him I learned that it is important for a person to check the territory around someone's words before making a deal. It was all because of this bunny.

     Some other family decided that taking care of a rabbit was too much trouble, so they gave it away. The lucky rabbit came to live at our house, in a box in the kitchen, sharing carrots, lettuce and space with our family. My brothers and I were supposed to keep it clean and cared for, but we didn't do very well so my mother, raised in farm country, said that was where the rabbit belonged. She sold us on the idea that the bunny would go to Grandpa's house in North Collins, NY.

left is Sebastian, girl is Elaine's mother, Joan

     I pictured it living in the little shed next to the barn being fed and drinking fresh water and wiggling its nose in greeting when I went there. We brought the rabbit to the earthy smelling chicken house and fed it bits of grass through the fencing. Satisfied that it would be happy there, I went home with a smile.

     On our next visit I ran to the hutch. Empty. I asked Grandpa about it, but his Italian and my English weren't making the proper connection. Something was wrong.  

I went for another answer and then another before collapsing in tears.    

     The pet bunny had become rabbit stew. Grandpa's enthusiastic thanks had nothing to do with the soft ears and cute face. The bunny had joined Grandpa at his weathered, little table behind the house, the reason for his full belly just before the silent pipe.

The Old Coal Furnace

      When we turned on the furnace this year, it was simple. A motor in the basement responded to the twist of a knob upstairs and the furnace started its job. It wasn't always so easy to start a home-heating season.

       Until I was ten, my family lived at 1101 Hertel Avenue in Buffalo, in one of three houses between 2 parking lots. Each had a basement, a first and second floor apartment, and an attic. 

     Our house was covered with brown, fake bricks. We lived on the first floor and rented the second floor. Our attic was a dusty place for storage of boxes and buzzing flies, heavy on the flies and our basement was for the furnaces.

     The basement was a dusty, gloomy, growling place, best entered quickly and left soon, little feet banging up the stairs. The dark area behind the stairs was of special concern. Impossible to see, it was a place for monsters.

     In the center of the basement the furnaces stood: likely not as large as in my memory but big.   

     They were clanging fire pits with octopi arms. I remember taking laundry to the basement. Walking down the stairs with the basket that was almost as big as me, charging past the furnaces, dumping the clothes by the washer and rushing up the stairs as fast as I could pulling the door shut behind me. 

      There were two rumbling coal furnaces, one for each apartment. They were round cast-iron fire bellies with white pipe-arms. In the summer, they were quiet and empty but, in the winter, they came alive with red flames glowing behind teeth-like grates. The fire hissed and popped while the fan growled in its cave. At my age, fear was reasonable.

     Having a coal furnace was trouble. The coal truck would back up to a basement window and send coal pounding down a chute through a window into the coal bin, a small room caked in soot. Slats of wood slid into place across the doorway serving as a closed door in preparation for the delivery.    

     The coal would bounce and thump against the wooden sides of the room and the slats until the level inside reached the height of the window. 

      When the bin was full, the shovel had to be lifted shoulder high, above the top slat to get coal. As the level of the coal went down, the slats were removed. After weeks of shoveling, the whole doorway was open, and one entered the dusty room to fetch coal.    

     Coal shovels were big, coal was heavy, and the dust was constant. Our coal furnace was superior to some heating systems, but the word automatic was years away.

        During the winter, my parents would go into the basement every morning and evening to shovel coal into the mouth of the furnace. When the weather was colder, the shoveling happened more often.  

     All that coal created ashes and that was another job. Ashes fell through grates in the furnace's belly. Collected in metal bushels, they were carried to the curbside on garbage day. Ashes were supposed to be cold before being put out for collection and that either took a long time or the addition of water, making the dense ash even heavier.   

     If the ashes were hot, the trash workers left them, telling the whole neighborhood that this was a careless house.

     As time went on, people in our neighborhood took advantage of the opportunity to convert a coal furnace to gas and there were fewer and fewer tubs of ashes at the curbs. Finally, my parents decided that they could afford the luxury of gas heat.  

     This was wonderful. A gas furnace could seem almost friendly. While outwardly the furnace was the same huge, multi-armed monster, the gas flames were quiet, well-behaved dancers and their blowers hummed gently. What a relief. With the new furnace, I had only to worry about the monster behind the stairs.  

          Rick said that he was perhaps fortunate to have a coal furnace with an auger system. This auger was about 4 feet long with a drill bit like thing that was 6 inches in diameter. 

     An auger is a mechanical device that would feed lumps of coal into the furnace automatically.

     Coal was shoveled into a box sort of container, called a hopper. The auger attached to the bottom of the hopper and moved lumps of coal over to the business part of the furnace.

     Coal had to be shoveled into the hopper, but the system certainly generated less dust by keeping the coal contained.

     It wasn't perfect because sometimes the auger would get jammed up. The person filling the hopper had to be aware of what was on the shovel because if a too-large chunk of coal went into the hopper, it could get stuck or break something called a sheer pin. In the same way a load of coal might contain the occasional rock which is harder than coal or there might be a piece of coal with rock stuck to it. 

    The point is that bigger lumps or harder lumps would break the mechanism and make it necessary to empty the hopper so that someone could fix it and put it all back together again.

     Rick said that in his house, he was often the "someone" who would have to repair the auger.

     There was a multi armed basement monster in the Riverside house but it was exorcised before our children could feel any fear. It was a coal conversion that had a 30" pilot light that made it look like a crematorium.

  

CHICKENS ON HERTEL

      We have a family story about Jay and his encounters in Kuala Lumpur with the man we named The Chicken-Plucker. Memories of chickens in my childhood include a Chicken Man on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo in the 1950s. 

     My family lived in a group of three houses next to a car dealer and across the street from the dry cleaner/bookie. (Was there really a bookie? My father said so because he saw people go in empty-handed and come out the same. Sensing it was crime related, I wasn't allowed to walk in front of that building.) 

     Sometimes my mother sent me past the other two houses and the church parking lot, on the good side of the street, to the brick building that held a car repair shop and a chicken coop on the ground floor and apartments above. 

     Entering the shop was strange because, on the inside, it didn't look, smell or sound like the city. The floor was covered in sawdust.  

     This Chicken Man walked through the mist of odors, leading with his enormous belly, wearing a blood-spattered apron over his long-sleeved white jacket. The sawdust on the floor behind his counter was not fresh but mixed with chicken droppings and feathers. 

     The back of the store held cages and a chopping block. The wire cages held chickens, sometimes more, and sometimes fewer, but always noisy. The birds would pompously strut with their darting beaks. Their combs proudly dressed their heads, and their bead-like eyes sparkled in the light of the bare bulbs hanging from black wires. 

     The man sold eggs in gray, cardboard boxes tied with a string that spun from a spool on the counter, traveled through a wire loop above and came back down to his flying hands to be wrapped around the carton, tied and snapped, the small sound of which was lost among the clucking.    

     Placed in my hands, those eggs were carried, cautiously, back to the kitchen at 1101. 

     Sometimes I was not an egg customer but a chicken customer. The chickens knew the difference.    

     "My mother would like a nice, fat chicken please, but she doesn't want any feathers. She hates finding feathers."

     When he went to the cage to select a chicken for butchering, the noise was deafening. Shouts of chicken kinship or chicken fear were far more hectic than those of egg loss. 

     His counter was too high for me to look over though I could peek around the side. I didn't see the business that so fascinated and shocked Jay in Malaysia because my Chicken Man stepped outside the back door to do the serious stuff. After there was the thunk of blade into wood, there was chicken silence for a feather's worth of time. 

     When finished, he would hand me the chicken wrapped in paper and tied with his flying string. It was okay to skip, run or even roller skate with a package of chicken and, when holding a dead chicken, moving faster seemed like a good idea. 

     There were always a few small feathers, and my mother would burn them off with the flame on our gas stove before she washed the chicken and started dinner. 

     The man and his chickens were gone by the time I was ten and could walk all the way to the corner drugstore or ride my bike around the whole block. 

     I remember stopping once to look in his dark window. The cages were empty, a few feathers were on the floor in the dusty corners and the quiet, so unusual for that store, was eerie.      circa 1956

ROLLER SKATES AND LOST HAIR

       When I was six or seven years old, something awful almost happened to me. It was a warm summer afternoon and Mom sent me out to roller skate so Dad could sleep. He worked at night, so we kids were supposed to be quiet in the morning, his bedtime.

     I put my metal skates on my sensible, brown shoes, put my skate key around my neck and took off on Buffalo sidewalks. I skated past three houses on Hertel, through the church parking lot, past the rectory and around the corner to the gas station on Delaware. That's where I fell.

     When I tried to get up, I couldn't. Something was holding my hair. I tried to pull away, but it grabbed me and held tight. I couldn't move.

     I smelled hot tar and rubber, and it frightened me. Reaching around my head, I could feel a car's tire. A tire was on my hair! A car had almost smashed my head! 

     The terrifying idea whipped energy into my fear, so I pulled my head away harder. It took more than one tug but, finally, my hair pulled free. Some hair stayed under the tire but the rest of it took off with me like a shot, head aching but still round.

    I looked back after getting up some speed and the car was there still. Hadn't moved. The driver was a woman with a small hat, a veil and her white gloved hands around her throat. She was probably trying to breathe again. 

     On I raced around the corner and up the sidewalk, not stopping to cry until reaching the porch and seeing blood on my knees.