Little doesn’t necessary mean little as in small but much more. When a parent or grandparent gives you a hug. My first crush or rather crushes. My first car, second car, anything but my present car. It needs to give way to something more recent. Something within the past 20 years??
I remember TV shows as a kid. “I Love Lucy”. The Jack Benny Show, The Twilight shows, Dragnet, One Step Beyond. I remember the TV’s that came before these. My next door neighbor had the first in our neck of the woods. My whole family and theirs gathered around it waiting for the station to begin its broadcast day (of about 5 hours). It had a small 8” screen with an enclosure as large as a small fridge. When it began we could barely see much other than a guy with some ad and the local news. We sat there entranced by this quasi lucid picture with lines angling through it. My neighbor got up and continually adjusted the picture and the rabbit ears antenna. He finally gave up and we went home… My dad said TV would never amount to anything.
I remember Christmas in the late Forties. One Christmas at Dad’s parents in Hyattville, KS. We’d come up from Tulsa for Christmas. It was snowing hard and my grandparents little house was empty on arrival. Mom said they probably went to church. It was a small Methodist church just about 4 city blocks from the house. We drove there and Dad got out to go inside while I and my sister remained in the car. Oh, the beautiful Christmas music. The 8 person choir and congregation sang alongside of a church reed organ. The church windows bright with candlelight. So there we sat among the heavy snow drifts waiting. I felt so good with all this magical music, light and snow falling. I thought “so this is what Christmas is all about”.
Times go on though through other Christmas’s not so good but there were other “little things”. My first crushes. It seemed there was always one if not two in every grade up through graduation from High School. It was always love at first sight. No they never knew but I did. Such male beauty. I always thought I’d be with one of them one day. That never happened but I did find others though never quite the same.
Then there was Aunt Martha, a Pennsylvania Dutch woman who denied any German ancestry. That wasn’t the point though. She and her husband back then were for me and my sister a second mom and dad. They loved us so much. In 1949 she and her husband were to visit us in Tulsa. Again there was copious snow on Christmas Eve. Before their arrival the door bell rang. Mom answered and it was UPS or whomever back then, holding a big rectangle box which had MY name on it. She brought it inside but said I couldn’t open it yet. It seemed like eternity but Aunt Martha and Uncle Paul finally arrived. I tore the box open and found an electric train! OH MY GOD! Wonderful!! Mom and Dad couldn’t have afforded it but they weren’t poor. What a gift, what a time of memories.
So much over the years of little things have now past. My first bicycle, my first motorcycle, my first car. My first sexual connection.
Maybe some of the happiest memories of the past would also include two additional things. At Mom’s parent’s farmhouse at two in the morning hearing the night train chug out of downtown Ft. Scott. Watching it as its dim headlight moved slowly upward on the inclining grade. What a trip!
The other at Dad’s parents again. Early on one morning during a visit from Tulsa I awakened from the night on their old feather bed in their two room home. I heard their windup WESTCLOX alarm clock tick/tacking away while Grandma and Grandpa still slept soundly . I loved listening to it run. Just minutes later that morning, only one block away, came the slow chug, chug, chug of another train, this time a passenger one. It stopped very briefly to dislodge a couple of locals then headed on its way north.
Lastly, since I’m into this sort of thing, I inadvisably was plowing through my Grandma’s wallboard once and found Granddad’s ancient Elgin pocket watch. WOW! I HAD to WIND it and listen to it tick. But, Mom saw me and that was it! The watch was taken away and hidden. Shit!! I hadn’t even gotten to take the back off it yet! Still what a discovery, and equal to the time Granddad caught me play driving in his 1936 Dodge in the garage. That watch, not the car, represented so much to me then as it still does today. I finally inherited it around 15 years ago, where it now holds a very special place in my watch collection but much to the chagrin and displeasure of my cousins who believed they should have been its heir.
Yes, little things in life; little things do mean a lot. But until the day I finally fall over, my spring unwound, these are just a very few of the best of my memories. For in the great eternity within the universe it’s little things that do mean a lot.
About the Author
"I'm just a guy from Tulsa (God forbid). So overlook my shortcomings, they're an illusion."
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