Category Archives: Childhood

I have generally attributed my obsession with language to my mother.  Actually I should say my obsession with the English language, since I don’t know or really give a hoot about any of the others, except Latin maybe and it doesn’t count. She was the one who consistently harassed my ass to make sure I spoke grammatically not out of any respect for the language but to insure I did not sound like a hick or pick up too thick a southern accent.

But I must say also that the old man exhibited some degree of linguistic liveliness one might say.  He told off-color jokes that we were not allowed to hear but which usually hinged on some ridiculous pun.  I know he liked, “Woman who fly upside down have big crack up.”  And while farting is sort of a universal language and not essentially English, his prowess in that area certainly contributed to my particularly low sense of humor.

More importantly though he used expressions such as “son of a gun.”  This was used to express surprise and even consternation.  He also said things like, “I did not cotton to it.”  He once said, “I haven’t seen you since you since Hector was a pup.”  Here we can perhaps see a classical reference in the mention of Hector.  Or: “Mad as a wet hen.” These were mostly all southern ruralisms passed down no doubt from generation to generation.  Though one of his favorites—It’s as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere—had to be of more recent origins since the brassiere only appeared in the early 20^th century.

I have already mentioned, “Kiss my rusty red bunny” and “bleed my whistle.”  These euphemisms were designed I do believe to be if anything more repellant that the actual “low” expressions, those being “Kiss my ass” and “take a piss.”

I have also mentioned swearing at which he was prodigious, the most classic being “goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch,” said as one word.  Also he would say in moments of frustration, “If I had a shot gun I would blow my fucking head off.”  At which I generally had to stifle my urge to say, “And boy do I wish the fuck you had one!”

 Perhaps most irritating was his tendency to turn the language into a code.  For example, one would be sitting at the dinner table and he would say, “PPMB.”  This was confusing until somebody muttered, “Pass him the butter,” since PPMB stood for Please, pass me the butter, one of the rules of his code being to leave out the articles, “a”,”an,” and “the.”

Mostly, I found this practice so ridiculous I could not be bothered to figure them out except for WFDS which through dint of sheer repetition I came to understand as What’s For Desert Squirt.  Sometimes he would come out with a whopper such as, “FDCQRTS,” which nobody could figure out, and since he would never explain them, as far as I know some of his deepest thoughts were never understood.

Seems as if today parents wouldn’t have to give their kids a sex talk if they have a TV; it’s all pretty much there.  They show animals openly fornicating on the Discovery Channel.  It’s appalling the way those animals fornicate out in the open like that and that’s just basic cable.  I am not a parent, so I wouldn’t know.  But I guess it there’s a sex talk today it’s more like: don’t do it! Or if you do it, do this or that! Not so much a sex talk as a venereal disease talk.

Anyway there’s not much to explain.  The mechanics of it are pretty straight forward.  Sex obviously is pretty much idiot proof.

Back in my day, there was no cable TV or Discovery Channel, but I never got a sex talk.  I had to do research.  My father never said word one on the subject, and all my mother ever said at all about the topic was: your father is like a rabbit; and sex is good once a week like chicken.

But in sixth grade we had a sex talk hour or so that must have been mandated by the state.  It was really odd because they sent all the girls off into one room and all the boys off into another as if one sex wasn’t supposed to know what the other was up to.  But it wasn’t a sex talk as much as it was a naming the parts talk plus some discussion of what would soon—for your average teenager—be happening in those parts.  It was sort of a heads up, by way of a warning.

So all of us sixth grade guys were in one room with Mr. Tode.  He was a really popular teacher, especially with the girls, since he was the only male elementary school teacher we had.  But I didn’t like him much because one day he was playing some music in class on a record player that for some reason he stuck in the back row next to me.  And when a song ended he asked me to move the little needle to another one but I flubbed it and scratched the record and he fucking yelled at me.  He nearly fucking traumatized me because that was the first time I had picked up a record needle since we didn’t have a record player.  But he said it like I was supposed to know how and it looked pretty easy. I mean, I was game.  But I flubbed it.

Anyway, we didn’t have any visual aides back then.  No charts or graphs and no movies because we didn’t have any movie projectors at our school.  So Mr. Tode, who was not a good drawer, had to draw pictures of the parts—penis and testicles and such—up there on the black board.  And then he tried to draw a penis in an erect state to indicate what would be happening.  And I was sitting in the back row and I leaned over to John Cobb sitting next to me and said, “Looks like a zucchini to me.”  Because that’s what it looked like.  And John laugh and the guy next to John laughed and I laughed, and there went Mr. Tode yelling again, “If you are not mature enough…etc.”

So that was the sex talk except at the end he asked were there any questions, and for quite a bit there weren’t any till Lance, who was pretty robust and earnest guy though none to swift, said he had one of those nackturanal emitters Mr. Tode had mentioned and while Mr. Tode said the stuff was supposed to be sort of white, he had noted that his stuff had been sort of yellowish.  And Mr. Tode said there was nothing to be concerned about since it could come out a bit on the white or the yellow side, and I just had to stifle myself from raising my hand and asking what if it come out blue.

Because she didn’t want us to grow up to be uncouth yokels like our father, the old lady started reading to us boys pretty early.  She’d start off with the Child’s Garden of Verses which she acted like was real special since Robert Stevenson had something to do with it.  This I didn’t like as much as Mother Goose featuring Humpty Dumpy and that woman who lived in a shoe.  And some of the Grimm stuff too.  But the stories that tended to stick in my mind were by Uncle Remus and involved Brer Rabbit.

I don’t know if people read Uncle Remus anymore.  People might think it is racist.  But I am not sure what reason for that there might be.  Maybe the Tar Baby?  But as I understand it these were African Oral Tales that a white man named Chandler Harris compiled and put out under the nom de plume of Uncle Remus.  Once at some function I sat next to a young black lady in anthropology I think, and I asked her about Uncle Remus and she said there was nothing racist in it, and we had sort of a debate about what Brer Rabbit represented  She said he was a common figure in African tales; he represented the trickster.

I said, true, he did trick Brer Fox on a number of occasions, but on one occasion at least he tricked himself and that was one of my favorites, the tale of the tar baby.  Seems Brer rabbit was out walking one day—well, you know the story.  And he came upon the Tar Baby who refused to returned Brer Rabbit’s salutation and that pissed off Brer Rabbit and receiving no apology for the insult, he attacked the Tar Baby and the more he fought the more he got tangled up in the Tar Baby.

So I said, Brer Rabbit didn’t seem to represent a trickster in this story; instead, I proposed, he had received his comeuppance for being the egotist that he was and getting so easily insulted.  The black student allowed that in this particular tale, true, Brer Rabbit had been chastened, but as a trickster he was also understood to be an egoist.  I allowed as how she probably was correct and obviously Brer Rabbit was a more highly complex character than I had supposed.

In one of the trickster tales, Brer Fox gets his hands on Brer Rabbit and is going to eat him.  But Brer Rabbit starts saying stuff like before you eat me please don’t stick me with a knife because there’s nothing I hate more than being stuck with a knife.  So Brer Fox would go to stick him with a knife and Brer Rabbit said something like oh don’t stick me with a knife before you eat me because even more than being stuck with a knife I hate being…and so on and so forth, till he said there was nothing he hated more than being thrown in the blackberry patch.  Whereupon the Fox did that and Brer Rabbit just laughed because there was no way Brer Fox was going to get him in there.

I was particularly fond of this story because of its mention of the blackberry patch.  There was one of those maybe fifty yards across down in the hollow beyond Grandma’s house.  I loved those blackberries.  They were free food.  Sometimes towards the middle of the summer, I would crawl out under that big black berry patch getting stuck now and then, but out as far towards the middle as I could go and find a nice spot with a bunch of berries, and lie on my back with the sun filtering through the leaves and eat blackberries, at times each one being sweeter than the next.  I guess I identified with Brer Rabbit because out in the middle of that black berry patch I felt off in my own place and safe from bigger people should they want to get at me.

Back in SC, we had no sweets around the house.  Except possibly vanilla wafers, and those quickly became tiresome.  Sometimes we had bananas, and when they went over the edge, the old lady would mash them up and put cream and sugar in with it, and then cover the whole thing with vanilla wafers, and then cook it in the oven for a while and then we would eat that.

We never had potato chips either.  That’s hard to imagine today what with all the sorts and kinds of chips wherever you look.  But I don’t remember a bag of potato chips in the place.  I guess we were deprived.  But every once in a blue moon on a Friday evening, when maybe he had a good week money-wise, the old man would stop at this place by the Laurens Drive in and buy hash and he would buy potato chips then.

That was about the whole meal unless the old lady made coleslaw which was a possibility and something she knew how to do.  So we would eat those chips, and you put that hash in the middle of a piece of white bread, and if any bread was left you used it to sop up the hash juice from your plate.  I don’t know but I loved that hash and missed it deeply when we moved to California.

Many years later when we went back to SC for a visit I was happy and proud that my Uncle Earl had gone into the hash business.  He didn’t do it on a regular basis but for holidays, especially the Fourth of July which is celebrated down south for different reasons than the rest of the country.  Fire stations would make hash too.  Uncle Earl just attached a cardboard sign to his mailbox and at one point he sold the hash at eight dollars a pint because it didn’t come by the pound but in little containers, like they have at Chinese places, with little wire handles on them.

I thought maybe I had built that hash up a little in my mind and when I sat down to eat some at Uncle Earl’s place I was prepared to be disappointed.  But I wasn’t.  Maybe it wasn’t quite what I remembered but it was near enough.  I am not entrepreneurially inclined, but I did sit around some and thought about how I might mass market that stuff.  People by that time had all become calorie counters and nutritious-wise and since that hash was probably about as God awful as any meat could be for a person, I figured I would have to market it as anti-health.  Put maybe a little American flag on the container and advertise it as “Not Meat.  The Pure Essence of Meat.”

Uncle Earle had a hash house built right next to his real house.  Inside, he had a couple of forty gallon vats.  He would put the meat in those and add some little water, and vinegar, he said, and some secret sauce, though I believe he was kidding.  His recipe as I recollect was something like 300 pounds of beef plus 300 pounds of pork and slow heat for 48 hours, stirring constantly so it did not stick to the bottom of the vat, and a whole bunch of onions. That was it.  Plus salt and pepper, and slow cooked that meat just broke down yielded up to the quivering palette the Pure Essence or Nectar of Meat.