That House in Milltown: 1989

My wife and I considered buying a house when we lived in Missoula. We were newly married--childless--and both attending school at the University of Montana. I had never owned a house. My wife had owned her half of a duplex in Champaign when I met her, but she sold it when we moved out west.

We had lived in a cabin in the Bitterroots--outside Stevensville--when we first moved to the area and that was for sale, but we wanted to be in town or at least closer to town. We looked at a few places, including one in Milltown.

Milltown was just east of Missoula, through the gap of Mt. Sentinel and Mt Jumbo, where the Clark Fork River is joined by the Blackfoot. There's another adjacent town called Bonner, but I could never distinguish between the two. It was a small town, depressed (at that time at least) and, as one would expect by the name, it had a mill. A paper mill, I suppose. It was home to The Milltown Union Bar and Laundromat: an establishment immortalized by a poem of essentially the same name by Richard Hugo. (I liked Richard Hugo and that poem and I liked that bar.) In fact, the house we looked at in Milltown was almost across the street from that bar.

Yes, we looked at a house. It was small. One bedroom. One bathroom. Not more than 1000 square feet would be my guess. It was cheap. I don't recall how much but, even to me even then, it did not seem like much for a house. I recall that it was painted red. The caveat for the property ended up being that it had no property--that is, it was a one-time mill company home and though you could buy the house, that deed did not include the land on which it was built.

The realtor seemed a little dubious--no doubt because of the land ownership thing--that we were really interested in the house. And, ultimately, he was correct. But I was interested (my wife, not so much) and wonder what would have happened if we had bought it.

Instead we ended up looking at houses in town, settling on one close to the university. Ultimately I nixed the deal. I wasn't ready to buy a house. We didn't have career-type jobs and who knew if we were going to settle in Missoula.

So, we did not buy a house--in Missoula or Milltown or the Bitterroot. We did not settle in Missoula--or in Montana, or in Seattle or Portland as we had half-planned. We ended up back in Illinois for a spell, had our two kids, then moved to South Florida, bought a house, and stayed there for over sixteen years.

NYC Snow:1988

One night in New York it snowed. Jimmy and I were out and about in Manhattan, probably somewhere around St. Marks Square. The snow came tumbling down thick and slow, sticking and piling up and doing that magical thing any snowstorm does for a city--really, for about anywhere. So, yes, it was magical. Cool. Beautiful. Then walking the sidewalk of a side street we come across this man asleep. Or passed out. The unconscious man was also collecting snow. His body being covered in the magical white right along with the pavement and garbage cans and the city as a whole.

Even the policeman who came and started to kick the man couldn't undo this magic.

Squirrel Call: Iowa City 1981

I was working at the University that summer at Burge Hall, doing maintenance and cleaning and housekeeping when needed. I was working along with a number of other students, some who I had known, some who I met while working there in the summer. It was my second summer doing this.

But I--or we, as the case may be--met other people, too. Full time workers mainly, who were often from the smaller towns around Iowa City. People from the likes of Tipton (or is it Tifton?), Solon, Washington and so forth. People like Alfred (which was not his real name, but we called him that and I can't recall his true name any longer) and Norbert (who died in a pick up accident) and, to the best of my knowledge or simply my fallback name I seem to use, Jeff.

Jeff was from Washington, south of Iowa City. He was young--maybe twenty at most, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He was pretty much a country boy and wasn't sure what to make of we student outsiders (nor we to make of him). At first, at least. But he was a good kid (even though I was, in many ways, still a kid myself). Anyway, Jeff taught Steve Bowers and I how to make a squirrel call using three quarters.

(Steve was a close friend of mine. We had lived on the same 2000 dorm floor our first year there, though I had never really knew him well--but we became pals while working together.)

Jeff hunted squirrels.  In the woods he called them out of the high trees with the use of quarters. He showed us how you can cup two quarters in the circle of your thumb and index finger, then using the third quarter, you tap it rapidly on the two suspended quarters to make that hollow knocking sound that squirrels make: thnock thnock thnock.

I have never hunted squirrels. But I did try it out with back yard squirrels once. They certainly paid attention.

Of course, I don't know whatever happened to Jeff. I hope he never ended up like Norbert.

The Toe Hoe

I met Jerry in Seattle in 1987. He lived down the block on First Avenue West in Queen Anne, across the street from the Safeway more or less. He, as it turned out, was schizophrenic. Nonetheless, we were friends for a number of years.

He had a medical discharge from the United States Navy and had some money. He was originally from Nevada--Sparks--but lived with his grandmother in Seattle. He had been a lightweight--maybe bantamweight--boxer in the service, but in his heart he was an entrepreneur. He invented games and candlesticks and, I'm not sure. But the one device he did invent and bring to market was the Toe Hoe.

The Toe Hoe was a bladed metal contraption with straps. You put your foot in it and used it to hoe the earth for flower beds or gardens and anything else you could think of. He had them manufactured and had them advertised. I used to have a copy of his commercial. I imagine it was shown on late night TV--one of those Popeil or Wham-O like commercials with footage of the toe hoe in use while a breathless narrator talked it up.

I was freshly married and my wife and I thought it was very funny. But, of course, it was also rather sad. Jerry told me that he got a call one day from some older man who had purchased his product and wanted to know how to make it work--evidently it didn't quite go over as advertised. Besides a copy of the TV commercial, I bought a toe hoe. When we got it, my wife and I laughed again.

I don't think I ever even tried to use it.

Feedback

When I was in my late teens and my twenties, I could make a high-pitched screeching sound. It sounded very much like feedback from an amplifier. In college I learned that if I could get someone else to make the lower pitch, kind of a train like woo sound, while I did the high note, it mimicked amplifier feedback almost exactly. I went eeeee, they went woooo. Mike was always the best at that woooo.

There was a party downstairs at Burge Hall, when I lived in the dorms at the University of Iowa, with a live band. Mike and I attended. There was a crowd and we stood close to the band, but not too close. We tried out the feedback noise. The band stopped playing and began to adjust their amps and we thought that was funny.

You'll be happy to know that we were always judicious with our power.

Can't Breathe: Johnson City 1968

I've only had the breath knocked out of me once in my life. It was when I was a kid and I was playing on a playground at Cherokee Elementary School, just outside of Johnson City, Tennessee. I don't know for certain if my year is right, but if so, I must have been eleven years old.

It wasn't what we called the Monkey Bars, but maybe that's the proper term for them. It was one of those contraptions like a horizontal ladder on poles--rungs, or bars, that you hung from and tried to cross by grabbing them one by one--something you see in Marine Corps obstacle courses, except, you know, for kids . . . I was with some friends, maybe a brother or two, and we were just goofing around. School was not in session. (Of course I could be mistaken about time and place, but not about the bars and what it felt like.) I was using the bars and maybe I tried to jump a rung using both hands at once--I was a pretty fearless kid, physically at least--instead of doing it one by one. But I missed and flopped down on the hard ground.

I must have landed on my belly, or on my side, but immediately, I could not breathe.

It was painful. It was scary. I was gasping. My lungs empty, I didn't know what had happened or what was going on but I desperately was trying to pull air back into my lungs, back into me. It is not a nice feeling, being out of breath. It's a very panicky feeling. No adult was there and I don't recall anyone else being all that concerned, but I sure was. Still--what are you going to do? Die?

Obviously, I didn't die. Also, obviously, such a thing as getting the wind knocked out of you is a semi-common occurrence. At least among sportifs. So, I recovered. More or less figured out, on my own, what had just happened to me. Put it down in my kid-history as to what can happen to you. And that was that. For all I know, I went right back to playing.

Yet, I have not forgotten it.

I certainly recall that it was no fun. No fun at all.

O'Malia's Black Beetle

I'd say O'Malia was my best friend at the end of high school and before I made friends in college. He remained a best friend for a very long time--but, I have not seen him in a very long time. Maybe thirty years, now. I know I talked to him once on the phone--that was at least ten years ago. He's one of those guys my age who have no social media presence and, if they have a cell phone or email, I don't know what the number or contact address is. I seem to have a number of old friends--and even some current ones--who don't use cells or computers, let alone, say, Facebook. Yes, I'm sure I could look him up with a simple Google search, so maybe I'm about as guilty as him (them) for losing touch.

O'Malia had a car. It was an older Volkswagen Beetle, black.

You could hear that car coming before you saw it. I don't think I ever drove it, but I rode in it many many times over the years I knew him. Around Urbandale and Des Moines, out to the Fort Dodge swimming pool and Saylorville Lake, to Lyons Park for touch football and frisbee, to--when we were a little older--the bars, and over to Iowa City and back numerous times.

The car's windshield wipers, I remember, ran on air pressure from the tires. He never appeared to have problems with it. Sure, it rode and rattled like a tin can, but it was reliable. And, well, I guess I don't have much more to say on this issue.

Good things disappear--just like that Black Beetle--and are discarded. Or change. Or, perhaps, outgrown. Or simply neglected.