Over Here: 1 – Little Mysteries
For some years now Open Writing has been publishing a weekly poem by American humorist Ron Pataky.
Ron’s unique take on the world makes his rhymes instantly and hilariously recognisable. How the Pataky “style’’ evolved will now be revealed in the ensuing weeks and months. Today we begin the serialisation of Ron’s autobiography, Over Here.
When I first arrived in this world in May of 1935, I was naked, wet, hungry, and broke. Almost immediately, within literal seconds of my arrival on scene, I was struck from behind by a person or persons unknown. Small wonder, I suppose, that I continued to have little use for Welcome Wagon for some years thereafter. And, I didn't even want to HEAR about another dude's humble beginnings in, say, some deserted duck blind on the parched Dakota prairie! No, indeed!
In those primitive days, you see, the small city of Danville, Illinois, thank you very much, probably would have scored reasonably high on the blight-meter of just about any outpost then visible on the recovering American scene. Moreover, the two-block-long West Bridge Street "neighborhood," a tiny wedge of the poorest of such collections this side of picturesque downtown Bombay, was among its less affluent mud and gravel arenas.
Dissolve to Mansfield, Ohio, and the year 1946!
Roughly eleven years later, I was reasonably clothed, generally dry, well-fed, and could usually afford modest portions of candy and/or a milkshake (providing there was no excessive extra change for malt).
More that that even, our new Mansfield, Ohio, street was (gasp!) tarred and semi-paved, albeit sticky in warm weather, and monumentally potted from sheer age and the ravages of winters past. Indeed, the
livin' in the old frame house Dad had purchased for an exorbitant seven grand was more or less easy, at least in summertime, and I can remember thinking to myself at the time, "What a country this is!" Yep, only in America, folks, only in America!
(And don't brush this off brazenly, contemptuous reader. One rarely will experience, for example, something akin to the ringing, enthusiastic shout of "Only in Sudan!" or "Algeria, Algeria ... what a dynamite country!" [No pun intended]. Nor, by the way, do I recommend that you hold your breath and refuse to take nourishment until you hear a booming anthem like, "This Is My Country," proudly sung by exuberant, cheering crowds mingling and boldly tromping the strewn corpse multitudes in, say, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, or Nigeria!).
But back to boys, men, and the general germination overview. Something new had been added as well, at least to my life. I was beginning to show signs of a medical condition doctors would call PMD (Persistent Male Desperation).
Girls had begun to smell pleasant, to look actually soft, and to be nice things to occasionally brush against. Their hair had taken on new curves and colors, and their sometimes-displayed toenails were generally polished to a bright, attractive gloss (which could have been interpreted as an invitation to actually bite them!). Also, and long before I noticed any real changes in myself (other than the relatively dull basics of height and weight), girls had begun to change physically, most of them slowly at first, but a few here and there in a fashion that was truly astounding to a boy of twelve.
Among my related discoveries during this period was my newfound awareness that sunsets, given the right company, could be incredibly enticing things, and that something (brief!) could be said for invigorating new mornings as well. I even read some Middle-Eastern poetry, for crying out loud!
"Awake!" (from memory, if you please!), "for morning in the Bowl of Night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,
and, lo, the Hunter of the East
has caught the Sultan’s turret in a Noose of Light”
Suddenly, adventure and romance abounded, and I began the looping, bedazzling, life-long process of being smittenized with their very aboundingness!
Little mysteries had begun to be either noticeable or assumed beneath various parts of female attire, which fabric itself slowly took on an aura that was separate and distinct from, say, the cruddy, untouchable denim or foul sneakers of a male friend.
And female smells! Upon entering a shared locker room following a girls’ gym class, for example, a boy was aromatically greeted with a kind of primitive excitement that was, at that age, simply undeniable. Smell that soap? She might have actually stood, naked, beneath this very shower!
Dare I imagine she may even have peed where my toes are wiggling at this precise moment in time and space? At times, it came close to being overwhelming! And, of course, there were times when our imagined pees — well, hers, at least, imagined — became involved in a kind of surreptitious, devilishly-seductive co-swirling. Ah, sweet, unclogged, unfettered, unmitigated paradise of youth!
Yes, too! Even the faintest leftover odor, real or imagined, could be pure magic! I had begun to associate the pleasant smell of mildly-perfumed soap, when encountered just about anywhere, with the obvious and undeniable soap aroma of the fully-grown twelve-year-old women I had known along the way.
Hells bells, a Kresge's dimestore could send me into a quivering flitter as I lingered among the bobbins, clothespins, and sundry colorful bath towels from exotic places like Des Moines! Wow!
It was, moreover, the kind of immediacy that also could arrive utterly unannounced in a dim and nondescript school hallway between classes, or even during an otherwise mundane recess
(co-habiting, sadly, with the unmistakable stink of boys!). To be brushed and-or encompassed by this peculiarly female soap-and-dainty-perfume aroma as you clumsily exchanged books and notes at your locker was at the time not a whit short — not even half a whit short — of heaven itself. It was classically and categorically wonderful to a boy of twelve!
**
Do watch out for ensuring episodes.
