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Kokomo Kootsie
2/21/2002
Nibbles- Bits & Pieces
Corn Bread
When my brother visited me in Kentucky one year, we had many good times. We were both very young, I was twenty and married and he was seventeen months younger and single.
We had parties many nights of the week, even though I worked, but I was always a night owl, so it didn’t bother me.
We visited all the relatives we had heard about all our lives growing up in Indiana with our grandparents; I had already established closeness with them in the three years I had lived in Kentucky. I was missing my grandparents and Aunt Lou, my grandma’s sister looked just like her, while Uncle Will looked like my grandpa and I went to see them on a regular basis. They were strangers to Jack and he enjoyed meeting and getting to know them.
Close by was our father’s house, where he lived with his wife, Lizzie, and their five children. After a lifetime of not having anyone to call dad, (we called our grandparents, who raised us, pop and mom) it was a pleasing idea to have a dad, to both of us. But strangely, neither of us was able to call him dad, and avoided any sentence structure that made it necessary or unavoidable, and force us to say Dad, or insult or hurt him by calling him by his name, Otis. "Dad" was too foreign to us for some reason.
Our day our step-mom, asked Jack if he felt close to her boys. He answered and said, "I can’t say I do." Everyone seemed embarrassed and the boy’s faces fell from bright expectancy. It was a stupid question! Later, I told Jack there were better ways to say it and not hurt feelings. He said, "Like what?"
So it put him in a bind whenever over to their house. Lizzie always asked personal questions of everyone. She just asked to be put down.
One day when we were there for a Sunday dinner, as Liz passed the cornbread to Jack, and insisted he take some, saying it was fresh baked and hot, made with buttermilk and so on, he took a piece though he hated cornbread.
Next time we went over for dinner, I asked Lizzie, in front of everyone, if she had made cornbread, which Jack had been looking forward all week to eating again; said it was the best he had ever had. Liz smiled and preened and the children’s eyes lit-up, everyone was so pleased- except my brother, Jack!
Across the table, Jack glared at me, while I gave him big smiles and rattled on about how he longed for that corn bread ever since we had been there last. Lizzie was thrilled to pieces. Jack hated all of us, waiting to see him grab that cornbread when it was passed. He didn’t grab it, but he took it like he liked it and ate it, but turned down more, saying he was too full already, while I urged him to take more, take some home!
He told me on the way home if I ever did that to him again, he’d tell everyone he hated cornbread, and go home to Indiana.
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| EPM 2002 - 2005 |
Kokomo Kootsie
2/20/2002
Submitted by: - Nibbles-- Bits & Pieces
The Pledge
There was great excitement at the beginning of the school year for the freshman.
New faces, new subjects, new teachers, lot of them! There was always a big crowd of kids, everything different from grade school, with its one room, one teacher.
All the boys wanted to be on the basketball team or the football team. It was their dearest dream all four years of high school.
The girls dreamed of being cheerleaders, and Home Coming Queen. But most of all, being pledged to one of the many elite clubs which prevailed, mostly sponsored by the YWCA. Once pledged, one had to be voted in by the other club members.
It was not easy to become a club member. It was a clique, usually made up of the girls from the ‘privileged’ families.
I had gone to a big consolidated country school for three years and came back to town and entered the high school a sophomore.
The day I was pledged into Delta Phi, I was ecstatic. Then the initiations began! They took many forms; all set up to hopefully, cause the most embarrassment to the pledge.
Everyone took it all very, very, seriously! Today, from this distance in time, it is all so silly and trivial. But not to the young students. A group of pledges from another club had to stand on a soap box in court-house square on a Saturday afternoon, and pass out sheets of toilet paper to passersby. I’d have hated that!
All had to be over painted with very rouged cheeks, red, red lips, heavy eye-shadow and lashes. Hair in pig-tails. Clothes on backwards - hats and coats in class. All that could be dreamed up.
The boys had it as badly. Make-up, dresses, hose -heels - picture hats!
On the night when we were to be pledged formally, we were herded into the clubroom, where we took our oaths of office and knelt down, given a big spoon, and told to eat. Graham crackers were soaked in milk and served in a baby’s potty, - in front of the entire club. How we gagged, and felt so terrible!!
Afterwards, we all piled into cars and were driven by parents out to an old empty haunted house, a few miles into the country.
When we arrived there, each pair of girls was given a hammer and two nails each. We were instructed in what to do.
We were to go up the path, into the house, and into an inner room where we were to take turns driving our long nails into the floor!The parents and rest of the girls would wait at the road-side by the cars.
My partner and I were chosen the first to go! We hung on to one another, as we staggered up the path, scaring one another more by doing this clinging, and were egged-on by our cheering comrades, though in a bit muted tones.
We went so slowly up that path to that old sagging door. Hanging there like a huge hungry dark mouth! It was so hard to step in through that door into that very dark unknown house!
But we did; in a hurry once inside, and found the room in the middle of the house, must have once been a dinningroom.
I nailed my two nails into the floorboards, and each strike of the hammer sounded like the thunder of doom. Then I stood up fast.
Jane stooped down and began to drive her nail into the floor; she began to whimper and moan, and that set me off, though I didn’t realize I was making those weird sounds I heard! With the last nail, Jane jumped to her feet like she’d been stung by a bee, her nerves having deserted her - and was immediately yanked backward and fell screaming to the floor!
I began screaming too- and stood there unable to even move. Our screams brought the parents on the run and some of the girls also.
When flashlights were turned on us, they could see I was not hurt, standing there frozen in place, screaming!
But Jane, was on the floor screaming, with both hands over her eyes, and kicking her heels up and down on the floor.
When she was helped to her feet, it was found she had nailed her big pleated skirt to the floor, and that’s what yanked her back and down to the floor when she had finished her nail driving - had jumped to her feet, ready to run out of the house.
Needless to say, the party broke up, as no one else was of a mind to go and drive their nails in that house.
The parents were more than upset- partly because they were given a good scare themselves, and partly at us for screaming and our silly games.
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