There was a game we used to play if there were not enough kids to field a team for baseball that involved one player hitting fly balls to several kids. The game was called 500 and you got so many points for catching the ball on the fly, fewer points for catching on the first bounce and so on. When one of the kids catching accumulated 500 points he got to bat.
There were never enough kids to field a team of anything on our side of town. Mostly our preschool days were spent pretending to be soldiers or cowboys. The older boy who lived behind my grandparents, George, was able to carve realistic guns out of wood, and so with our two girl cousins who watched over us we would run around shooting and falling to the ground. Uttering "fix fix" allowed the corpse to arise, totally recovered.
One day my mom bought me a cap gun, shiny metal with red plastic panels on the handle. It came with a holster. Soon after this gift she took me to the beach. We stayed at Newport. Because of the war the beach and town were patrolled by Coast Guardsman carry in rifles and some leading German Shepherds. Upon seeing the young man with the large dog I drew my pistol and shouted bang bang. This was a mistake. The dog nearly pulled the Coast Guardsman over in his efforts to rip the gun out of my hand. My mom was quite upset as a crowd gathered and the young man got his dog under control and several mean comments were made. I was paddled when we got back to our cabin.
Back home a few days later I was demonstrating my gun to George and he suggested that the gun he had carved was a more realistic copy of what the soldiers were using in the war. He said he would be willing to take my inferior cowboy copy in exchange for the nice wooden pistol he had carved. Of course I thought this was quite a bargain. But when I got home to show my mom I got paddled again. She was under a lot of pressure and I was not as cooperative as I should have been.
She promised that we could go down to the theater in Marcola and see Snow White, so while she went to work I industriously shined my new shoes with black liquid polish. There was not enough to finish both shoes so I mixed in some water. The water appeared to make them shinier so I applied more water. When mom got home and found my good shoes were dripping wet she got upset. " Go out and get a switch, " she said, so I had to take a knife out and cut a stick so she could paddle me. But I got to go see the movie.
One day Grandad approached me and GD and said he had a surprise for us. He took us down to uncle Ted's barn across from where our cousins lived. In the barn were two baby pigs. "You boys can name these pigs," he announced. We were quite excited. We named them Sloppy and Slurpy.
As time went by the pigs grew larger. They were enclosed in a fenced area up the hill from the barn. One day I asked George if he wanted to go play with the pigs, and I led him to the pig pen. We crawled over the fence and found the pigs and I scratched Sloppy's ears. Then the pigs got up. They had grown to an immense size. They snuffled and began pushing against us, sniffing and poking us with their snouts. Suddenly fearful, George and I climbed a tree in the pen and sat on a limb as the pigs circled around beneath us. The sun began to go down and dinner time approached but we still sat in the tree. Then I heard mom yelling my name. "Over here in the pig pen! " I shouted.
Mom shook her head upon seeing our plight. She picked up a stick and came into the pen. She poked the pigs and shouted at them and drove them away from the tree, allowing us to descent and scamper over the fence as fast as we could. She gave me quite a fierce look, but I got dinner instead of a paddling for that escapade.
A short while after this adventure Grandad collected me and GD and took us down to Ted's barn. We were quite surprised to see Sloppy and Slurpy hanging from their heels in the door of the barn with blood flowing out of slices in their necks. The blood flowed across their jowels, down their snouts, and formed a river of blood that ran down the ramp into the barnyard. After gazing wide eyed at our pet pigs, now destined for our dinner plate, we focused our attention on the blood forming a lake in the dirt.
We got sticks and began to direct the flow but uncle Ted noticed us and gave us a stern shout and Grandad shifted the toothpick in his mouth and jerked his head, so we moved away from the blood and watched as the men used a pulley system to hoist the pigs one by one over a 55 gallon drum of water boiling over a fire. They dipped the pigs into the boiling water. Grandad explained that this was to loosen the hair which covered their bodies. By the end of the day we had watched the total disection of our former pets into chunks of meat that later turned into ham and porkchops.
As we sat at the dinner table that winter dining on the remains of the pigs we would ask, "Is this Slurpy or Sloppy?" and laugh.
Although is would seem that sentiment was in short supply in those days, in truth Grandma was a very sentimental person, serenading us with such tunes as "Poor Little Babes Lost in the Woods," or "Red River Valley."
Nick
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