Wow Jerry

How do you do that? Draw up memories, condense them without making them seem trite or forced.

You tweaked some of mine. We would have candy making weekends when the whole house smelled of divinity, seafoam, fudge, peanut brittle, Martha Washington candy. I miss that.

And my dad's usual pipe tobacco (when he wasn't smoking unfiltered Camels) was Walter Raliegh and he had a lovely cherry wood revolving pipe caddy. We kids used to love sniffing each bowl. He used a different pipe for different tobaccos.

Our basement was refurbished into family room, Bar, TV and furniture one end, play room the other. It had linoleum floor and we kids were always being hollered at for skating on it. Sidewalk skates with key and little metal wheels. The basement was huge (nearly the whole of a ranch style house) so lots of rambunctious activity took place there. Lots of places to hide in the whole house, but the basement was best. My favourite was the shelves inside my dad's bar. I could squish in between the box of photographs and the box of plastic cups, napkins, swizzle sticks and stuff. My brother would set up tickle machines, He would lie on his stomach across one or 2 chairs and we little ones would have crawl through the contraption as fast as we could without getting tickled. Or he would hide under an army blanket and play glob. We would all scurry about, trying to get past him without getting caught. Or he would pretend to be a TV set. He would launch into a reenactment of some show or commercial and whenever anyone said click, he changed channels. It was hilarious, because it would make unlikely sentence combinations, like

Today's guest on the Merv Griffin show is, click, Snap, Crackle and Pop, click and brought to by, click Oh a Kid'll eat the middle of an Oreo first and save the chocolate cookie outside for, click, Let's Make a Deal. We would be rolling.

But my favorite game was when I got to be giant. Whenever I had ear infections and colds etc. I would be put downstairs on the sofa, in a bundle of warm clothes out of the dryer, where all the laundering and ironing etc was going on. Big bro, used to pretend to be tiny little person on the floor and every time I coughed or sneezed, he would go rolling away like a tumbleweed, grab onto the pole in the center of the room and hang on for dear life, while I hooted and guffawed.


The name Buster put me to mind of about a quarter of my wardrobe. I had Buster Brown skirts, shorts and tops. I always called my Buster Brown skirts Olive Oyl skirts, because they had that double stripe trim at the hem.


Smell smell butter sugar caramel
Roasting peanuts for a Saturday candy carousel

Turn turn Daddy's tobacco toy
Fiddle with pipes, make a pipe cleaner boy

Play play the seeking game, hide
Crawl under the chairs for the tickle man ride



WOW!! I did it! Sort of.