[Sca-cooks] nostalgia

[Dan Phelps]

 I was born in 1952 and lived most but not all of my childhood in the south.
I remember many things from my childhood, not all of them fondly, like they
were bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

In Lansing Michigan; waiting for my dad to get home from over seas and Dad
getting the shakes from malaria.   In Miami; it raining every day in the
afternoon, the next door neighbor tightrope walker's practice wire, being
hit by a drunk while riding my bicycle, getting really sea sick going
offshore fishing with my dad and Alf the Canadian in his boat, damned near
being parboiled in the bath because Pop's frostbite from Korea had left him
with limited feeling in his hands.  In Beaufort South Carolina; hurricane
Gracie hitting us, a neighbor killing himself in his front yard, fighting
with the local kids, blinding headaches in the first grade until they
determined I needed glasses, crabbing on the dock and osytering at low tide.
In Alabama outside of Bermingham; segregated water fountains and tell my
mother that the water didn't taste any different, freedom rider buses on the
highway, The Klan burning a cross, hearing about lynchings, Dad telling me
not to tell anyone my grandmother is Cherokee, my mother explaining about
segregation and driving us by a black school on the weekend to show us that
seperate but equal wasn't, nickel cokes but only in the small bottles, the
price of comic books going up from a dime, my first look at a color TV, dad
explaining to a black man in Michigan while we were on vacation that yes the
car plates say Alabama but no we aren't from Alabama he's just stationed
there.  In North Carolina; the Cuban missile crisis, collecting pop bottles
for the two cent deposit, being called in off the play ground when The
President was killed, the first black kids at school, the monster/beast who
lived next door and his kids, Dad twice going off to Nam, cousin Butch who
didn't come back and all of the family friends who didn't either, The Tet
offensive.

I remember getting my draft number, 36, and knowing I wasn't a kid any
more...  forever after that I wasn't a kid.

Daniel Raoul