northeastern Brasil, 1945-1954, part eight
ah! I think this concludes this sequence of appreciations. if not, I'll come back to it. please remember the caveats for this sequence: 1945-1954 is once upon a time, and these appreciations depend on memories of a boy between two-and-a-half years old and about twelve years old, remembered by a seventy-four-year-old man. this particular appreciation and set of memories goes back before the blue-grey house. I think I was about nine, so this would have happened in 1951. it happened at the plain house. plain? yes, there was absolutely nothing special about it. it looked like what a kid draws for a house. it had a carport. why? my father had access to a car sometimes, for his travels. I don't think he owned it. the car disappeared when he bought the blue-grey house. but the carport isn't important to this appreciation, this memory. no, another attachment to the house is. out in back of the house was a clothes washing stand. it had a little dais, a little cement stoop, not much wider than the length of my feet. I suspect it was all cement, not concrete. it was about the size of a washing machine, except no one knew washing machines then. it had a deep sink for plunging the clothes into sudsy water, then for rising them in later. it had a built-in washboard for rubbing the clothes on. I don't remember why clothes were rubbed on a washboard, maybe to get out the ground-in dirt for kids' clothes, maybe to break up and wash out the starch from my father's dress shirts. yes, under his wool suits in the tropics, he wore dress shirts so starched and ironed I was sure he risked cutting his throat on them. I don't remember watching one of the servants washing clothes in that device, but I'm pretty sure they did. we had clotheslines, and I remember the sheets billowing in the breeze, and the shirts, blouses, dresses and underwear dancing in the wind. but most of the time, the wash stand stood around empty and unused. except when I climbed on it. but climbing on it wasn't very interesting. after the first time or two, it was kinda boring. until! I read about Tarzan in a book with drawings. in one of the drawings, swung from one tree to another on vines. hm. we didn't have a jungle, we didn't have trees, we didn't have a tree. we had clotheslines, but they wouldn't work! oh! I could tie a rope to the little roof-like structure that shaded the wash stand, stand on the wash stand, and swing out and drop onto the ground. it seemed like a great idea, except I had no rope. I looked and I looked and I looked everywhere I could think of, but I could find no rope. hm. but I had a ball of string, bits and lengths of string I had found here and there and collected. now I had a use for it. no, I couldn't swing on string, obviously. if I could break string by snapping it between my hands, and I could, then it wasn't strong enough to hold me up. hm. but I had recently learned about braiding so I made a braid of three strings. hm. *that* wasn't going to hold me up either.so I made two more braids of string and braided them. hm, not much better. so I made braids and braids and braids of string, and I made braids of braids of string, then I made braids of braids of string, and I made a braid of braids of braids of string. there! that looked and felt thick enough. surely it would hold me up! I took it outside, climbed up on the wash stand, stood up and tied it to the little roof-like structure that shaded the wash stand, hm. that took more of my "rope" than I'd expected. rats! but I still had enough to swing out past the stoop and drop to the ground, at least it looked like I did when I swung my rope out with nothing attached to it. well, it looked kinda like Tarzan's vine. So I grabbed my rope and jumped! and heard and felt the rope snap. and turned a half-somersault and landed on my head on the edge of the stoop. oh my! I lay on the ground by the stoop and steadfastly did not cry. this would not do! I couldn't be found lying on the ground next to the stoop. I sat up. no, that wasn't any better. uh-oh! I'd broken a sliver off the edge of the stoop! damn. I could think of no way to hide that, but I did climb back up on the wash stand and untie my rope from the little roof-like structure. then hide the pieces of the rope under my bed, then lie down in my bed until I was no longer dizzy and my head didn't hurt. uh-oh. I overheard the two servants talking about the sliver broken off the edge of the stoop. they couldn't figure out how I had done it, but were pretty sure I must've. but they didn't tell my mother, so I more or less got away with it. that's kinda magical, isn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment