Random memories from the James House

Here are some things I may or may not have mentioned in previous posts:

• Turtle soup. The neighbor kids once showed me and Allen a dead turtle and told us they were going to make turtle soup.  I couldn’t even imagine what that must be like, but I believed them.  Those kids scared me a bit.  I wondered what the inside of their house looked like, if it was as chaotic as their yard seemed to be.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to try the turtle soup.

• Churn.  This was the nickname our Aunt Bonnie gave my little sister Sharon.  She loved to climb and get into things so Bonnie thought “Churn” was a more appropriate name, I suppose.  It still fits her!

• The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  This was a television show that my brother Allen and I acted out.  We would “plake” he was Solo and I would be Kuryakin, and we would pretend we were spies like those characters on the show.  We sometimes lay on the floor on our bellies and inched forward, pretending we were scaling a wall.  I think Robert Vaughn, who played Solo, was one of my first crushes.

• Love of Life.  There was a TV in the house when we moved in, and Mama watched this soap opera while she folded laundry.  She would make us kids go play outside or in our room.

• Stingray.  This was a children’s marionette adventure series about a futuristic submarine patrol.  We thought it was wonderful, but seeing the pictures now kind of gives me the creeps!  We couldn’t always watch it because it didn’t come in very well–lots of snow and rolling.  Kids today have no idea what that means!

• Dinner.  Daddy would come home for dinner in the middle of his workday. We now call that meal lunch, but back then we had breakfast, dinner, and supper. I remember having a sit-down meal with him at the table we played Tinker Toys on.

• Tinker Toys.  We played with those things for hours.  Allen could always build better structures than I could.  I guess his boy’s mind was geared more that way than my girl’s mind.  I don’t know how we kept from killing ourselves or each other with all those sharp sticks, and for that matter, all those metal toys and playgrounds.  How did kids make it to adulthood without all the safety measures we take today?

• Hurricane Betsy.  Threatened by this hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, my dad’s brother and his family came to stay with us.  It was the first time I had ever heard of a storm that could make people flee their homes.  My uncle’s home was spared, by the way.