Why I Feel Comfortable In Such An Old House

I am old. I remember when men were wiry and thin and squatted on their haunches to talk when they got together and built boats, not because it was their life-time dream to do so but because they fished to feed their families and they needed a new boat in which to do so.
I remember when those men, upon rising from their beds in the afternoons after fishing all night would spend hours and hours and hours mending their nets.
Really. I remember that.

I am so old I remember the Fuller Brush man and boy, was he thin! toting that big case of his, door-to-door, and he'd come into the kitchen and squat and open the case and give my mother free fingernail brushes and show her new products and she would buy them. He had a Yankee accent, our Fuller Brush man and he always wore a suit even though this was in Central Florida and he sweated a lot but he never complained and he had a crew cut that he'd rub his hand over.
I remember that.

I remember the old lady my mother would sometimes hire to babysit my baby brothers and how I would always end up being the one to take care of them because she was OLD! She barely moved, but would sit in the rocker in the living room (the same one that my grandson pulls himself up in these days in my library) and she would rock and rock and rock. She would also sit at the piano and play chords and sing along but this was not quite music- it was eerie and dirge-like and it drove me crazy but sometimes, oh sometimes, she would get in the kitchen and fry a chicken and make potato salad and she put apples in her potato salad and honey, it was so good.

I remember spending the night at my best friend's house. Her name was Lucille and she and I would make a tent by stretching a blanket from an old out-building to the chicken coop and we'd burn a mosquito coils and I can't remember the brand name (do you?) and they were a sort of incense which no adult in his or her right mind would now allow a child to burn in a homemade tent but these were the old days when children were believed to have enough sense not to kill themselves. We would peek our heads out from under the blanket and the stars were so plentiful that it was like the rash of the worst case of Chicken Pox you ever saw, that crowded and thick with stars and we were in wonder.
I remember Chicken Pox.

I remember when girls were named things like Jeanette and had fiances with names like Dorsal. Or was it Dorsel? I don't know. But I remember. And I remember when a girl named Jeanette and her fiance, named Dorsal, took a bunch of us kids to the Tastee Freez and bought us chocolate dip cones and when we stopped at a gas station, Jeanette walked over to the hose that always used to lie in front of gas stations with that bell in it that rang when you pulled in so that the attendant (there was an attendant!) would know you were there and would come out and pump your gas and wash your windshield, and Jeanette put her heels over the hose and brought down the weight of her skinny body and it made the hose ding and I thought that was the coolest thing in the entire world.
She wore flats that showed toe cleavage and I was sure that Jeanette was the coolest, sexiest woman in the world and she and Dorsal were like sex on a stick, that full of hormones and kisses and she had a transistor radio in a little leather case and I wanted everything Jeanette had- the boyfriend, the shoes that made toe cleavage, the sass and the transistor radio.
I remember Jeanette.

I am not old enough to remember dinosaurs walking the earth but I do remember walking on a dredge island in the Indian River where mammoth teeth and vertebra were there on the surface to trip over and we picked them up and brought them home and kept them in the laundry room. I don't know why we kept them in the laundry room but we did. We had mammoth teeth in the laundry room, right next to the Tide and the Clorox.

I remember when the president was shot and I remember when Cuba was the place that was going to send the bombs to kill us and I remember sulfur water and I remember the dark, brackish river that flowed under the dock where we fished for catfish and I remember when my grandfather and all of his man-friends wore bow ties, even to visit each other and their wives all wore those little clips that fastened on to their sweaters so they could be like capes, draped over their shoulders, and hair nets with tiny beads on them and I remember I loved those hair nets on the beautiful white hair of those old ladies who were so sweet to me.

I remember when kids were expected to have the sense not to get snake bit or drown in the river or run away and I remember when kids knew how to treat the wounds they got when they fell off their bikes with Iodine that stung like holy hell and Band-Aids. I remember pulling sandspurs out of my body and cactus needles and there were a million ways to die but we didn't. We were tough little people and the bomb didn't kill us either.

I am remembering so many things today, this quiet morning, and it's the Fall Equinox and the moon is almost full. The earth tips a bit today and perhaps it is the moon pulling these memories out of me, or the gravity of the earth in its tipping; they are pouring out of me like milk from a tipped pitcher.

I remember when men squatted on their haunches, wiry men, and kids played in the jungle-woods all day and women said, "Go play outside!" and they wore curlers in their hair, sometimes even to go to the store, and they were never still, and men like Dorsal had blond hair they wore Bryl Cream in and it flipped up a little bit in the back and women teased their hair into beehives on their heads and smoothed over the top layer and it was something to see. I remember the wooden handle and the pig bristles of the beautiful hair brush my mother bought me from the Fuller Brush man and I remember when we washed our brushes and combs in the sink every week with ammonia and water, and summers lasted forever and ever.

I remember when the world which came to us from the television was all in black and white and so the President's wife's dress was gray with black splotches all over it when her husband died and the flag draping his coffin was black and white striped and we had to fill in the colors in our minds and our minds were so busy then, filling in the colors, the details of that black-and-white world but not the night sky which was black as ink with stars as white as new-born silver because those were its colors and the mosquito coil burned with an orange tip, eating itself, sending acrid but somehow pleasing smoke up into the night air and the mosquitoes, invisible in the darkness, still hummed in our ears and when we looked up at the sky to see all of those stars, we somehow knew in our child bones that this was something we would always remember, even when we were very, very old.