Lowell Mick White
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Ordinary Horrors

Where I Lived Then Now VII: Wayne, Nebraska

12/17/2021

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This is 908 Circle Drive in Wayne, Nebraska. I lived here for about a year and a half—1964, 1965—while my dad taught at Wayne State College.
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A lifetime later, in 2010, I visited Wayne on a job interview, and of course had to drive by the old homestead. Aren’t childhood houses supposed to be smaller when you see them as an adult? This place seemed—bigger. I think someone at sometime added a room or two onto the back...? Those trees didn’t exist in 1965! (That curved-trunk tree might have). But there still wasn’t much grass…My bedroom was at that window on the far right.

In 2010 the house was for rent at that time—I thought, If I get the job, would it be weird to live here…?

A voice answered—Yes, Lowell, it would be very fucking weird.

(I did not get the job. Which is a good thing! (No offense, Wayne State)). 

This house below—the house next door—didn’t exist in 1965—it was a vacant lot
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After seeing The Beverly Hillbillies for the first time, I went out there with a shovel and started digging for oil.

There was no oil.
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This is at the top of Circle Drive’s circle. An older kid named Todd lived here. Sixth grade, seventh grade. He was kind of a perv, and was friends with a kid named Stanley who was a serious goddamn pedo. All us first graders tried to stay away from them…..
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When I tell an imaginary kid to go out and play in the ditch, I’m not being mean. This is what we kids did in Wayne! We played in the goddamn ditches! It was fun! 

Look at this ditch above!

Doesn’t seem like much—I think it’s been filled in. But 55 (!) years ago it was pretty deep—about head-high on a first grader. We could play army in the ditches, hide from the pedos, if girls were around we’d play Family (I always got delegated to be Brother, which was uninspiring). The ditches led to culverts that ran under the streets, and those were cool and scary, too—you could hear cars thumping overhead….
​
​I’ve only written one story set in Wayne. It’s about playing in the ditches and storm sewers and hiding from the pedos…and it sadly doesn’t work. POV problems. Maybe I should figure out a way to fix it….
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During my 2010 job interview, the chair of the hiring committee was driving me around town, and we went past a grim little house….
 
I said, “Back in first grade we thought that house was haunted….”

​The chair blanched. “My kids think that house’s haunted, too!”
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Maybe the whole town is haunted?
 
This is haunted America….
​You know my entire oeuvre makes a great present, right? So get over to my Amazon page and order some books.  Your life will be better for it!

The kindle editions are at a special pandemic/holiday price!
​​Not sure which book to get? That's understandable--it's easy to be confused by an abundance of excellence. So here's a seasonal reminder: THAT DEMON LIFE is the official community read of Pottersville!
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The Stupid Persistence of Stupid Memories

12/10/2021

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This is the grave of Laura Zeilke, who was my teacher in the third grade at Wilson Campus School in Mankato, Minnesota.

I woke up the other day with a sudden unexpected flashback to my third grade experience, and to Miss Zeilke, and so I did some semi-random googling, and found that she had passed away some time ago….

My educator parents thought Miss Zeilke was a good teacher. They knew more about teaching than I did or do, but as far as I could tell as a kid in the classroom—No. Miss Zeilke was mean, Miss Zeilke was crabby, Miss Zeilke picked on me, Miss Zeilke was generally disliked by me and (I think) my classmates. I remember once at the mall (what passed for a mall in 1966) jumping on the cracks between the concrete in the sidewalk outside—yelling “Step on the crack, break Miss Zeilke’s back!” and my poor mother was shocked and outraged.

But it was an honest childish emotion I was expressing.

Below is a floor plan for a room at Weiking Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Back in the day this was Wilson Campus School, at Mankato State College, where I received much of my youthful education. Wilson was a small school—maybe 500 kids pre-k through 12th Grade.

From the website, it looks like the building has been much modified over the years, but this—which was the Second Grade classroom then—still has much the same form as the other classrooms in the elementary school wing of the building.
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Of interest here is B158—the “locker.” In my day this was just called the “back room.” A storage area. Every classroom had one. I remember all the back rooms had those giant paper cutters which we were constantly warned away from. I guess other teaching supplies were stored there, too. But as far as I could tell then, or remember now, the main use for the back rooms was to house and punish unruly students.

I spent a fair amount of time in the second grade back room. I probably spent half the year in the third grade back room. Sheesh.

I was an ornery kid. No doubt about it! I was squirmy and fidgety and excitable and I talked a lot. (I probably had ADHD, which was unknown then). But I think different adults reacted differently to my orneriness and squirminess. Me, as an adult? I sure wouldn’t want to be around me as a child. If Current Me was supervising 3rd Grade Me, I’d say something like, “Little Lowell, go out and play in the goddamn ditch and leave me the fuck alone.” Or I’d lock me in the goddamn back room with the giant paper-cutter and hope for the best. Some of my teachers no doubt found me annoying, too—maybe especially Miss Zeilke found me annoying.

At one point in the school year, Miss Zeilke moved my desk from the rear of the room, to the front—right in front of her teacher desk. I told my parents that, yeah—she moved my desk to the front of the room because I was smarter than everyone else. And, yeah—I think I actually thought that was true! I don’t think I was lying! Stupid, clueless me.

My parents came home from a meeting with Miss Zeilke and told me that—Hell, no, Miss Zeilke didn’t move my desk because I was smart, she moved my desk because I was ornery and obnoxious and disrupting the class. Whoa. My parents were ashamed and they were pissed.

So the unhappy school year sort of passed like that. I got yelled at, I got exiled to the back room, I endured what I thought at the time was terrible injustice. I guess I learned stuff. Our class moved on to the Fourth Grade, with Mrs. Palmer, who I loved.

Miss Zeilke later retired and moved to Florida. But I never forgot Miss Zeilke!

In fact, I carried a stupid smoldering grudge.

So. Years and years later, my class at Wilson finally graduated and people were milling around afterward, and I saw—Miss Zeilke. Talking to one of the Mitchell twins. Laughing—saying something about how cute they were way back then.

I marched over and stuck my arm out. “Look!” I said. “I still have scars on my arm from when you grabbed me and dragged me off to the back room!”

Miss Zeilke just looked at me blankly. Confused.

Miss Zeilke had no idea who I was.

And I suddenly felt like an idiot. Here I had been carrying a deep anger and resentment toward her for nine years—for half my life!—and she had been off living her good life in retirement with no idea that I even fucking existed.

So my hate was all a big nothing. So, apparently, was my life.
You know my entire oeuvre makes a great present, right? So get over to my Amazon page and order some books.  Your life will be better for it!

The kindle editions are at a special pandemic/holiday price!
​Not sure which book to get? That's understandable--it's easy to be confused by an abundance of excellence. So here's a seasonal reminder: THAT DEMON LIFE is the official community read of Pottersville!
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My Desk, c. 1982

11/12/2021

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This is my desk in the Haunted House, 1982. It’s messy—just like my brain….

I wrote about this desk once before, c. 1981 (here). But it was earlier in my haunted residency, which I wrote about here.  There’s more going on in this photo than the 1981 shot—there was more going on in my life, too.

I think this photo was probably taken in the early morning, after me being up all night. Morning sunlight is coming from the east, and my lamp is still on. Only one bulb in my lamp!

There’s an empty Coors can (why was I drinking Coors? I was young). A coffee cup with, probably, coffee in it. Empty Coke bottle in the background on the windowsill. Also on the windowsill is another coffee cup and a cool bookend with a propeller—now sadly lost. I wonder what happened to that. Don’t know what the red book is.

The rectangular-ish thing on the windowsill is one of those expandable file folders. Who knows what I was sticking in it. Probably unpaid bills.

There’s a jar back there I was probably using for a drinking glass.

Also one of those stacking file things—I had several of those, mostly carried off from my dad’s office. I just crammed junk into them—unpaid bills, probably, like my dad.

My trusty Smith-Corona is in the center. I was working on two projects then—a fly fishing book, and the rock’n’roll novel. I can’t make out what the notebook says—I’m thinking it’s probably the fly fishing book, now fortunately lost.

In the foreground next to the typewriter is a typing guide for margins—you’d feed that heavy plastic sheet into the typewriter behind the paper you were typing on, and then you could see the margins through the paper. 

And there’s a mystery—I can’t figure out what the blue object is. The words are still fuzzy no matter how much I enlarge it. The fact that it doesn’t trigger a memory probably indicates that it’s something insignificant (or maybe traumatic?). I’m thinking it’s something mundane like a package of socks.

(Contest! If anyone can make it the blue object, I’ll send you one of my books).
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Yeah, I Climbed the Water Tower

1/25/2020

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I’m not a big believer in nostalgia—I mean, I do like the past, but I see it as kind of place, a setting for my stories, not as some golden cheerful smiling misty-eyed fake memory mess. We all have pasts—we all have stories, and if you follow those stories you can sometimes fall into a wormhole of memory that comes out somewhere else and is quite startling. And so…I was looking at something or other online, and I saw a reference to Mankato, Minnesota, a town where I lived from 1965 to 1976 and did much of my growing up. I went to Google Streets at looked at my old house (I did that a couple of years ago, too, for a blog post) and then I followed the cam around to other places in the town. I haven’t been to Mankato since 1979 or so, and, as you might expect, it’s a very different place now. Interesting, in a dreamlike way, familiar and strange at the same time.  But then I saw the water tower on Balcerzak Drive—and, oh—a story came clawing up out of the deeps of time.

We—us kids—we used to climb that tower!
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In the days of my youth, those apartments on the left were there—they were brand new—but the building covered by shadows wasn’t there, and softball fields were all cornfields. This was in high school—junior year, senior, 1975, 1976. We’d park at the apartments and sneak across the cornfield and—kick—the door at the base of the tower.

Boom. The door would open, we’d jump in, and shut it behind us.

Inside was a circular stair winding up and up and up.

Then there was a little platform. From the platform on up there was a ladder—inside a tube—running up through the water tank itself.

Then there was another platform at the top of the ladder. Stand on that and you were inside the tank. Shine your flashlight down at the water—and it was always scummy and covered with mats of algae or bacteria or—just scum.

Then there was another ladder up to the top of the tank. This ladder was kind of scary, because it went up at an angle, and you were out over the scummy water.

Whoever was the first up the last ladder would—ease—open this big hatch and lower it gently onto the tank top.

Then you’d go through the hatch and onto the top of the tank.

It was scary! The top of the tank was curved and seemed to slope sharply. No railings.

But! You could see for fucking ever! I told people I could see all the way to Waseca, about thirty miles to the east.

Maybe I could just see the lights of Waseca reflecting up into the clouds. Still—a long way.

My only time as the first up the ladder, I didn’t gently ease the hatch to the surface of the tank—I fucking dropped it and it BANGED and echoed around and my buddies cussed me out. Still we went up through the hatch and stretched out on the tank, looking out at the world.

Then there was someone yelling at us down below.

“Mike Westlund! I know you’re up there!”

It was Mike’s sister, who lived in those apartments. I guess she heard the banging of the hatch.

“You get down from there right now or I’ll tell mom!”

So—we came down off the tower before we even had a chance to engage in youthful bad behavior. I fucked everything up.
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Twelve Things I Remember About Home

6/16/2018

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Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
1. The Mispunctuated Town
Cox’s Mills is a tiny place, even for West Virginia, with a population of maybe 75, two stores, a post office, a closed schoolhouse, and a church that holds services one Sunday a month.  It lies stretched out along Rt. 47, following Pike Fork between Horn Creek and Hog Run.  Cox’s Mills is “five miles from everywhere,” my grandfather used to say, if everywhere is defined as the surrounding communities of Burnt House, Auburn, Troy, and Alice.  Alice is a ghost town anymore, but Cox’s Mills is not too different from the surviving other three, a small community, insulated and static, growing gently shabbier as the years pass.

On the map and in the postal directory the town’s name is spelled Coxs Mills, no apostrophe, apparently because map makers and zip code cipherers don’t like apostrophes.  I’ve always spelled it Cox’s Mills, anyway, because I do like apostrophes and I like things to make sense.  I’ve never heard anyone else offer an opinion about the spelling of the town’s name, and since I go there now only in memory I probably never will.
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory

​2. Millstones and the Bridge Pool
My mother told me that the millstones for Cox’s mills had been just upstream from the bridge where Rt. 47 crossed Horn Creek and I tried several times over the years to find them, wading up the shallow part of the creek under a dark canopy of sycamores and willows, under a water gap and on up.  I never found the millstones, and my guess is that they must have been buried under the silt and fine gravel washing off the hills, buried and lost like so much else.  Below the bridge there was a large, deep pool where Pike Fork flowed into Horn Creek, and I did my first fishing there, catching smallmouth bass and bluegills.  Sometimes I would fish off the bridge abutment, cringing when log trucks or well service trucks from Dowell or Halliburton raced by.  In the lot next to the pool was an olive-painted corrugated metal building, an old gauging station for Eureka Pipeline that my grandfather had worked in.  One damp December day a truck came and loaded up the building and hauled it off somewhere.  In later years weeds grew around the old concrete foundation and multiflora rose snaked around a rusted old steam engine whose original purpose no one could tell me.
 
3. Hunting under the Hickories
I have been told that before the chestnut blight hit the eastern hardwood forests, chestnut trees were where you went to look for squirrels.  It wasn’t unusual to see as many as thirty squirrels working in one tree.  But the chestnuts are long gone, the remaining dead hulks chopped down and used for fence posts, long enough ago now that even the fence posts are gone, even though chestnut made the best and longest-lasting fence posts.  Now the squirrels in our part of the country gather mostly around hickory trees.  The leaves of the hickories turn bright yellow in the fall and stand out between the reds and browns of maples and oaks, and when I went hunting I would sit beneath the trees, quietly, beneath the soft falling leaves and hard falling green nuts.  Squirrel season was the best time of year: the days were cool and usually sunny, and the woods were silent but for the falling leaves and the rustlings of small animals.  One time I heard fallen leaves crackling—something moving—and instead of a squirrel a grey fox came over the edge of the hill.  He trotted right toward me until, when he was six or seven feet away, I said, “Hello, little fox.”  The fox stopped and regarded me for a few moments before angling off, circling around my hickory tree but still heading to wherever he was heading.  I told my grandfather about the fox and he said, “I’d a-shot the son-of-a-bitch.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history

​4. Apple Trees
Below the house, along the creek, we had two immense apple trees.  In a good year the trees would be utterly loaded, groaning under the weight of the apples.  My grandmother would literally spend all day in the kitchen during apple time, canning apples, making applesauce or apple butter, the kitchen windows dripping with steam.  The ground beneath the trees was pocked with holes and tunnels of ground squirrels that ate fallen apples, and beyond the fence, under the rocks, there were snakes, copperheads and blacksnakes, that ate the squirrels.  At night deer would come down off the hill and eat apples, and we could sit in the porch and hear them chewing and sometimes choking.  In the summer of 1988 the trees finally died, and the people who were renting the house cut them down, leaving the stumps standing high enough to run a clothesline from one to the other.  After the trees died I lost interest in the place.
 
5. Farming the Hills
The hills there in that part of West Virginia are hills, not mountains, but they rise so steeply away from the road, away from the creek, that they hem in the sky and induce a sense of confinement if not claustrophobia.  I remember my mother telling about her first trip away from home, to Iowa to visit relatives, and how sick the prairie landscape made her: All that space!  There was nothing around to hold up the sky!  No doubt flatlanders would get sick in Cox’s Mills, and feel trapped and nervous.  In the days of my grandfather’s youth, the hills were still covered in virgin timber.  His family—and the other pioneer families over along Rocky Fork and Old Field Fork—would work their way through the woods, uphill and down, cutting down the trees, selling the solid old timber, burning the rest, rooting up the stumps with mules, planting wheat the first year, corn the second, then grass for cattle, working on and on through the woods.  He said the hills were so steep they had to plant the seed corn with shotguns—just stand back and fire it into the hillsides.  But all that ended.  Farming was difficult at any time in that country, a crazy idea, really, and impossible after the topsoil washed away, and so the farms died out and the trees came back, slowly, thin young forests that have grown more robust over the years.  Still, my grandfather would say, “By God, when the Russians take over, they’ll have people out working on those hills again.”
 
6. My Palm Prints in Concrete
Sometime in late 1962 my grandfather poured concrete for a new walkway that led around the front of the house, from the front door to the East Porch.  We were down that weekend and he had me put my hands in the cement to make a mark.  I remember the icky texture of the cement—it was cold, and sticky, and I didn’t like it.  My father took a nail and wrote my name and the date beneath the palm prints, and I guess it’s all still there.  At least, it was when I finally sold the house.  The concrete had buckled, bulged up by the roots of a maple tree, but my prints endured, faint and shallow but legible.
 
7. Our Hill
When I was very young my grandfather ran cattle on the front of the hill, the side that faced the house, and the cattle grazed the hillside down to short grass, dirt and a few blackberry vines.  After he got rid of the cattle the hill began to regrow.  Brush—filth, we called it—took over, mostly thorny multiflora rose and more blackberries, then a few trees began to poke through, sycamores at first and then maples and oaks.  The top of the hill had been left wooded and was very dark and shady, and you would pass through those first woods and come out on a flat, more or less open area that had once been a planted field.  Rocks had been pulled out to let the plow through, and were piled at the upper end.  We had peach trees up there (peaches down below by the creek would not bear fruit), short lived trees that were all but dead by the time I began exploring the woods.  The dead trees stood for years like skeletons until they began to rot and collapse into the brush.  From the top of the hill you could see miles of land that was empty, used very hard in the past and now all but unsettled.
 
8.  The Hay Barn and the Meadow
Directly across the creek from the house was a small hay meadow and an old barn.  We used to get two cuttings a year off that land until people started running fewer and fewer cattle and no one bothered to come by and cut it.  The grass would grow and fall over, pushed down by rain or pulled down by gravity, and there would be wide trails through it where deer would pass to get to the apples.  The old barn where the hay was stored grew more and more decrepit over the years and became a home for yellow jackets and snakes.  When she was dying, my grandmother would look out the window at the meadow, the wasted hay, and one time she said, “It makes me sad looking out there at that. You know some old cow’ll be wanting that hay this winter.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
Coxs Mills, Appalachia, West Virginia, history, memory
9. Pike Fork
On the maps the upper part of the creek is called Coxcamp Fork, but I never heard anyone call it that.  The local name was Pike Fork, but I never heard anyone use that, either, at least on regular basis.  It was just “the creek.”  It ran through our property, separating us from the hill.  As a child there in the summers I usually spent all day down in the creek looking for fossils, catching crayfish or trapping minnows.  It never occurred to me to be lonely.  I would be down at the creek all day, and then in the evenings I would go back up to the house.  At night fog would drift down from the hills, and I always sat out on the porch and listened to the creek run, and I could hear crickets and frogs and other animals, and I could hear owls hoot, and deer stomp around by the apple trees, I could hear all the thick dark night noises, and once I saw a snake crossing the road in the headlights of an oncoming car.
 
10. High Water
In high water people upstream would throw trash into the river, sometimes plain garbage but more often large chunks of wood that were too expensive or impractical to haul off, like rotten lumber or trimmed tree branches or brush.  As a very young child the junk in the high water always excited me—I imagined the old logs and boards as naval vessels, battleships—a fleet attacking the minnows!   In very high water the creek would stretch clear across the meadow to lap at the base of the apple trees, and though our house was high enough up on the hillside that it never got flooded we could feel the rumble of the muddy brown water as it pushed downstream. 
 
11.  The Langford House
The Langford house was across the road and down a bit.  The Langford family was long gone, died out or moved away, and the house was rented out occasionally to very poor families, until at last it grew too dilapidated and run down to rent to anyone.  One night, after it had been vacant for a several years, my grandmother claimed she saw the house all lit up—glowing in the dark.  My grandfather dismissed her, said she was probably dreaming, but I suspected ghosts.  By that time I was living away from Cox’s Mills, and I was familiar with ghosts—not just the ordinary spirits that might take over a property, but ghosts that got inside your head, ghosts not only of the dead, but of the living, too, ghosts of family and ghosts of place, ghosts that can follow a person around and bother them with guilt and shame and regret that cannot be exorcised.
 
12. The Tree that Didn’t Fall Until Later
It was late when I arrived home for Christmas in 1981, driving in from Texas, and I was very tired, and I was hungry, and I wanted to sit around and decompress, but my grandfather was all agitated and he was saying “Where’d you park?  Out by the barn?  Well, you get out there and move your goddamn truck, there’s a tree a-going to fall on it.”  He followed me out into the dark and pointed across the road into the night.  He said there was a big tree over there that had been struck by lightning and might fall any moment.  So I moved my pickup.  The next day I could see a big oak that been indeed struck by lightning—there was a pale vertical stripe running the length of the tree where the bark had split away.  But the tree didn’t fall—not then, at least.  Years later when I sold the house I came by to take one last look around, and the new owner was walking me out to where I was parked.  He was a nice man, retired and living alone, and he said he would take good care of the house.  “I know all your family’s memories are wrapped up here,” he said.  By that time everyone was dead and I didn’t really care, or thought I didn’t.  I didn’t say anything.  Then I looked up across the road—and the lightning struck tree wasn’t there!  It had finally fallen, not down the hill but across it—but, still, the damn tree had finally rotted and keeled over, and for some reason I just didn’t know what to make of it.  I stood there for a while, staring dumbly at the hillside, and then I got in my truck and drove on back to the new home I was trying to make in Texas.
 
(Originally published in You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Summer 2008)
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
NOTE: I decided to republish this little West Virginia essay as part of the run-up to the release of my West Virginia book, Burnt House.

​BUY IT NOW!
novel, Burnt House, Appalachia, West Virginia, family, gothic, reading, Lowell Mick White, best WV novel
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Sleazy Rumdum Bars!

4/14/2018

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Austin 1982 drunk bars sleazy fun
When people talk about the lost bars of Austin, the places that usually come up are Liberty Lunch and the Armadillo World Headquarters, and both those places are full in my memory of fine interesting people and stories. But there are other interesting lost places, too—does anyone remember the Alamo Lounge? The Malamute Lounge? Paula’s Playpen? TA Station?

Does anyone remember the sleazy rumdum bars on the 200 block of Congress?

Oh, the sleazy rumdum bars! They would open at 7am, which was perfect for a young ne’er-do-well heading home after a long night of misadventure. They were unheated in the winter and barely air-conditioned in the summer. They were full of story-telling people down on their luck with no place else to drink.

A few things that happened there:
  • We got kicked out of the Dew Drop Inn after we loaded up the jukebox with all the quarters we had and played nothing but “Kung-Fu Fighting.”
  • We got kicked out of the Dew Drop Inn a couple of months later when we loaded up the jukebox with all the quarters we had and played nothing but “Roxanne.”
  • The Veteran’s Day Parade in 1979, just after the Iranian Hostage Crisis began, and the barmaid from the Stop Inn (we just called it BEER because of the sign on the front) was crying, “I just want to go off with the cowboys! I just want to go off with the cowboys!” (The guys on horseback weren’t cowboys but mounted soldiers from Fort Hood).
  • That barmaid from the Stop Inn/BEER—she was from England. How did she get to the US? And how did she get to BEER?
  • Playing pool at the Tradewinds and I was aiming at the 8-ball, and a fight broke out between two women. A serious boom bang brawl, and the women were grappling and cursing and gouging and rolled across the pool table, and I paused my shot until they rolled off the table to the floor and out of the way—and then I made my shot, unperturbed.
  • An old guy at the Tradewinds (old-seeming then but probably younger than I am now) who knew where the gold was. The gold—in the Sierras east of sacramento somewhere. He knew where is was, and thought we should pool our resources and go pan it out of the streams. Putting together the plan took a long time and a lot of beer. “We’ll need a dog,” the guy said. (We ended up not pooling our resources, not getting a dog, not going to the Sierras, and the gold is still there).
  • My birthday, 1980, when my roommate woke me up to go to the bars with the immortal line, "Lowell, you have to transcend the bullshit!"

As always, I relate these stories for your edification, not your emulation….

(Photo from the Austin History Center).
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Where I Lived Then—Now

3/31/2018

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Mankato Minnesota boyhood home sad house
Mankato, Minnesota. I lived here from 1965 to 1976.

The house was painted pink when we moved in. My dad painted it gray—a different shade of gray than this, in my memory—and added the shutters. He painted the shutters red—my mom said she’d always wanted to live in a gray house with red shutters.

It’s in a good location, just a few blocks from the university (Mankato State College in 1965, Minnesota State University-Mankato now). I walked to my school, which is now closed, the building used by the university. The garage is prob a bit small for contemporary tastes. Looks like someone widened the driveway to accommodate two cars.

Those maple trees in front are nice! They were the biggest trees on the street when I moved away, in July 1976, and they’re even bigger now. Good for the trees. There were shrubs of some sort along the front of the house—one of them died sometime in the mid-70s and in the chaos of that time was not replaced. I guess the others died since then.

That’s my bedroom window on the right corner. I kept the blinds down always—I wanted it dark in there, though I would usually keep the side window open and my cat could come and go as he pleased.

This was an unhappy house—well, no, the house itself is neutral, of course. It's just a thing. But it was certainly a house filled with unhappy people—filled with anger and tears and depression. Still, I’m cheered now that whoever lives there is taking care of it. Looks good!

(photo from Google).
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This Happened: Three Flat Tires at Once

12/11/2014

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Guilford, CT. May, 1983.

There also seems to be a problem with the muffler--or lack of muffler....
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Forgotten Children

1/13/2013

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Newsboys
I was looking for something on the wonderful National Archives website—now I forget what—when I came across these photos of child laborers.

I’ve written before of my interest in archival photographs, and about my fascination with forgotten people, people who have lived and died and are now—lost to history.

And here at the National Archives, a whole trove of forgotten children.

The photos were taken for the National Child Labor Committee between 1908 and 1912 by Lewis Hine. They are just amazing—pictures of a lost world, filled with lost people.

What scary photos! these poor kids, doing hard work that would kill me if I even tried to do it. The moments of interrupted narrative that are captured here—what is going on? Who are these people? What happened to them? I'll never know: the people are gone, though their images live on to haunt me....

National Child Labor Committee photographs

National Child Labor Committee

Lewis Wickes Hine

Picture
Oyster shucker
Picture
Spinners in a textile mill
Picture
Berry picker
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I Made a Mistake

7/24/2012

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Picture
Back in 1985 I had a crummy job as a burglar alarm monitor, working for Security Monitoring Systems of Texas. I sat around a hot office all night and waited for something to happen. When something did happen, when an alarm came in, the computer would buzz and a customer number would appear on the monitor. Then I would pull a big loose-leaf binder from the shelf and see what the customer wanted—sometimes they wanted the monitor to call the cops immediately, sometimes they wanted the monitor to call the house or business to see if everything was all right. So, I was sitting there one night, very early morning, not quite light out, sweating, waiting, and the computer buzzed.

I looked at the number on the screen and then pulled down the instructions. I was supposed to call the customer and ask for the secret password. Burglars don’t know the password, right?

So I got on the phone and called the customer. A groggy-sounding guy answered.

“Hi,” I said. “This is security. I’m calling to see if you know the password.”

“The password?” the guy asked. “Uh….”

Now, if whoever answered the phone didn’t know the password, I was supposed to hang up and immediately call the cops. But calling the cops was always a hassle. So I asked again.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “This is security. I’m calling to see if you know the password.”

“No-no….” The guy sounded half-asleep. “Nobody told me any password.”

Which meant he wasn’t supposed to be in that house. But still. He sounded confused. That happened. There was a drunk guy in Pennsylvania who was always setting his alarm off accidentally. I had to call the cops on him at least once a week.

“Well,” I said, “I still need the password.”

“But—but…I don’t have a password.”

I was about to hang up when I glanced down at the phone. The readout had the phone number in it. The area code I had dialed was 503. Hmm. I looked at the instructions.

The number I was supposed to have called had a 603 area code.

Oh.

Oh!

I said, “Well, okay, sir. We’re just checking. But you need to get yourself a password.”

And I hung up.

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    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

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