Never Quite Yo-Yo Man

I wasn’t yet Yo-Yo Man. Hell, I wasn’t even eight years old. 

I’d had my eye on a sparkly blue Duncan Satellite on the toy shelf at Harvey’s Market for a long time. Weeks! The thing may have cost as much as a buck thirty-nine.

Probably less. I knew if I saved the 25 cents Dad paid me for pushing a mower over the grass in the side yard, in no time I’d be traipsing back through the almond orchards behind our house from Harvey’s with that blue beauty lashed to my finger. Mom was excited that her youngest son would have a goal, so she sewed a cloth pouch with an old shoelace for a drawstring. 

“It’s special. For your savings,” she said with a proud, motherly-loving look in her eye.

There would be obstacles. Red licorice, primarily. Five vines for a nickel at Harvey’s. Some weeks, no percentage of Dad’s quarter would make it into the little cloth bag. At least, not for long. Looking back, this might have been my initial object lesson about the evils of addiction.

Secondarily, come fall, our St. Augustine grass went dormant, and there was nothing to mow for the duration of the dark months. And months were what those anticipatory yo-yo weeks would turn into. With the spring however, the grass began to flourish and the quarters began to roll in again. 

 

Around Memorial Day weekend – I was eight now – while Beebo and Dad watched AJ Foyt or someone race in the Indianapolis 500, I hiked through the orchards and across Nord Avenue with five or six quarters and some nickels and dimes jingling in my pockets. I’d stop frequently ankle deep in orchard weeds to fish out my coins and count them. Curiously, by the time I got to Harvey’s I’d lost a quarter.  But I still had enough.

“Shouldn’t you be home watchin’ the race?” the old storekeeper said as he slid my change across the counter.

It was less change than I expected – I didn’t get sales tax – but I wasn’t going to quibble. The Duncan Satellite was as beautiful as anything I’d ever ‘boughten.’ As blue and sparkly as the midnight sky. So intent I was on tying the thing to my finger…

“Uh, son,” Harvey said, “wrap it around your middle finger so you can catch it in your full hand.”

I wasn’t very good at knots, so wrapping the string around my middle finger was what I did and as I pivoted toward the door, Harvey said, “Don’t forget your change.”  I fumbled with the coins, because the Satellite was clutched by my good hand.

 

The springtime air out front of Harvey’s Market was a special kind of fresh this day. I let the yo-yo go toward the ground and watched it spin there for a number of seconds. 

The thing didn’t jump up into my hand. Winding the thing up I tried again and again and soon remembered you’re supposed to jerk on the string when the yo-yo is at the bottom. The wrap on my finger had loosened, so I took a moment to rewind it. Sure enough, that little jerk was all I needed for my first yo-yo success. I moved a few steps further from the door. And tried twice or three times more. What a cinch! Next trick would be tossing the Satellite out in front of me and jerking it back.

 

The old woman was older than my mom. Older than any of the moms in the neighborhood, but not as old as Gramma Carah who read Bible stories to us kids on occasion. I know I’d never seen her before in her dark full dress and clunky black shoes. And I can’t say exactly what happened except that my first attempt at throwing the yo-yo flew out of my hand like a Don Drysdale fastball and ended up smacking the old gal in the forehead just above her eyes. Had she been wearing glasses, I’m sure they would have flown off. I suspect her hat had been bobby-pinned into place. Her moan was immediate as was her stagger. I didn’t know what to do. I watched her wobble as my Duncan yo-yo rolled toward the curb and out onto Nord Avenue. 

I chose to run up to her and see about her. Was she hurt? Did I knock her out? Fracture her skull? Was she going to die in the parking lot of Harvey’s Market because of me? 

She wasn’t mad. Just stunned, I suppose. She did put her arm over my shoulder and her wobbling stopped. I think I was teary-eyed when I asked if she was okay. I don’t recall what she said. Mortified, if an eight-year-old can fathom mortified, I eased along with her as she shuffled toward the front door. Harvey had opened the door and, after calling her by name, asked if she was okay. Apparently, she nodded and then Harvey looked at me and said, “You’d better skedaddle on home, young man.”

My midnight blue Duncan Satellite was resting in the middle of a lane in Nord Avenue. It had been driven over more than once. I remember wincing as cars passed over it. But it never got hit.  Scuffed and no longer beautiful, it lay there waiting for me to pick it up and march home. The yo-yo was still serviceable, I found when I picked it up, but in that moment, I wished I’d opted for a handful of red vines.

 

© 2024

Church of the Open Road Press 

HEATING WITH WOOD

 …or ‘a house afire’…

 

It was the kind of day they make picture postcards out of. Coursing through vineyards in the late November chill on my Italian motorbike, the byways between Cloverdale and Calistoga were the perfect venue for an early winter sojourn. I found myself consumed by the light of the low sun and what it offered the autumn colors of the oaks and vines. The whisps of high cirrus clouds foretold of a change in the weather. Better get the ridin’ in today.

Up a rise and around a bend I motor from valley-floor vineyards into a creek-carved canyon of black oak, with their amber leaves and, in just the right locales, stands of coastal redwoods. Channeling through one of those groves, a rough two-rut drive leads to someplace I’ll not trespass, but as I pass by, down that lane I see a curly-cue of smoke rising from a rustic chimney in a vintage rooftop.  

Actually, I smelled it first. In the early morning cool, the chimney smoke had settled along the creek and roadway reminding me of the days when wood heat was the only decent heat in our house.

 

Beebo and I were considered old enough to be left home alone while Mom and Dad attended the evening PTA meeting at Rosedale School. I’m sure the instructions we’d been given we forgot – or ignored – as soon as the back door closed so forgive me if I can’t remember the specifics of those instruction now. That said, one of them was probably, “Leave the Franklin Stove alone."

We’d moved into the old house on five acres in the late 50s. Mom said it had once been the barn for the house next door and we never questioned that even though, thinking back on it, we’d never heard of a barn with two bedrooms, a bath and a half, a living room and a nicely appointed kitchen. What the barn didn’t have was effective heat. A natural gas line ran from the street to the house serving a water tank and a heater carved into a plaster wall. But when the first bill of winter arrived, both parents gasped in unison – which was odd because they rarely agreed on stuff – and soon we were told to wrap ourselves up in winter.  Gas was too damned expensive. Fortunately, Mom was quite adept at knitting, so never was there a dearth of sweaters into which her two boys could wrap themselves.

Still, not heating with the wall mounted furnace in the front room seemed, well, stupid, so one day, Dad went down to Collier Hardware and came home with a cast iron Franklin fireplace. Franklin fireplaces were purported to have been an invention of Ben Franklin himself and known for their heating efficiency. The iron box was set on the linoleum floor of the living room and since Musty’s dad – from just down the road a piece – was handy, our dad called him to cut a hole in the ceiling and the roof and help install and flash the new chimney pipe.

“You’re going to need to put a damper in the pipe,” Musty’s dad said.

“A damper?” Dad asked. “You mean like a wet towel or something?”

“No. A damper is a plate placed in the stovepipe with a handle on it so you rotate the thing and control how much heat and air goes up the pipe.”  After installation he demonstrated. “Turn the thing this way with the handle parallel and the smoke goes up the chimney. Turn it perpendicular and the plate doesn’t let the smoke go out so good and eventually the fire will go out, choked on its own smoke.” 

Or something like that.

That afternoon, dad wadded up some sheets of the Enterprise Record newspaper – “at least that rag is good for something” – put some light kindling on top, tossed in a chunk of almond wood and set a match to it. He shut to stove doors but through the open vents in those doors we could see the flames ripping through the paper and setting the kindling to popping. After a few minutes, the flames died away and through those vents we could see the almond wood aglow. Soon the cast iron was radiating the kind of heat that meant we could return our sweaters to the cedar chest. 

Expertly, we thought, Dad rotated the damper a quarter turn and almost immediately smoke began to billow out the open door vents. He shut the vents and the fire relaxed.

“In a few minutes, the fire will suffocate,” he said, so he partially opened the damper and cracked open the vents. The living room would be cozy this evening.

 

Beebo and I should have been paying better attention.  Because it wasn’t more than a few months later when Mom and Dad, engaged in their parently duties chose to attend the evening PTA meeting over at Rosedale School.

I’m not sure what possessed us to see how hot we could make that Franklin Stove, but what possessed us doesn’t really matter now does it? Out back of the house stood about a twenty year supply of almond wood. Dad had pulled out the orchard of aging trees and replaced them with new ones. “The wood from the old orchard will keep us warm for years!” he said.

As soon as they left in the old Ford, we snuck out to the woodpile and carried back as much as our arms could hold. Beebo burnt his fingers trying to open the stove’s already hot doors, so I got a potholder from the kitchen.  We stuffed in as many logs as we could and stood back. With the vents open, the supply of oxygen was more than adequate to set the new fuel ablaze. Not certain how long it took, but the popping of the fresh wood soon became a roar. We stood back and enjoyed the warm fruits of our efforts until one of us noticed that right when the stovepipe disappeared into the ceiling, the pipe had begun to glow. Even as inexperienced pre-teens, we knew this was not good.  Beebo hustled up to the door and touched the vents. He jumped back uttering a word I’d never heard him utter before. (I’m not sure what it was, but I’m pretty sure I’ve uttered it more than a few times in my subsequent years for various reasons.)

I handed him the potholder and he used it to twist the damper a quarter turn.  “That should take care of it,” he said, standing back.  And it did.  Within minutes the glow at the top of the pipe began to fade, but smoke began to pump out through the open door vents.  Thick smoke.  Angry smoke.  Smoke smarter than two little boys.

We didn’t keep track of what we did so we didn’t know how to ‘un-did’ it.

“Let’s open up the door and pull out some of those logs,” I said.

“You do it, dummy.”

I didn’t.

The room was filling with choking smoke, but the chimney had cooled, we hoped. 

Beebo twisted the damper around and around. Stepping aside, the fire set to roaring again and the pipe took on that cherry glow.

“Call 911!” one of us said.

“There is no 911. This is the 1960s!”

“Then call Dad!”  

“How?”

“Call the school. Maybe Mrs. Bossard (the school secretary) is in the office! She’s alwaysthere!”

The Mrs. Bossard’s desk phone rang and rang and rang while one of us again fiddled with the damper twisting it this way and that.

“Sideways! Sideways!”

We must have gotten it right because that glow subsided, and then one of us remembered: “Close the little vents on the door. That’s what Dad would do!”

The hot pad proved handy and once all was shut down, we stepped away from the stove.  The smoke in the room burned our eyes and was thick enough to taste. And Mom and Dad would be home soon.

Thinking like the Cub Scout that Beebo was, he said, “You open the front door and the windows and I’ll get that big box fan outta the closet.”

Plugged in, the fan was just beginning to push air through the front door while Beebo and I were frantically waving dampened bath towels at the two open double-hung windows when Mom and Dad arrived.

 

I can’t recall the consequence, but as I drove past that little cabin in the redwoods on my motorcycle, I thought, “Holy cow! This is Thanksgiving holiday week. The kids are probably home. Alone? Hopefully not. They could burn the whole damned house down.”

© 2024

Church of the Open Road Press