It's a Small World

Dad would announce, “Guess we better go to town,” with all the joy and inflection of announcing the Bataan Death March. Dad hated town.  Too many cars, too many people, too many strangers, too many buildings, too many sidewalks, and too many paved roads.  These were his thoughts on the two local towns, each with a population of 200 and 700 people, respectively. 

                This was all I knew of a “town” for my first decade.  My father’s sentiments fed my disdain for “town” as well.  Cousin Kristy’s parents went to faraway, exotic places such as Brainerd, Fargo, St. Cloud, or even, gasp, the Twin Cities.  I couldn’t even imagine a place as big as “the cities” and knew it must be equivalent to a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

                It wasn’t just the idea of the town itself that worked on Dad’s last nerve.  It had a lot to do with the process.  Up at dawn to milk cows, then feed the livestock, pigs, and various poultry, Dad was already tired by ten a.m. Now the car had to be prepped.  The battery charger and extension cord were dragged from the last battery that was charged.  Then, carefully clicking the clamps together to create a spark, Dad would attach them to the car battery.  I was in my twenties before I figured out that creating the sparking arc of electricity was not necessary to charge a battery.  Dad just didn’t trust extension cords or any little box that mysteriously made electricity flow.

                Tires would have to be checked and inflated.  The gear shift knob may have to be found under the driver's seat, where it rolled after the last use.  Then, leaving the car to charge a bit, Dad could finally get out of the winter’s cold and come into the house for a few minutes of rest.  

                Of course, there was no peace and quiet in the house.  Raised feral by a herd of cows, horses, sheep, and dogs, I had to be trapped and washed.  Mom foolishly insisted that I be clean, have clean clothes, and have combed hair before I appeared in public.  This only proved Dad was right about town. It was the source of everything bad. 

I had to run, zigzag style, to escape Donna and Mom, who were armed with hairbrushes and clean clothes.  Fresh out of the metal washtub, I was slippery, only my underwear providing a handhold.  Donna was quick and usually got a grip on my underpants as I dodged Mom. 

                I cried while Donna pulled the hair out of my scalp.

                “I don’t wanna go to town!  I wanna stay home with Tubby!”

                “I’m not leaving you two little shits alone again.  I don’t have a decent dining room table anymore.  The cellar smells like wine.  Your bicycle is still covered in pigshit.  And why is there a shotgun shell-sized hole behind the medicine cabinet?”  Mom said.

                “I’m not going to town!”  Tubby would announce. 

                “If he’s not going, I’m not going either!”  Donna would declare.

                “Fine, then you two can feed the cows hay at noon and clean the barn.” Dad would announce.

                Both teenagers, Donna and Tubby, were left with a difficult dilemma: going to town or working.  On one hand, there was the teenage embarrassment of going to town in a dilapidated vehicle with their parents.  On the other hand, cleaning the barn was a horrible job.  The decision was usually the same: Tubby would stay at home, and Donna would go to town, “to keep an eye on Poochie” at Mom’s suggestion.

                Keeping an “eye on Poochie” was not an easy task. It included getting me ready and being responsible for her feral little sister. Once my hair had been pulled and beaten into submission, Donna had to use hair bands to make two ponytails in my fine blonde hair.  It was the sixties, and some sadistic designer had invented hard plastic balls to sit decoratively on elastic hairbands.  Wrapping the elastic three or more times around my hair, Donna would stretch and snap the hard plastic balls on the top of my skull. 

                “Ope!,” Donna would say, “Sorry about that, just trying to make sure they are tight.  You have such thin hair!”

                She wasn’t sorry.  It was revenge.  And the only reason I had thin hair was because she had pulled it all out with the hairbrush.  Then Donna would pick me up under the armpits and sit me on the kitchen table and dress me in clean clothing against my will.  I had to balance on the table by extending both arms out as far as I could reach.  This helped stabilize the leaning, lurching table and kept me from being pulled off by my sister’s less-than-enthusiastic dressing. 

                I sat on the table, leaning and swaying with the poorly repaired table legs until I felt seasick.  Donna kept up a steady litany of complaints about having to dress me as Mom was in the bedroom getting dressed.  

                “OUCH!”  I would scream as she scraped my nose with a shirt collar.

                “If you didn’t have such a big Baumgart nose, it wouldn’t get in the way!”

                “My nose is smaller than yours!” I would defend my nose to the death.  As a teenager, my defense was undeniable when, in a sibling argument, we all measured noses, and I came out with the smallest.

                “Lift your arms up!”

                “I can’t, I’m gonna fall!”

                “I got my foot on the table leg, it's safe, now lift!”

                As a child, reading the story of Cinderella, I identified with the ugly stepsisters.  The Disney book that I read had a picture of each stepsister desperately trying to cram their oversized feet into an unyielding glass slipper.  I knew their pain.

                “Stop balling up your foot!”

                “I’m not balling up my foot; it's shaped that way!  I will just wear my barn shoes.”

                “You are not wearing those old shoes to town!  Ma!  Pooch needs new shoes again; her feet have grown another size or two!

                “Oh great.” Mom would yell back, “Are you sure, or is she just balling up her foot again?”

                Having had enough of his rest and relaxation moment, Dad would go out and start the car.  This meant that everyone who was going to town would have to pick up the pace to a frenzy. Dad’s temper was such that if he was already going to town, he was already grumpy.  Having to wait would only make it worse.

                We had a choice of two towns.  Wolf Lake or New York Mills.  Wolf Lake was about eleven miles from home; New York Mills was twelve.  Depending on the road conditions, the status of our severely used vehicle and Dad’s patience, we went wherever Dad declared we were going.

                “Don’t wanna go any further than we care to walk back.  Guess we’re going to Wolf Lake today.” Dad would announce.

                Not knowing the exact mileage myself, but not wanting to walk back from either place, I was along for the ride and did not have a vote.  My job was to keep my mouth shut, behave myself, and stay clean in town.  My reward would be a can of pop and possibly a candy bar.  Maybe this time I would finally be able to get a stray dog into the car and all the way home without being noticed.

                Relegated to the back seat with Donna, there were no booster seats or seat belts.  If I were lucky, Donna would throw an arm across my stomach if the car slid on the ice.  If not, I was a loose pinball inside a box of rusted-out metal on bald tires.

                Mom and Dad smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made from Velvet tobacco, kept in a tin and wrapped in Zig-Zag papers. They lit them with matches and smoked constantly for the entire trip. Dad, with one hand resting on the steering wheel, would reach into the pocket of his bib overalls and pull out his makings. Then, somehow keeping control of the car, he would fold the paper, pour tobacco into it, roll a cigarette, and light it with a match. He performed this little magic trick while driving down an icy, snow-covered road winding past fields and trees. The car had bald tires, and the windshield was iced over except for a dinner-plate-sized patch scraped clear. Several times on the drive to town, he repeated the trick while cursing the roads and scraping the inside of the windshield. The defroster never worked, and the heater had long since gone missing in action.

                Wolf Lake had two streets.  One going east-west and one going north-south.  There were no streetlights and no stoplights either.  Driving in from the south we would go as far as Jenny’s store.  Jenny’s was a mercantile, meaning that it sold a little of everything.  There was a grocery store a couple of blocks west of the road, next to the Lutheran church.  The town also had a post office and a bar. On the edge of town, the west side, was an old blacksmith’s shop that Dad sometimes stopped at when he needed a part repaired just one more time to finish the planting or harvesting season. 

                Shopping was done quickly.  Time could not be wasted; the battery might lose its charge or the tires all their air.   Dad would stay in the car and keep it running, hoping the alternator would keep the battery charged.  Besides, Dad hated shopping as much as he hated making small talk with other shoppers. 

The wooden floor of the ancient store sloped downward from the doorway, where generations of shoppers had worn the wood into smooth paths.  Straight down from the door, at the very back of the store, was a cooler that hid a variety of cans of pop.  I would go there first, picking out a can of grape soda and clutching it tightly in my greedy little hands.  Any chill the old cooler might have given the can of soda pop was long gone after a few minutes, to the point that to this day I prefer my soda at room temperature.

There were no grocery carts; chosen goods were carried to the counter or put in one of the few faded plastic baskets.  Sometimes, Jenny would have an order of shoes and work boots on the far west corner along the wall.  I would have my choice of generically ugly shoes.  I could choose between ones that fit and ones that didn’t fit.  Usually, I got a pair slightly bigger than I needed, “to grow into”.  If there were none in my size that month, I would have to wait until we made a trip to the Co-Op store in “Mills”. 

With a sour expression, Mom would pick out only the basics of necessities.  I now know that she wasn’t angry; she was doing the math in her head.  What could she afford, and what did she really need?  Could she get that slightly brown, lonely head of lettuce?  What did she have to put back in order to afford that tin of Velvet tobacco and rolling papers?

Donna would keep my hand in hers the entire time we were in the store.  I was shackled tightly by my teenage sister as though I were a tiny John Dillinger. I could barely glance at the cheap plastic toy guns before being yanked away.  I wasn’t allowed to so much as sniff the candy bars by the shop counter.  Jenny sat silently watching us, seated on a stool behind the cash register.  Donna made sure that no one would ever hear gossip about me shoplifting or “running wild” in the store. 

With Mom carrying the one or two brown paper bags, Donna would pull me along back to the car.  If I so much as glanced at a stray dog or yelled, “Puppy!” she would pull me airborne.  Back we went, a couple of dollars of gas in the tank and a long nerve-wracking ride home.  Flat tires were common.  Sometimes the car just stopped without warning.

  Going to town was always a disappointment to me.  There was no fun, no playing, and once the candy bar and can of pop was consumed, I had nothing to show for my efforts.  If I had gotten to stay home, I could have helped Tubby invent something. Instead, I had to risk life and limb, not to mention getting cleaned up, just to freeze for eleven miles there and back.

Mom would fill Dad in on the local gossip as we drove back.  Jenny was always a good source of the happenings around town.  I would sit in the backseat pouting, knowing the outcome of going to town was always the same, yet disappointed. 

I always thought that “town” should be more exciting.  On TV, people who lived in cities were always in the middle of excitement.  Columbo solved murders in cities.  The only crime that happened in Wolf Lake was when my cousin shoplifted a candy bar during vacation bible school.  Surely there had to be more, a magical town where things actually happened.  Someday, when I got big, I was going to a real town, a big town like on TV.  Just to visit, I felt sorry for those poor townspeople.  Imagine having to get bathed and wear clean clothes and shoes every day!