The Stradivarius in the Basement: A Collection of Essays

By Kristina Simms

The Stradivarius in the Basement is a collection of essays, some humorous, some serious, based on the author's 72 years of observing - and participating in - life on this wonderful but essentially puzzling planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452001333

Kristina Simms

Kristina Simms is a retired educator, community volunteer, and political activist living in Perry, Georgia. She has published two other nonfiction books, Macon: Georgia's Central City, An Illustrated History (Windsor Press, 1989) and A Year at the Lake (Xlibris, 2003), a poetry book, A Second Spring (iUniverse, 2006), and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

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Contents

Childhood on Planet 1945

The Stradivarius in the Basement

A Tale of Two Grandmothers

A Tale of Two Apprentices

An Interrupted Life

Do I Dare to Eat a Wing?

Are You Being Served?

The Sporting Life

Confessions of an Uncool Traveler

A Paean to Office Technology

Saving the Senior Mind

My Mother the Writer

Earthly Alarms and Adventures

Notes from a Confederate Childhood

Shaking the Family Tree

My Grandfather the Movie-Maker

Confessions of a Camera Lover

Segregation – The Way it Was

The Lake Dwellers

The Accidental Botanist

A Place of Their Own

But the greatest of these…

Childhood on Planet 1945

My grandchildren are whizzes at computer games and anything else that involves a keyboard, buttons, or hand-held controls. As well they might be.

They didn’t have to start with an Underwood manual typewriter almost the size of a microwave oven and work up to a slim laptop. They didn’t start with a telephone that was mounted in a wooden box on the wall and had a crank on one side and an earpiece receiver hanging on a hook on the other side. (Hence, the term hang up.)

Nor did they start with a record player that had a turntable and an arm with a needle that wound its way through circular pathways in a record. (Hence, in the groove.) Nor did they start with a film-loaded Brownie Hawkeye and end up, years later, with a Canon that would hold hundreds of photos in a memory card.

Their generation -- children of the technological revolution-- leaped over all the intermediate steps and landed smack in the 21st century. And there they are, with their marvelously fast reflexes, rearranging and matching geometric shapes faster than the shapes can fall—and that’s about twice as fast as their grandmother can follow.

The world I grew up in, though not so long ago from a geological perspective, might as well have been Earth 3.1 as opposed to Earth 10.9, a different version and a different skill level for sure, maybe even a different planet.

So far neither of my grandchildren has looked up long enough to say, Grandma Tina, what did you do for fun when you were a kid? Good thing too. It would make me feel even more like an visitor from Planet 1945 to have to say, "Well, we used to go out in the front yard and spin round and round until we got dizzy and fell down in the grass. Sometimes three or four of us would be spinning all at the same time. Sometimes my little brother would throw up. It was lots of fun."

But not cool. Not cool at all. Definitely a low tech childhood.

There was a slightly more elaborate version of spinning game that involved swinging a sibling or neighbor child by the arm until they got dizzy and then abruptly letting go so that the kid would tumble into some unusual position. The swung one was then supposed to freeze and pretend to be an object or animal while the swinger would make such guesses as You’re a coffee pot or You’re an elephant or You’re ugly ol’ Miz Perkle, ha ha ha! That game even had a name. It was called Sling the Statue.

After one particularly strenuous game of Sling the Statue, in which I had been the statue, my right shoulder was so out of whack that my mother actually thought I had polio. My father was serving in WWII in the Pacific, and my mother didn’t drive, so an off-duty policeman drove my mother and me the fifty miles to Macon for a diagnostic spinal tap. I protested all the way that my shoulder was sore because we had been playing Sling the Statue, but to no avail. The polio epidemic of the 1940s had parents scared so bad that every fever and every ache was suspect. After the painful and unnecessary spinal tap, my enthusiasm for playing Sling the Statue waned significantly.

Unless the weather was perfectly awful, my sisters and brother and I, and the other kids in our neighborhood played outside, and we played with whatever was most plentiful – like dirt, for example. And water.

There never was any shortage of dirt around our place, and we had access to shovels, hoes, hole-diggers and other gardening tools. So long as we stayed away from our grandmother’s flowers and vegetables, nobody cared how many holes we dug. Kids were not watched nearly as closely in those days as they are today.

At least, we weren’t.

Once a suitably big hole had been dug, the next step was to drag the garden hose to the site of the lake, fill it up and slosh around in it. Of course we usually ended up squirting each other with the hose and tossing handfuls of mud.

Eventually we decided to give up lake-digging and try our hands at cave-digging, an activity that eventually earned us considerable negative attention from our mother and grandmother. Generally they were pretty much oblivious to what we did outside, just so we minded our manners inside the house. The cave-digging venture turned out to be an exception. It got their attention – unexpectedly and dramatically, and in hindsight comically.

The hole we called our cave was an excavation about three feet deep and four feet wide, artfully covered over with branches and leaves and dirt. More like a well-camouflaged trap than a cave, really. It was just large enough for two of us to huddle in at a time, so we had to devise games that involved two cave-dwellers staying home while the other cave-dwellers went out hunting and foraging. Naturally the cave got soggy the first time it rained, and we moved on to other games. Refilling the hole when we were finished with playing in it didn’t occur to us, of course.

Well, the day eventually came when Henry Lee, a large, strong older black man of somber and serious mien, arrived at our place with his shiny plow and his fine glossy mule. Henry Lee wasn’t just any plowman, mind you. He was the special plowman, the one that all the gardening grandmothers wanted to hire. I mean, you had to get on Henry Lee’s calendar to get some plowing done. He would try to squeeze you into his busy schedule if you were lucky. He had other work to do besides small plowing jobs and he would let you know it.

My grandmother, who was born on a cotton plantation and knew a few things about farm animals, looked on admiringly and said, That certainly is a fine mule!

Henry Lee nodded in agreement. He was understandably proud of that mule.

Temporarily banned from the rear of the lot so we wouldn’t be a nuisance during the plowing process, we kids were limited to observing the action from the back porch as Henry Lee commanded the mule with authoritative git-ups, and gees, and haws, and whoas. We hadn’t played in the hide-out cave for several weeks and had pretty much forgotten about it. It was fun to watch as the sharp plow turned under the grass and weeds and leaves, and created nice straight furrows. Not exactly fun like watching a Harry Potter movie, but fun in a 1940s small Southern town sort of way. Few kids today have done any serious mule-watching.

Everything was going along predictably, furrow after furrow, and then it happened. Suddenly, the front end of the mule plunged into our well-disguised cave and his butt and tail went up in the air and the normally taciturn Henry Lee started shouting expletives loud enough to be heard all the way to the downtown depot.

We kids started hollering The mule fell in the cave! The mule fell in the cave!

Alarmed and puzzled by all the commotion, the grownups hurried past us and down the back stairs as well as two chubby, non-athletic, intellectually-inclined ladies could hurry. Our mother still had the mystery novel she was reading clutched in her hand.

"Cave? she said. What cave?"

Our grandmother had quickly set aside her copy of the Christian Science Monitor. Both were in a rush to see what in the world was going on out back. But, as one might guess, they were of very little use in helping the mule extricate himself from the hole. All they could do was stand at a safe distance, cast quizzical and annoyed glances at the four young’uns standing quietly on the back porch, murmur encouragement to the Henry Lee and gaze away discreetly when his curses became too audible.

My grandmother had the habit of pursing her lips and inhaling sharply when she saw or heard something she considered to be coarse. I am surprised she didn’t hyperventilate herself during the extrication of the mule from our cave.

The mule, miraculously, was uninjured by the fall. Miraculously too, we kids got by with nothing more injurious than a stern scolding. And -- surprise, surprise-- that was the last time Henry Lee ever plowed at our place. As he often said, he had a lot of other work to do besides taking on backyard plowing jobs, especially in places where kids might dig big holes for his valuable mule to break a leg in.

I suppose I could say to my grandchildren, "Y’all are really terrific at those computer games, but did you ever dig a mule trap?"

Another really dangerous thing we did was to climb out an attic window and onto the roof of our two storey house. Violet was busy at her manual Underwood putting the finishing touches on an operetta she and a friend were co-writing when the phone rang and a neighbor said, Honey, did you know your children are on top of the house?

Baby sitters were called nurses back then and during the long summers of my childhood, my mother hired two lively young girls of about middle-school age, daughters of the woman who did our washing (we didn’t yet use the word laundry) to serve as nurses for her four kids while she pecked out columns, feature stories, and recipes on an old manual Remington. I will call them Varina and DeeDee.

Actually I think the services of both nurses were obtained for the price of one since Varina, the younger, just liked to tag along with her older sister DeeDee.

At any rate, they were both lots of fun and almost as full of mischief as we were.

It was DeeDee and Varina who taught us to play a game we called Going To See Miz Minnie Jones, and sing the verses, to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb, that accompanied the action.

Suspecting that there might be a folkloric background to this game, I finally found its history in William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children, first published in 1883, and now available from that invaluable reprinter of the unusual, Dover Press. Miz Minnie Jones (we said Minn-eye ) was originally Miss Jenny Jo or Jennia Jones or Jenny my Joy and her story, originally a tale of lost love going back hundreds of years, was now a mere caricature of its former sentimental original. Oh, what a falling off was there, going from Jenny to Minnie.

Going to See Miz Minnie Jones was always played at the rose-covered gazebo my grandmother had placed in an area surrounded by pyracantha, eleganus and other thick shrubs. The gazebo and the plantings in that part of the lot successfully shielded the chicken house from being seen from Highway 49, which ran in front of our house.

Whoever was chosen to play the role of Miz Minnie sat in the gazebo while the rest of us, with arms linked, skipped toward her singing:

"Gwine to see Miz Minn-eye Jones,

Minn-eye Jones, Minn-eye Jones

Gwine to see Miz Minn-eye Jones

and how she is today."

Miz Minnie Jones would refuse to see us, announcing in a loud voice:

She’s washing!

Then the singers would retreat, regroup, and skip back to the Gazebo again, singing the same verses.

Again we would be dismissed:

She’s i’ning (ironing).

And so it went –

She’s hanging out the clothes.

She’s sick.

She’s worse.

"She’s DEAD!"

Then Miz Minnie Jones would leap up, make a fearsome face, and start chasing us all over the lawn. Eeeeeeeeek! Eeeeeeeek! We would all shriek and run, no longer a cheerful skipping chorus but a desperate band of little mortals trying to escape from the undead. Whoever got caught would have to be the new Miz Minnie and the game would begin all over again. DeeDee was particularly good at screaming She’s D-E-A-D, making scary faces while she chased the rest of us. She had real theatrical talent and could tell some really gruesome tall tales and make us believe every word.

When we tired of gwine to see Miz Minnie Jones, a game of what we called Rock School might follow. I think Varina and Dee-Dee taught us this game too. The name had nothing to do with the current meaning of the word rock. That was yet to come.

By means of a count-out round of eeny-meeny-miney-moe one child was chosen to be the Teacher. The rest of us sat in a row on the first of the six concrete steps that led up to up to the front porch of our two-storey frame house. The Teacher would conceal a rock in one of her fists and then hold out both fists, challenging the members of the Class to tap the fist that contained the rock. A right guess would promote the pupil to the next step. The first kid to reach the top of the stairs would graduate and have the privilege of becoming the Teacher. Rock School could go on interminably, especially if the Teacher was prone to cheat, and after a while the discouraged pupils would become Rock School drop-outs and drift off to other activities like tickling each other’s noses with pink mimosa blooms or picking honeysuckle and tasting the tiny drop of sugar in the tube of the flower.

On dark summer nights we would capture lightning bugs (maybe you call them fireflies) in Mason jars, the kind that the old folks used for fig preserves and pickled peaches, and then let them all loose again when we were called in for bedtime preparations. Short of getting inside a closet and closing the door, many kids these days have no idea of exactly how dark dark can really be and what the sky looks like with all the stars so bright and sharp that even a five-year old could exclaim Look, there’s the Big Dipper! and be correct in locating it. We used to lie on our backs in the grass gazing up at the night sky and hoping to see a falling star. If we got redbugs (you may call them chiggers), which we often did from playing on the grass, we painted the itchy places with nail polish, which was supposed to suffocate the skin-burrowing pests.

In later life, as a teacher of English classes, I had the opportunity to explain what the word benighted meant in its original sense, that is, being stranded in total darkness like the children in Milton’s Comus. But since none of my students had spent the 1940s in a small town without high intensity street lighting or even one single traffic signal, they probably didn’t understand what real dark dark was.

Another favorite night time activity, which may have been unique to our area, was pulling homemade street cars with lighted candles inside.

Our street cars were made of cardboard boxes – shoe boxes were ideal – with rows of square holes cut in the sides for windows. A stubby candle was placed inside the box, glued in place by a dab or two of melted wax. It’s too bad we didn’t have those short fat votive candles that are sold everywhere these days because they would have been just the right size. A square was also cut out of the top of the box just above the candle. Without this hole the top of your streetcar would catch on fire, which sometimes happened anyhow if the candle fell over or the flame was too high. A piece of string with a knot on the end threaded through the front of the box connected the streetcar to its source of power – the hand of a child pulling this delightful contraption down the sidewalk.

Part of the allure was the flickering pattern of light cast by the candles. Beams of light shone like a beacons out of each window of each streetcar as we slowly paraded up and down the sidewalk. Sometimes as many as a dozen or fifteen kids at a time, including tots accompanied by the parents or an older sibling, joined in the streetcar pull. There were many stops along the way to re-light or replace candles, refasten strings, and get drinks of water from a neighbor’s convenient standpipe. And our parents thought nothing at all of sending us out with big boxes of kitchen matches. If we blistered a finger, well, we’d just have to soak it in ice water and learn to be more careful in the future.

I don’t know any parents today who would nonchalantly send their kids outside to play in the dark with candles and matches and cardboard boxes while they stayed inside and wrote newspaper articles and read Agatha Christie and True Crime magazine, but ours did, and we certainly had a lot of fun.

The Stradivarius in the Basement

Where I grew up in small-town Georgia some years ago, basements were not common. Most houses then were of frame construction with ample crawl space so that a plumber could get under the house to repair the pipes when they froze and burst, which happened any time we had a harsh dip in winter temperature, because the pipes were located in a crawl space. In the clear light of hindsight, I will concede that there is a certain irrationality to this arrangement, but I long ago pledged not to hold my breath waiting for my childhood environment to make good sense.

At our ramshackle two storey frame house, which was built on a sloping lot, we had plenty of space underneath. There was enough room under our kitchen to store big piles of coal and firewood, and I count us very lucky that none of these potential bonfires ever ignited. There was, of course, an assortment of water pipes and drain pipes positioned in well-exposed drafty places so they could be easily reached for winter repairs when they froze due to being located in well-exposed drafty places.

I doubt my grandchildren would be able to recognize a chunk of coal if they saw one.