The Moon and Me: More Memories and Reflections

By Dean Charles Dickinson

IN THIS SUCCESSOR to his first collection of memoirs, Corn and Me, Dean C. Dickinson continues his thoughtful reflections on the colorful people and compelling events in his life. Mixed in with the memories are a number of short essays on a range of topics that will intrigue the general reader. The short chapters, woven on a roughly chronological framework, can be enjoyed whenever the reader has even a few minutes to spare. The characters in the story range from his droll and home-loving family members to the fascinating and appealing people he met along his way. His travels took him to Europe, Turkey, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Readers will find the same humor, pathos, and witty observations that they found in his previous book. They will be captivated by the range of his observations and inspired by his enduring love of books and ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491769676

Dean Charles Dickinson

Dean C. Dickinson had an active and varied career with the U.S. Air Force: first as a communications officer, and later as a supervisory electronics engineer. He graduated from George Washington University in 1958 with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree. In 1975 he earned a Master of Science degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California. He retired in 1990 and resides with his wife in Canastota, New York. After a lifetime of serious reading; he published his first book, Corn and Me, and Other Lingering Impressions, in 2007. This is his second book. Mr. Dickinson has five children, twelve grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.

Book preview

1

Christmas in Medina

Amid the clamor of arriving guests there was an air of expectancy. Aunts, uncles and cousins were bursting through the door of Grandpa Davis’s big brick house at 403 East Washington Street in Medina, Ohio. The Christmas tree was ablaze with lights and covered with tinsel balls and garland. The top of it scraped against the 10-foot ceiling. Each new arrival greeted everyone with a hearty, Merry Christmas. Their spirits were high. Though no one knew it then (December 24, 1939), this was the last time my mother’s Gilbert family would all be together on Christmas Eve. I was four and a half years old and I remember it well. The next year my mother and father and I would spend our Christmas at a motel in Virginia where my father would report for a job with the Army Corps of Engineers.

As the living room, dining room, kitchen, and parlor filled with relatives I was overwhelmed by the noise and confusion. My mother was the eldest of eleven: she had seven brothers and three sisters. The Gilbert aunts and uncles were delighted to be together and the house was filled with conversation. I don’t remember seeing Grandpa Gilbert, but I’m told he was there too. He never paid any attention to me, and he didn’t much like my mother—even though she was his first-born child. I tried to stay close to cousin Bonzie as she scooted all around the place. We were the same age, but I was bashful and she was always in the middle of things. She always knew what was going on before I did.

A couple weeks before the family party there had been a Christmas program at our church. Parents had been encouraged to have their children present a poem as part of the celebration. Mother taught me to memorize some rhyming lines about hanging up a stocking on Christmas Eve. After I learned to repeat the piece from memory she told me she expected me to stand on a stage by myself in front of the whole congregation and recite it for them. I didn’t want any part of that. I was afraid I’d forget the lines and people would laugh at me. Mother insisted I would do just fine. She gave me one of my father’s woolen hunting socks and told me to hide it behind my back until the end of the poem. I can’t remember the lines anymore but I did remember every word that night. The final line was something like, I’m sure my daddy’s sock will hold enough for me. And when I held up that enormous stocking—it reached almost to the floor—the whole place rocked with laughter and cheers. It was my first public speaking success.

At the party there was a lot of activity in the kitchen. The adults mixed their drinks from different bottles and offered glasses to each other. They gave cups of a frothy cider to Bonzie and me. It was sweet but had a kind of bite to it. It made me feel a little giddy. Mother and the other ladies set out a lot of food on the dining room table and we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted.

I heard someone say they hoped Santa Claus would pay us a visit. But Aunt Kate said, Naw, he’ll be too busy to stop here. At my tender age I didn’t know much about Santa Claus: he was a distant and mysterious figure. I shied away when Mother and I saw him in a department store in Akron. I quietly hoped he wouldn’t show up. There were already so many of us milling around in the house, a stranger would just add to the turmoil. Bonzie perked up though. She said he would bring us some toys. I had my doubts about that. He didn’t even know us.

Then Aunt Mabel told everyone to be quiet and listen. She thought she heard a noise on the roof. All the adults laughed and said they bet it was Santa’s sleigh. There was a knock on the door and one of the uncles yelled, He’s at the front door, open it. Everyone cheered as Santa Claus walked into the room. I wondered how he got off the roof. When I mentioned that to Bonzie she just laughed.

Santa sat down by the Christmas tree and they all crowded around as he pulled packages from his bag. I stood in a distant corner and watched. Everyone in the room received a gift—he looked around at each person as he called their name. The adults talked and joked with him. Bonzie and the younger cousins were delighted. I couldn’t figure out how he knew who everybody was. It seemed kind of spooky.

Then he called Uncle Gail’s name and they all laughed because he wasn’t there. Several of them said, Where’s Gail? I had seen him in the house earlier; so I started looking for him. Bonzie laughed at me and said she knew where he was. One of my other uncles said he was probably out in the barn. So I headed out into the cold night looking for my missing uncle. I looked on the back porch and all around the yard. It was dark in the barn, so I was afraid to go in there. Finally, I went back into the house and told them I couldn’t find Uncle Gail anywhere. No one seemed concerned. I wondered why Aunt Kate laughed—she was his wife.

I was surprised and embarrassed when Santa called my name. He looked right at me like he knew me, even though I’d never seen him before. I opened the gift he handed me and found a cuddly teddy bear. Later, I named it Cinnamon because of its color. It made a squeaky noise when I pressed a button on its belly. That stopped working after while but I liked the bear so much I took it to bed with me every night for the next nine or ten years. Mother often said she thought I was going to take it with me to college.

Finally, Santa finished handing out the gifts, wished everyone a Merry Christmas and went out the door. Soon afterward, Uncle Gail showed up and everyone told him what a lot of fun he had missed. I asked him where he had been. He said he had been checking on something out in the barn. He must have been working in the dark because I hadn’t seen any lights out there.

2

The Summer of ’42

Mother said, I’m going to swim out to the raft where your father went with the Yokums. You stay right here and don’t go into the water until I come back.

Okay mom, I said. I’ll wait for you here. She swam away and I looked around at the other people on the beach. All of them were strangers. Nearby I noticed a boy somewhat older and bigger than me. He was looking at me and I wondered if he had heard what my mother said.

Come on, the boy said, let’s you and me swim out to the raft.

No, I said, I don’t want to go out there. Besides, I can’t swim.

Okay then, he said, let’s just wade out where the water is deeper.

I don’t want to go into the water right now.

What’s the matter? You afraid? I was seven years old and my mother’s warnings about how sister Joyce drowned when she was 18 months old had made me afraid of deep water. I wasn’t taking any chances.

He danced around and badgered me to play in the water with him. When I refused to do it he became annoyed and called me a scaredy-cat and a sissy. I ignored him and he finally went away.

Shortly after that I felt a clunk and a sharp pain as something heavy struck my head. Stunned, I sank to my knees on the sand. Someone near me said, Hey, that kid is bleeding. I touched the wetness on my face. I looked at my hand and saw—blood.

Frightened by the attack and upset by the pain and blood, I felt sure that bully kid had hurt me out of spite. People were staring at me and I didn’t know what to do. My head throbbed with pain and I was embarrassed at being such a spectacle. I crouched over and stared at the ground as hot tears welled up in my eyes.

Then several young men rushed up to me. I didn’t see where they came from but they were all wearing bathing suits. One of them said, Let’s take him to the shower and wash off the blood so we can see how deep that cut is. A couple of them lifted me up and hustled me into the men’s bathhouse. They spoke in soothing voices and said they were sorry I was hurt. Their strong arms held me up as they eased me under the shower and rinsed off the blood. One of them asked, Where’s your mother?

She’s out on the pier, I moaned.

She’ll be looking for you, he said. I’ll find her and tell her you’re here.

This all happened at a new recreation park at a man-made reservoir in Kentucky. It was our first outing of the summer and we went there with my friend Pat Yokum and his parents, Ann and Bill. They were out on the pier too. We all lived on the other side of the Ohio River in Cincinnati, in the same apartment building, across the hall from each other. Bill Yokum was standing on the raft and saw the men pick me up and take me to the bathhouse. So he called to my mom and dad and then dove into the water. He was a powerful swimmer and he reached the bathhouse ahead of my parents.

I was immensely relieved when Bill rushed into the shower stall and looked over my wound. He asked, Do you feel dizzy?

No, I said. Then, Where’s my mother?

She’s right outside. I saw them bring you in here and told her.

As he looked at the gash he said, You’re going to be okay. Scalp wounds always bleed a lot. It’s not as bad as you’d think from all the blood. He and Ann had been trapeze artists in a circus and knew something about accidental injuries. By then my worried mother was outside the men’s locker room calling my name. Bill stuck his head out the door and told her I was okay. Then he and my dad got the bleeding stanched with a towel so I wouldn’t look such a fright to her.

I felt a lot better when Mother looked at the wound and said I would be okay. She asked me what had happened. I said I didn’t know who hit me but a mean kid had been taunting me just before it happened. Then Bill said, I heard someone say there was a group of young men throwing a conch shell around and playing catch. Maybe that’s what hit you. So that ended our holiday. We all changed out of our bathing suits, gathered up our things, and headed for home. No one said anything about going to a hospital, or seeing a doctor for stitches.

After the wound healed it left a scar and my mother started parting my hair on the other side to help hide it. I always assumed that if I ever got bald like my mother’s brothers the scar would be visible. But, surprisingly, when I finally did lose all my hair the scar had completely disappeared.

In retrospect, I have decided that my youthful injury was most likely an accident. If the kid who had been pestering me had been mean enough to launch a rock in my direction he probably would have missed. Over the years I’ve thrown enough rocks to know how difficult it would be to clock somebody in the head with one throw. Even professional baseball pitchers have trouble delivering a ball to their point of aim. No, I’m sure it had to be an accident. The concerned young men who showed up so quickly to help me were probably playing catch with some kind of seashell when a throw got away from them. Actually I feel a debt of gratitude toward those young fellows when I reflect that before the year was over they were probably learning how to throw hand grenades. It was their last carefree summer holiday for a long, long time—for some of them it was the last one ever. And if they did cause that scar on my scalp, I like to think I wore it in their honor.

3

Aunt Lavonne

The sign in her front yard read, Canaries for Sale. The entire dining room was filled with birds in cages. There were rows of them in the middle of the room and along three walls. Their pleasant twittering softened the mood in that dark, old house. Three or four of the cages housed pairs of love-birds as she called parakeets. She said, I don’t really don’t care for them. They don’t sing; they just make an ugly squawk. People like to watch their antics though. The mated pairs will cuddle up to each other like lovers. Then they’ll get into a fight and go pout in separate corners just like married folks. Some people can get them to talk, but I’ve never had any luck with that—it takes too much time and attention. She chuckled and said, I prefer the canaries; I love to hear them sing. Her specialty was patiently breeding the little yellow birds to get progressively darker and more colorful plumage—eventually she hoped one of her pairings would produce an orange canary. In those days people liked to keep the little songbirds in their homes, and her sales were brisk. She thought an orange bird might sell even better.

Mother’s Great Aunt Lavonne was a kindly old lady, but when I was a small boy the sound of her voice made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Her voice was unusually deep for a woman and she spoke in a gentle monotone. Her lower jaw protruded and I thought her little pearl-like teeth looked like kernels of sweet corn. She was a big woman, broad-shouldered and large-boned—a hulking presence in the room. But she was not at all gloomy. In fact she had a wonderful sense of humor and she often punctuated her statements with a friendly chuckle. She lived alone in a farmhouse on a remote stretch of State Route 3 just east of Medina, Ohio. That’s the town where my mother grew up and where both my mother and father graduated from high school.

My earliest memories of Lavonne are from my early childhood when we lived in Cincinnati and visited her on trips back to our old hometown. She was a widow then, the last of what my mother called, The older generation. Her deceased husband, Frank Huffman, had been one of my great grandmother’s three older brothers. Lavonne was the only one of them still alive by the time I came along. She often spoke fondly of the good times we had when Frank was alive.

There used to be another sign in her yard that advertised a spookier sideline. She told people’s fortunes by reading their tealeaves. Relatives, friends, and complete strangers came to her house to drink tea and enjoy a reading. As a young child I had listened to her conversations with my mother and father and was spellbound with her death scene descriptions of how various family members had passed on. One of them made a rattling noise at the dinner table and when the family looked at him he fell over dead. Another one was found sitting motionless in a chair with his eyes wide open and his body stiff as a board. When she noticed my horrified look she would say, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to frighten you. I tried to look unconcerned but I was covered with goose bumps. Behind those wire-rimmed glasses her pale eyes twinkled as she reached over and patted my knee.

I was a little older on another occasion when we visited Lavonne. I remember watching her carefully when she offered to read our tealeaves. First she filled the pot with water and loose tea. After it had steeped she shook the pot to make sure the leaves were floating in the brew. Then she filled our cups and we all chatted and sipped. When a cup was nearly empty she picked it up, gently swirled the remaining liquid to stir up the leaves, and then tipped it up to isolate the leaves onto one side of the bottom. She seemed to be alert for certain formations that had names and meanings. I was surprised to see her repeatedly swirl and tip as she looked at the resulting patterns and mused aloud about them. I was also surprised how tentative her interpretations were. She said things like, It looks a little bit like such and such or I think I can see this or that. Since everyone had been conversing with her as we sat around the kitchen table, there was a good chance that some of her musings would relate to things we had discussed.

I was in high school the last time I visited Lavonne with my parents. She told us about an experience that had made her very uneasy. One day a group of people came to the door and said they were from Cleveland.

Mother asked, Did you know who were they?

Well, yes, in a way. I recognized some of them as having been here before. But there was an old man with them that they said they wanted me to meet. So I asked them out to the kitchen and made some tea. Then we all sat around the table. The old man didn’t have much to say. He just stared at me with a vacant look.