Memories and Value

The strangest things from my childhood have stayed with me.... I carry odd snapshots and movies around in my head....
Odd notions, smells, clips of conversations....

The bloody slush that remained when a street car ran over a dog and how I couldn't eat ketchup for a long time....
I started noticing the labels of ketchup bottles more.... Ketchup could be written as "catsup"... which I read as "cats up" and saw as something bloody spewing from a cat...and this reminded me of the bloody slush on the track....
All this may be why I tend to choose brands that go with the "ketchup" spelling... even today.

Before I came to New Orleans, I had never seen a dragonfly...never experienced how lovely they are in the sun.
I remember roaming around the beautiful grounds behind the Sara Mayo Hospital on Jackson Avenue with my cousin Mibby (Mary Ida) capturing these lovely creatures.
Mibby said that her mother, my Aunt Roberta, would beat her if she found out that we were tearing their wings off...
Dragonflies don't cry out....but helplessly cling to your fingers with their sticky legs and curl their long tails. I remember their silence.
Mibby and I shared our feelings of guilt and swore we wouldn't do it again....but we did.

One afternoon, on the way to the Kingsley House on Constance Street, I cut across a lot, kicking through the remains of a demolished building.
Among the old bricks and trash, I spotted a crushed metal box....sure that I would find treasure.
But there was a tail sticking out of one end of it. I had to know.....
With a stick I was able to flip the lid open....and see a huge black and white rat...smashed.
How did a dead rat get inside of that box? Did someone smash the metal box to kill the rat?
Good questions....
And some questions stay with you... and many times they are questions that were never asked or properly answered. Questions like....What gives something value?
You see, Kingsley House had an after-school program for kids in the Irish Channel. I think it came about right around the time the the St. Thomas Housing Project was built.
Behind the safety of huge brick walls, there was a playground, a sheltered area with a jukebox and board games, and workshops. The soundtrack for Kingsley House would be Buddy Holly and the Crickets....
Can you imagine 5-6 elementary school boys in a workshop full of electric saws? Well, neither could they...
There was a middle-aged man with a carpenter's apron. He promised to make each of us boys something to bring home if we would just watch and be quiet....and not touch anything.
The smell of the wood being cut, planed and sanded was wonderful....but I hated the shrill sound of the saws....still do.
We each left with an unfinished whatnot shelf made up of two wooden squares that fit together.
The man told us to bring it home, and our fathers could help us stain and varnish it.
Yeah sure... Most of us had no fathers...or stain...or varnish...
Walking home swinging the wooden thing around, it meant nothing.... I didn't make it, and I had no hope of seeing it finished and hanging on the wall.
An old woman sitting on a stoop called to me... She asked to see what I had and where I got it.
She offered me a quarter for it.... It was hers!
The value of things was something that kids in the Channel had to work through. Many of us spent our lives selling things too cheaply....or spending what little we had on trash. The important things seemed way beyond our reach....or we were totally unaware of them.

Dead dogs and ketchup, tortured dragonflies, crushed rats, and what remains unfinished with no worth.
Memories....