Home and Other Places

This is one of those 'random memories' kind of blog post so don't go looking for a unifying theme :-)

The past few blog entries have centered around a small 2 bedroom house we rented on Mueller Rd in Concord, MO (outside of St. Louis). I know the exact time period because we bought a (much larger) home a couple of miles away right before my 4th birthday. More on that later. (Haha - I said moron.)
I still remember that place in exquisite detail. I can mentally walk through it and see almost every piece of furniture, every appliance, every detail down to the floor drain in the basement where the septic tank used to back up (a frequent occurrence) with one glaring exception - the bathroom. Aside from a single fleeting memory of sitting on a potty chair watching my father shave, the bathroom is a total blank. I can only assume that my mind has blocked it out due to all the potty related trauma that occurred there :-) My mom used to say that she thought I was going to end up going to kindergarten in diapers.

I remember lifting the grate off the furnace air duct in the dining room floor and tossing clothes down it (repeatedly) - I don't have any idea why I did that but it made my mom really mad.

I remember late one night during a severe storm (with tornado warnings) we were in the basement when it started flooding and we had to run next door. My dad held me under his coat to shield me from the rain and wind - the thunder and lightning were awesome. BTW - I really liked those storms but they scared the heck out of my mom.

For the sake of completeness I should include a couple of stories that my mother frequently told (I have no recollection whatsoever of these events):
One day we were expecting company for dinner so she cleaned the house and then took an afternoon nap (she took a lot of naps). While she was sleeping my sister and I decided that the living room would look much better if it were covered with 'snow'. So we took a 5 lb bag of sugar and 'decorated' all the furniture. Needless to say mom wasn't amused when she awoke to find the living room covered in holiday cheer (she didn't really appreciate it at all).
Another time I reportedly ran out into the road in front of our house and my sister ran after me, pushed me down and got on top of me so that if a car came it would hit her and not me... Yeah, her reasoning was a bit flawed but I guess it's the thought that counts :-)

As I mentioned above, that house was in Concord, which at the time was just a wide spot at the intersection of Lindbergh and Tesson Ferry. There was an old barber shop where I got my first hair cut, a Zephyr gas station, a farm equipment store with a tractor or 2 parked out front, our neighbor Mr. Cloninger's clothing store (he was a very nice gentleman) and a grocery store.

We used to spend a lot of time swimming during the summers.
There was a huge spring fed pool in White House, MO that we went to from time to time. That's were I learned to swim. I had been taking lessons for weeks and they'd accomplished nothing but scaring the heck out of me. Then some guy (who was clearly hitting on my mom) taught me in about 10 minutes. (He was really good - I remembered his teaching technique and used it on my kids.)
And the Concord Lanes bowling alley (just a few blocks away) also had a pool. We continued going there until I was 8 years old (when we moved to Philadelphia).

OK - this is funny (at least I think so):
Concord Lanes had a small round kiddie pool with 3 round pedestals in the middle with fountains on them and large main pool with oddly curved sides. When I was about 5 or 6 I remember being puzzled about why the sides of the main pool were curved rather than straight. After weeks of obsessing over it, it finally dawned on me that the main pool was actually shaped like a (really wide) bowling pin, and the kiddie pool (with the 3 pedestals) was the bowling ball with 3 holes in it! It was really quite clever and I was kicking myself for taking so long to figure it out - it seemed so obvious in retrospect. And (of course) I never mentioned it to anyone else because I expected they'd say "Well, duh!!!"
It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered I was the only one in the family who had ever noticed the shape of the pool...