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Authors: Malcolm Jones
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catch my breath a little. It was like encountering a stranger in the house at bedtime.
Most nights, though, hours before she finally turned off the kitchen light and went to bed herself, she put me to sleep with aback rub and a Bible story. The tales she told, in a soft, hypnotic voice, sounded oddly violent coming from the mouth of someone so mild, but I think it was just that she knew what I wanted to hear: David and Goliath, Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, Jesus walking on water and manufacturing loaves and fishes sufficient for a crowd of five thousand. I never went to sleep before she finished, and always begged for one more story. More often than not I got it. We had a catchphrase that we used only on each other: “I’m going to pester you.” She deployed it with mock ferocity to coax me through a chore, to get me out of the tub, to get me to finish my dinner. At night, in bed, I took it up, pestering her not to stop telling stories. It was a little like a secret code, a way of talking that only we shared. We certainly never pestered anyone else.
Pester
was the first word I remember thinking of
as a word
, worrying its mustardy sound over my tongue, saying it in private until it became nonsense. I’ve never known anyone else who said it, certainly not the way we said it: chanted back and forth, something said over and over just for the fun of saying it, and I made the game go on as long as I could. I didn’t want her to leave, not before I fell asleep, and usually she accommodated me, turning off the little lamp beside my bed and sitting there in the almost dark with just the light from the hall coming through the half-closed door, whispering to me. Sometimes it was something from the Psalms, or just a phrase or a sentence, dreamily spoken over and over, as though she, too, were drifting off. (What did she say? I wish I could remember. But all that’s left is the comforting sound of her voice, light and soft, like an extra blanket.) If she got to the door before I was asleep, I would try to hold her there as long as I could by saying, “Love you the most.” Then we said that back and forth there in the dark, playing catch with words until I was too sleepy to go on.
Matinee Idyll
Going to the movies was my most exotic thrill as a child. It happened so rarely that stepping into any theater was an event, the closest thing to real magic that I could imagine. The gilded ticket booth out front, popcorn geysering forth inside a glass-walled machine at the concession stand, the rich velvet curtain parting just before the newsreels and cartoons and previews—it was like the church had run off and joined the circus. And you never knew when you were going to get to go or if you would ever be allowed to go again. So you didn’t miss a single detail of the experience.
Even when Disney movies came to town, no one I knew got to go to every one. After I saw
Snow White
, I returned home and acted it out for the other kids in the neighborhood and then we played
Snow White
for days. Other kids taught us the plots of
Toby Tyler
and
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. (None of us had the guts to re-enact
Old Yeller
, our first encounter with tragedy.) Bible movies were the best fodder for backyard epics. My mother donated a threadbare beach towel that served as a costume for Moses parting the Red Sea, Ben-Hur racing in a chariot andSamson before he lost his hair. No one liked playing the blind Samson, because the rest of us just ran away and hid, but pulling down the temple on the Philistines did cheer us up.
In the years before I started school in 1958, our apartment complex was crawling with kids my age. After that, our stock company drifted away one actor at a time, as parents saved up enough for down payments on new houses and departed for neighborhoods a notch above ours, leaving me without companions: that exodus was my first lesson in the realities of a semi-broken home, since unlike everyone around us, my
Most nights, though, hours before she finally turned off the kitchen light and went to bed herself, she put me to sleep with aback rub and a Bible story. The tales she told, in a soft, hypnotic voice, sounded oddly violent coming from the mouth of someone so mild, but I think it was just that she knew what I wanted to hear: David and Goliath, Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, Jesus walking on water and manufacturing loaves and fishes sufficient for a crowd of five thousand. I never went to sleep before she finished, and always begged for one more story. More often than not I got it. We had a catchphrase that we used only on each other: “I’m going to pester you.” She deployed it with mock ferocity to coax me through a chore, to get me out of the tub, to get me to finish my dinner. At night, in bed, I took it up, pestering her not to stop telling stories. It was a little like a secret code, a way of talking that only we shared. We certainly never pestered anyone else.
Pester
was the first word I remember thinking of
as a word
, worrying its mustardy sound over my tongue, saying it in private until it became nonsense. I’ve never known anyone else who said it, certainly not the way we said it: chanted back and forth, something said over and over just for the fun of saying it, and I made the game go on as long as I could. I didn’t want her to leave, not before I fell asleep, and usually she accommodated me, turning off the little lamp beside my bed and sitting there in the almost dark with just the light from the hall coming through the half-closed door, whispering to me. Sometimes it was something from the Psalms, or just a phrase or a sentence, dreamily spoken over and over, as though she, too, were drifting off. (What did she say? I wish I could remember. But all that’s left is the comforting sound of her voice, light and soft, like an extra blanket.) If she got to the door before I was asleep, I would try to hold her there as long as I could by saying, “Love you the most.” Then we said that back and forth there in the dark, playing catch with words until I was too sleepy to go on.
Matinee Idyll
Going to the movies was my most exotic thrill as a child. It happened so rarely that stepping into any theater was an event, the closest thing to real magic that I could imagine. The gilded ticket booth out front, popcorn geysering forth inside a glass-walled machine at the concession stand, the rich velvet curtain parting just before the newsreels and cartoons and previews—it was like the church had run off and joined the circus. And you never knew when you were going to get to go or if you would ever be allowed to go again. So you didn’t miss a single detail of the experience.
Even when Disney movies came to town, no one I knew got to go to every one. After I saw
Snow White
, I returned home and acted it out for the other kids in the neighborhood and then we played
Snow White
for days. Other kids taught us the plots of
Toby Tyler
and
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. (None of us had the guts to re-enact
Old Yeller
, our first encounter with tragedy.) Bible movies were the best fodder for backyard epics. My mother donated a threadbare beach towel that served as a costume for Moses parting the Red Sea, Ben-Hur racing in a chariot andSamson before he lost his hair. No one liked playing the blind Samson, because the rest of us just ran away and hid, but pulling down the temple on the Philistines did cheer us up.
In the years before I started school in 1958, our apartment complex was crawling with kids my age. After that, our stock company drifted away one actor at a time, as parents saved up enough for down payments on new houses and departed for neighborhoods a notch above ours, leaving me without companions: that exodus was my first lesson in the realities of a semi-broken home, since unlike everyone around us, my
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