"Sheckman's Shack"

Our home, "Sheckman's Shack", poised itself in a rather convenient location just up the street from the Bond Bread factory and directly across the street from our neighbor's pigeon coops. At all hours of the day one could hear the short stifled hum of the birds in their screened jail. Amid this humming, a little girl lost her sight in one eye as a result of a BB gun shot we knew was not aimed at the oft-targeted homing pigeons. We could still smell, however, the soothing warmth of the fresh baked bread from the Bond Company ovens. And that shaped our feelings of home.

Resurfacing as silent movies, I hardly remember all the rooms in my dwelling, let alone their placement on someone's blueprint. We didn't have much. (I remember in later years asking my father for some money and he was surprised because as long as I had food and clothing, I had no need for money, "What do you need money for boy"? Or when I complained about not having dessert, I received a verbal lesson for life--"Boy you don't get fat on what you wants, you get fat on what you gets.") Nonetheless, I still daydream of the bathroom and the living room--where the old brown stand-up stove provided the sun's blistering heat inside.

In the wintertime I remember the bathroom and soft-stepping, careful not to slide bare, cold feet against wooden floors. Splinters surprised me with excruciating pain when I least expected it and often Ma had to extract the wooden spears with blunt tweezers, adding to the misery. In the bathtub, the water was heated with the pouring of a huge teapot of scalding water into the thin ice water already filling the tub. Yet it wasn't so much the bath that comes to mind but my scamper to the Brown stove to stave of the formation of icicles from the beaded water droplets that dotted my skin and to quell the shivering and teeth rattling shaking. "Don't stand too close!" Ma yelled. Her warning went unheeded, I inched closer and closer to the stove until I backed into it and screamed! The smell of burning flesh, however, only drew my mother's scorn.

Years later, my older brother, Joey, who also shared the same bath tub would smile and reminice, with not a little relish, about my man made birth mark, my own "red badge " of humility as it were, and the colorful experiences we shared in Sheckman's Shack. And from the victim's point of view, I return his smile.

"Dress Shoes"

Dress shoes
Blest shoes
Smile at me
Sole plopping down
With each clippety clop step
The soul's merriment Exposed
Except
When standing
Then nobody knows about my "soul"
And where it's traveled to
What puddles
My feet have muddled through...