TERRY MOSHER
PEANUTS SITTING ON MY DAD’S LAP. TERRY MOSHER IS ON THE RIGHT
Mary and I have been hit large by the evil flu that has been going around and when you are our age it really floors you to the point you start thinking about your life in sort of a review as if this might be it.
Well, I think we will survive, but it did open some lost channels of my life that came into sharp review as I coughed away into sleepless nights. It’s kind of amusing the things you remember and one of them for me was where we five Mosher kids slept in our old yellow house with the wrap-around porch back in our home state of New York. Now that doesn’t sound important, but it’s driving me mad because I can only account for four of our sleeping arrangements.
My brother Ronnie is the odd man out in my recollection. So I called him and after a half-hour I was no closer to reaching a solution then I was before I called. I was the youngest of the five and we had three bedrooms upstairs and my sister Minerva, the oldest, slept in the front bedroom fronting Highway 16, Ray, the second oldest, slept in the back corner alongside the driveway, and David, fourth oldest and I had separate beds in the other back bedroom alongside the side lawn.
So where was Ronnie?
I’m going to get the answer, but evidently not today because Ray, who is having health problems doesn’t feel very well today and I can’t bother him with such drivel, and David didn’t answer my call.. But I’ve always been a good detective and I’m persistent so I will get my answer – if the flu doesn’t take me first.
Sleeping arrangement doesn’t seem very important in the bigger picture, but, hey, I need to know. And the drive to find out opened other interesting memory doors. For example, we had a very loyal and loving dog named Peanuts. She was my best buddy and often slept at night in my bed or with one of my brothers (Just got distracted for a few moments because a large fish is flopping around in the middle of the bay and I’m wondering what that is all about. Oh well, I have my own problems).
Anyway, I use to hide Peanuts under my blankets just in case my mother would come up the stairs to check me out. Supposedly, Peanuts, who weighed maybe 40 pounds, was not to be with us at night. She had her own little nest in a wicker chair in the downstairs dining room (visitors would often attempt to sit in that chair before my father would admonish them that it was Peanuts’ chair and they would quickly back off. There was some royalty here after all that was reserved for Peanuts).
When I was talking to my brother Ronnie the other day I began to chuckle when it came to the Peanuts’ story. I remember that Mom used to holler up the stairs and ask if Peanuts was up there. But I don’t ever remember her making the trip up the stairs to find out for herself.
And, our answer to her was always no, Peanuts is not up here. Even though she always was. And I started chuckling because it sudden dawned on me that Mom must have known Peanuts was up there with us. She knew but she probably didn’t want to hear us say she was up there because then it would be breaking a house rule. So as long as we denied she was there, things were cool with mom.
Weird, isn’t it. But it’s a fond memory. And Peanuts loved snuggling up to me, and me to her. During the baseball season we both could listen to Cleveland Indians’ games on our upright Zenith Radio, with the light from the radio tubes casting a small but comfortable light in the darkness. Those tubes were like a security blanket and the radio voices of Cleveland broadcasters like Van Patrick and Tris Speaker added comfort.
I also used to listen to fight night on the Zenith, including some of Joe Louis’ bouts (distracted for the second time as my friend, the bald eagle, just flew again by my window. He’s big and beautiful. Hope things are okay with him).
The other memory that the flu has pushed to the front is the window in the upper garage level at the house. I know that doesn’t’ seem important enough to remember, but believe me it was.
I slept next to a window that was almost on the same level as the roof over our back sun porch. You could roll out that window onto the roof and maybe 15 feet past the window the roof stopped just a little short of that window, which had no glass and thus was always open.
That garage window became an escape to freedom. My brothers, being older, were the first to discover the joy of having that escape route, especially during New York summers when the humidity made sleeping almost unbearable.
Mom would, as was her wont, make sure her children were safely in bed and then she could relax. What she didn’t know – although now I suspect she might have – is that her blood would if they desired escape by going out on the roof and leaping from the edge of the roof into that open window.
The only downside of this leap is that if you missed you fell to the concrete patio below and if you didn’t die from that you would have been lucky.
So my brothers perfected that leap without incident and pretty much came and went as they wished, doing a reverse leap back through the window to the roof when they returned.
My memory this morning as I lay in bed was a bit amusing and a bit scary. I remember going out on the roof and looking at the gap I needed to traverse to make it safely into the window, and then into freedom.
Being five or six years old at the time, it looked to me like a death-defying trick that you only see in a Ringling Brothers’ circus. I know I walked out on the roof dozens of time just to get the feel for it, and to find the courage.
Finally, one night I made my escape. I summoned up all my courage and made the leap and made it through the window. As I dusted myself off, I thought to myself, that wasn’t so bad. It became much easier after that and as far as I know mom never knew her youngest son was on the loose into the summer night and not tucked safely in his bed. As I recall I got Peanuts to follow me with her own leap into the window. And I helped her make the reverse leap when we wanted to go to bed.
My mother died when I was 12 and a year later my father remarried and we moved to Ferndale, WA. That, as I said many times before, started my dark years. It was like closing one good book and opening another book that was full of disappointment and emotional instability. So it was good that the memories that have come flooding back with this flu devil were beautiful and very comforting.
And somewhere Peanuts, who died in 1956, is smiling, too.
The fish and the bald eagle are gone and now so am I. I hope the New Year finds you well and that life is good.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.