Dennis: “Oh but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
King Arthur: “SHUT UP!”
Dennis: “Oh but if I went ’round sayin’ I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!” — Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Following the Ice Wagon
by J. Hamilton
In Norman, Oklahoma, after the war, we lived in Hillcrest Courts while my parents studied to graduate from the university. Hillcrest Courts was a government wartime housing neighborhood composed of barracks-like structures sliced like sausage into six apartments. The apartment buildings themselves were arranged like the petals of a daisy around a circular drive that enclosed the carpel of the flower and also overflowed with apartment houses.
We had an apartment at the outer end of our building next to a fallow field. From my high wooden porch I could look straight at Owen Field and the university beyond. The neighborhood teemed with children, and I played with them without really knowing them or understanding any more from the experience than the exuberance of life.
The adults talked over my head, but I had developed the pattern of pretending to be playing while listening. It required quite an effort for me to understand, because I knew nothing of what they talked about. I could read emotion unfailingly, but their subjects required thought, a searching, and the accumulated knowledge of later years to understand. One subject late that summer was Dewey and Truman. I could tell they were deciding.
Mostly, though, I played in and mused upon the world while I experienced nature in the Wordsworthian sense. Twice a week two brawny men with large, hairy forearms drove a dripping, loaded ice wagon to Hillcrest Courts to replenish our Coolerator ice boxes. The man who carried the ice to the apartments was called a striker. He used sharp-pointed ice tongs to sling an ice block onto a leather apron falling down his back. I often saw the iceman when he came into our apartment with the glistening ice block, and would follow him when he returned to the wagon.
Children gathered an allowed distance behind the wagon — our hardened feet padding on the pebbled gravel, and we jumped up and down with excitement as the driver whistled the horses to begin their slow pull to the next stop. We rushed the back of the wagon and plucked ice slivers from the wagon bed, and continued to do so until the ice wagon left the neighborhood. The rounded gravel under our feet, the hot August day, the cold ice slivers, the excited, squealing children — I have few memories as delightful as that.
My parents lived in a different world. They had to master marriage, two children, their courses at the university, planning for what appeared to be a bright future, politics, and surviving on the GI bill — which wasn’t easy as I could tell from hushed conversations between them, and the fact that breakfast was always oatmeal, and mother cooked liver twice a week.
One day, after more private and grim conversation, father picked up mother’s portable electric sewing machine and carried it down the lane and out of sight. I watched from the front porch as he put it down and picked it up, because it was heavy and cumbersome. He finally disappeared from sight.
I asked later where he took it, and he replied the pawn shop. I asked what was a pawn shop? He said it was a place that gave money for goods. After a while, the sewing machine reappeared and never disappeared again.
Later that winter — after Truman beat Dewey — I heard mother exclaim: “You know what happened? Millions of people just like me went to the polls intending to vote for Dewey and somewhere along the way we changed our minds and voted for Truman.”
It took me years to figure out what she meant. At the time, I only longed for summer when I would again follow the ice wagon and greedily stuff ice chips into my mouth under the unrelenting sun.
Header image by mudeth used under this Creative Commons license
