FastCounter by bCentral
CHAPTER 3
When I was in the third grade, I lived just across the railroad
tracks in Winter Garden Florida. I’ll call it "the wrong side of the
tracks" because my grandparents lived on the other side of the tracks,
albeit several blocks from them. We were poor at this time. Actually, we were
poor most of my life. Even more actually, I’m poor now. But that’s
later in the story.
Our house was infested with rats. If you went into the kitchen in
the middle of the night for a glass of water, the rats would be sitting on the
table. If you opened a cabinet door, the rats would scurry away. They never
charged us, but we never declared war on them either. We had kind of a mutual
respect.
The tracks split the town right down the middle of Plant Street.
Plant street had all the buildings that make a town a town—the Ben Franklin
Five and Dime, the First National Bank, the theater, and the hardware store
were all on the south side of the tracks. City hall, the police station, the
hotel, the post office, a tavern, and the First Baptist Church were all on the
north side of the tracks. The railroad depot was smack dab in the middle of
the street. It was about 50 years old at that time.
There were some mornings when I was heading out the door to go to
Winter Garden Elementary, which was about four blocks west of my house and six
blocks south, that a slow-moving train would be moving through town. It went
so slow through town that I could walk at the same pace as the train.
Several times, I would have to wait for the train as it stopped
and dropped the mail off at the depot. Eventually, I got impatient and crossed
the train between cars—a dangerous move at best. If it should ever lurch
while I was on the ground between the cars, I certainly would have been injured.
Sometimes, if the caboose was near, I would wait for it to pass, cross the tracks
and walk alongside the caboose. One day, the brakeman told me to step up onto
the platform at the back of the caboose and ride along. I did, and thus was
created a ritual that lasted until I moved up to the fourth grade and a pattern
that would resurface when I started high school. The brakeman was a nice man.
An older fellow who took a liking to me as companionship for those eternally
long four blocks.
I had a friend that lived across the street and two houses down.
I don’t remember his name, or his sister’s, but we played army with
little plastic soldiers every chance we had. We would set up our battalions
and then stand behind our forces and throw rocks at our opponents. Last plastic
soldier standing was the winner.
One day, we were setting up our soldiers and I was feeling particularly
patriotic and singing "America the Beautiful." I had been told by
my teacher that I had a very good voice and was quite proud of it. I was learning
new songs and "America the Beautiful" was my most recent. I had just
finished the song with a rousing "...from sea to shining sea!" and
my friend’s sister, who was older than us boys, walked right up to me,
stared me in the face and said, "You sing like a girl."
I didn’t recover from that until I was a teenager.