Not A Little Angel

Not A Little Angel

After our summer in Blowing Rock, N.C. we moved back in with Aunt Eliza and Uncle Bing.  Mom reopened the Jack and Jill Playschool and I went back to my original elementary school about two blocks away.  The artistic pilgrimage mom took for that year must have satisfied her inner being for now.  She seemed to settle back to normal, well as normal as possible for mom. There was a lot of tension between mom and Aunt Eliza, but they seemed to solve it by avoiding each other all the time. Not an easy thing for them to do when they live in the same house.

That was the summer I learned about the joys of capitalism and about the mystique of girls. I guess I was about eleven years old.  I started my capitalistic career by doing yard work for people in the neighborhood after school at a very reasonable price.  When I had enough money saved from these odd jobs, I invested in my very own used lawn mower from a guy down the street for twelve dollars. I got it running and then started my lawn mowing business.  It took me a while to acquire eight yards to mow each week that summer. Most of these yards belonged to elderly neighbors. I got my customers by going door to door and charging about half of what they had been paying to adult yardmen and I did a better job by providing personal and extra service.

I mowed these lawns every other week or so after school in the spring and fall. I worked full time in the summer months for an average of five dollars a yard.  Forty dollars a week back then, for a kid my age, was very good money. Mowing yards was great. I felt like I had been doing it all my life. I found a picture of me when I was two years old with a push lawn mower. Maybe it was my destiny.

 How much money I made by mowing lawns I kept secret from the rest of my family.  They were on a need to know basis.  Nobody in the family ever kept tabs on me anyway, so it was easy to have a secret. During the summer I would leave home early in the morning and not come home until after dark.  No one ever asked where I had been or what I was doing.

I discovering that I liked girls one afternoon that summer. I was on my way home after mowing a couple of yards, when I ran into two older girls from my elementary school. I could tell that they were far wiser than I was.  They were very pretty and I was impressed, because they were both smoking cigarettes.  I thought that was very cool. They actually stopped and started a conversation with me.  That had never happened before. One of the girls was holding a book of matches and had a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “Do you want to see a magic trick”, she said.  I said “Sure, I like magic.” She said, “I will bet you a quarter that I can use my magic ability to make a match burn twice”...

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