WHILE I WAS WAITING FOR A TAXICAB in the Pasadena railroad station (Hollywood doesn't have a railroad station—doesn't even have a railroad) I met a small girl who said she'd never be able to leave home on account of she lived in the middle of an orange grove, and if she ever moved away she'd be homesick for the sound of the orange blossoms falling in the night. I thought that was a pretty poetic remark. A large hunk of the Hollywood glamour group, by the way, goes through Pasadena for another reason than the railroad station—in order to get to the race track at Santa Anita. But somehow Pasadenians are just simply invulnerable to that fancy Hollywood star dust, which doesn't seem to brush off onto them at all. They are just as natural and unaffected as a crock of beans at a church social. A crock of beans at a church social. A thought like that can sure juicy-up your memory, can't it? 121 118 Like Von Weber, the great composer, who couldn't write for sour apples until he went over to the piano and hit D and F sharp. Then hewas a ball of fire. Well, I want to tell you that crock of beans has D-and-F-sharped me right back to Mason City again, and California will have to wait, because I'm on my way down-cellar to sprout the potatoes, or to get a jar of ground cherries, or to bust up some ice in the gunny sack with the ax to make ice cream. Just smell that stone-cool cellar smell. It smelled even cooler on rainy Saturday afternoons when the wash had to be hung out in the "laundry." Later on, after helping with the wringer and all, provided we were careful with the lace doilies, Mama'd let us get out the buffalo robe and throw it down on the sitting-room floor. I never knew then that those lace things were called "doilies," though. In fact, somehow or other I left Mason City believing that doily was kind of a dirty word. In fact, I guess the only reason I brought it up now was because I get sort of a vicarious thrill using it so freely—doily doily doily. Anyway, we loved to scramble around on the buffalo robe and invent things with our Meccano set and rubber bands and marbles and the wooden fire engine with the big heavy momentum wheel in its bottom. We didn't have any jigsaw puzzles then, but there was a puzzle with big honest 122 [44.211.28.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:24 GMT) pieces that made a picture of a river steamboat when we put it together. Never got tired of doing it over and over. The blue sky was the hardest part, and the rail around the boat and the paddle wheel were the easiest. Like doily, "powerhouse" always had a self-conscious significance, but there was a reason for that on account of the boys' toilet was in the powerhouse at school. "Miss Wallacer, can I go to the powerhouse?" So even at home, going to the bathroom was, "Have to go to the powerhouse." I wonder if kids still get coupons at the bookstore for secondhand books. What a racket we used to put over on Papa every single summer. We'd take all the schoolbooks we could find and get coupons for them and trade these coupons for hard rubber balls or slingshot rubbers or "glassies" or "steelies" or "pig turds." (I can see Miss Remley now, patiently standing behind the marbles counter saying, "Now let's see, you wanted—uh—ten of the peewees, that one large glassie, six snotagates , and three of the pig turds." I'm only telling you what everybody called the different kinds of marbles and I'm not mistaken. I remember distinctly .) We'd get all that stuff instead of the books for next term. Then in the fall Papa would have to cough up for books all over again. Why don't parents drown their kids? Roger Glanville was a little older than the other 123 kids on our block, but never mind age—he just had a natural talent for organizing. When I think of Rog, even now, I think of him sprawling on a rich diamond-and-ruby-studded throne, being transported from...