And There I Stood with My Piccolo

22

22. WHEN I LEFT MASON CITY I SURE thought everybody would be different, and it gradually has come over me through the years that they aren't different at all. Too bad young ones don't believe that and have to find out for themselves . They'd just be that much smarter sooner. I thought my folks invented that falsetto "yoohoo " out the back door at mealtime, but twenty years later I find out that mothers "yoo-hoo" for their kids all over the world. Another thing. When you get to be my ageyou wish you'd been nicer to your folks. My father was always ready with the twenty-five cents a week spending money for my brother and me, and fifty cents extra every now and then for baseball games and special things like the fair, so why did we have to pull nasty little tricks on him besides? Like asking him for a nickel every time he'd be talking with a neighbor out in the front yard. We knew he'd always be kind of embarrassed to refuse in front of 154 people, so usually we'd get away with it. Well, we didn't invent that either. That seems to be an instinctive little hunk of blackmail procedure, common to the kids of every generation. There are some things, though, that you expect to be the same all over the world and that turn out different; simple things like the drumbeat in the parade. Did you ever stop to realize that the American basic drumbeat we use for our parade rhythms isn't heard in any other country? I mean that old bass drumbeat: Boom Boom Boom boom boom Every country has its own basic parade beat, and most of them don't even remotely resemble ours. Then there is the matter of the rooster. I suppose you think that children all over the world say "cock-a-doodle-do." Well, if you don't think so, you are pretty smart because the Russian kids saw "koo-ka reh-koooo," Spanish kids say "ki-kirikiii ," the Dutch kids say "ku-kele-ku," the French kids say "co-co-ri-co," the little native kids from Africa say "ri-ki-ri-ki-ri-ki." And almost every place when they sing about a big bell it's always "ding-dong," the same as 155 here, but a little bell is something else again. We say "ting-a-ling," in Mexico they say "tilintilin ," and in Russia they say "deen-deen-deen." But for the most part, as I started to say, kids and their folks are pretty much the same all over the world. Abe Meyer's mama in Flushing and my mama in Mason City—both probably had the same way of holding the pillow under their chin when they wanted to put on the clean pillow slip. They both probably looked through the bookcase with the same anxiety every time a neighbor kid had a birthday party, looking to find a book that was almost new, so you'd have a present to take. And probably both, with their patient fingers, tried to erase the peanut-butter stains or the herring stains from the pages, and to cut a new jacket for this book out of some shiny paper tucked away in the sideboard. "It's just the thing!" she would say in Flushing or Mason City, trying to reassure you that your gift wouldn't be shoddy at all but gleaming and special. And I guess everybody goes through the growing -up period where his vocabulary changes, and he's ashamed of his folks because they say yard for lawn and sofa for chesterfield and supper instead of dinner, sociable for charming, picture show for theater. The first time I came home after living in New York I probably said things like "Rivahside 156 Drive," "Plahza Hotel," and "I mean to say" before and after every remark. And I can hear my friend Abe, after his first trip to the Golden West, rushing into his Flushing parlor and slapping his mom on the back with a hearty "Hi ho thar, podner, whadaya got fer chow?" But Long Island or Iowa, we never looked foolish to Mama. 157 ...