Kid Games 1951

 

PoBoy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Fair Play

Or

Time Out

“A. A my name is Alice and my husband’s name is Al; we come from Alabama and we sell Apples! B. B my name is…..” A kid’s ball bouncing game.

        There’s a certain playing ball made by Spalding Company, it’s called the Spalding High Bounce; it looks like a pink bald tennis ball and its bouncing ability is legendary. It’s used primarily by city kids for street games such as stick ball, stoop ball, throwing, catching, hand ball and bouncing ball games like the one mentioned above where the ball is bounced in cadence time and at every capital letter word (“A my name is Alice…”) has to be bounced under the leg until the entire alphabet is sing-songed to its end. Get it? There’s usually only one or two Spaldings to any group of kids so that if a miss occurs the ball is passed to another kid to try to get further, beginning all over again (“A my name is Alice...”).

        Back in the day when mothers were between their husbands coming back from WWII and sons going off to Korea, we as kids played in the streets and courtyards under their watchful eyes while they sat smoking cigarettes and gossiped with each other: “Marcia! Get down from there before I hafta get up from here!”---“Tommy! You better learn to pick on somebody your own size before I tell your father!”

        Girls played with Jacks and jump ropes; boys collected baseball cards, played with tops, yoyos, and anything that resembled mock weaponry. Some played with marbles; others pitched pennies against the wall. We sat on stoops and played card games while the older kids congregated in parks playing older teen games (softball, basketball and showing off).

        Card games by the dozen: War; Old Maid; Casino; Slap-n-Match; Knuckles and the infamous ‘Fifty-two-Pick-Up’. Roller skates were these metal things that strapped to your ankle and were held vice-like on the front of your shoes, tightened by a ‘skate key’; if a skate went missing it was probably because some boy nailed it to a 2x4 to make a scooter of sorts. Pea shooters, sling shots, spit balls and carpet guns rained on the unsuspecting. Chalk games like hop scotch and Skellies; ask your grandparents.

        Choosing sides by throwing finger signals or Rochambeau or ‘one potato-two potato’. Hide and seek; Red Rover-Red Rover; Red Light-Green light; Ringolevio or the dozen kids long ‘Rattlesnake’. There were summertime swimming pools and beach outings. Minimum wage was a dollar an hour. “A my name is Alice…”

        There were playgrounds that we could go to on school-less days with burning metal slides, swings with wooden seats that you could stand on, see-saws that were used as whip lash testing, monkey bars that you could either fall from and break a bone or surreptitiously get a glimpse of Molly’s underwear and that round merry thing where you ran around it to get it going real fast before jumping on for a ride or falling on your face in real gravel. We went home tired, dirty, bruised and happy.

        Mothers called kids in for supper and let them stay out until street lamps came on. Our parents were beer and whiskey drinkers; filter-less cigarette smokers and physical punishment was swift and brutal. Bigger kids stuck up for smaller ones and smaller ones emulated the bigger ones; I got caught smoking when I was eight years old (Mom made me eat a cigarette). It was a rite of passage when someone took you aside to show you how to stick up for yourself by using your fists. You never hit a girl or someone wearing glasses.

        This was the projects; the welfare checks came on the first of the month; few had televisions, but everyone had a radio; you got your phone calls at a neighbor who was lucky enough to get a phone installed; you could smell what everyone was having for dinner in the building’s halls; you knew their music. Gas was .23 a gallon; nobody had a car.

        Food was coin of the realm and as long as your parents had breath in their bodies, you had food on your table. Dinner time was mandatory and at a precise hour. All kids had chores to make it happen: going to the stores; helping with the dinner prep; setting and clearing the table; washing (and drying) the dishes; taking out the trash.

        Kids collected soda bottles for refunds and spent the money on penny candy. Keeping up with the newspaper funnies was de rigueur. Girls taught each other how to dance and then taught their brothers how to lead. There was this new music that kids listened to on transistor radios; the music was called Rock and Roll (which was originally a euphemism for having sex).

        On Saturdays our parents would send us to the movies and it took years to figure out that that was the only time they could get some privacy. Everyone went to church on Sunday and holidays were sacrosanct. We dressed up for Easter; were smug about our school supplies, showed off our Christmas haul and danced in the streets to marching bands. There were no ‘only childs’; everybody had brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents somewhere, and besides them, you had neighbors. Folks were always dropping by or gathering in groups.  Mothers hung out windows watching the world go by; you couldn’t get into mischief unseen. Pops would be home soon from work.

        Growing up in an inner city, you’re are a tribe unto yourselves; the economy is someone else’s concern; there’s rich folk, the ones who make it to the suburbs and you. Poor but proud and gonna be somebody some day. “A my name is Alice…”

       

       

 

Poetry 2024

 

PoBoy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Words

Or

Feelings

        “Anytime is sometimes sometimes. Sometimes is sometimes anytime. Sometimes is always sometimes. But only anytime is always sometimes And Eddie time is all the time”:  Eddie Tebbe (Sir Bone Funk)

 

        That is poetry. Poetry inspires feelings, patience and verbal skills; poetry asks/teaches us to make sense of words; poetry invites us to listen and learn. Poetry will speak to us if we listen; it will resonate and amaze. “We’ve all walked into the bar of a joke we’ll never get” begins a poem by Dobby Gibson.

         “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold; the Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.” Is the beginning of a poetic tale by Robert W. Service, who began another with “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon” that’s the stuff that resonates and amazes a reader.

        You could say that the reading of poetry is coming back with somewhere between 20-25% of the population reading it…(Quora) or you can say it has never gone away; that poetry has always been with us or that poetry is stuff that other people read and why they appreciate it is a mystery. After all, poets kill themselves don’t they? Nobody knows why, just that a large bunch do.

        Poetrysoup.com will list  of the top 100 most popular and best famous poets who committed suicide if you care to read some less than relative to your life information; they’re (poets) a weird bunch and who knows what the heck goes on in their mind/lives to want to express their thoughts/feelings only to have no other recourse but to end their lives for their own reasons which nobody knew because we were busy trying to find some obscure meanings, justifications and possibly lessons that in some fever had them put thoughts on paper for the world to ponder. I wonder if Elizabeth Bishop’s brain aneurism wasn’t some kind of force of nature euthanasia.

        Some of your favorite songs are merely poetry put to music; some pieces of music are merely pure poetry. Poetry has rhythmic qualities of a myriad of forms from limericks to sonnets; Hallmark cards to Haikus; little ditties to profound empirical discourses; odes to enjambment. Oddly enough, you don’t spy many folks carrying a book of poetry with them as they make their daily rounds; in fact, oddly enough, you rarely see anyone carrying books of any kind as they make their daily rounds (kindle excluded). You will occasionally spy a newspaper reader, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here (bless them anyway). I personally think that carrying a book of poetry around with you would be a pretty cool thing to do (although I haven’t done that …yet).

        Rarely do I hear anyone start a conversation with “as Garcia Lorca (or Pablo Neruda, Silvia Plath, Emily Dickenson and/or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) would say….”; however, start someone off with “there once was a man from Nantucket…” and off you’ll go on a whimsical train of thought. Not exactly Proustian existentialism, but, what the hey.

        Begin a conversation with something by John Prine, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan and people’ll match you old school lyrics word for word; more recently try a little Jay Z, Alicia Keys or John Legend. Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass, Mary J. Blige, all poets. Locally, and, true dat, who can deny, Doctor John, Allen Toussaint and Little Queenie Harris were all poets extraordinaire?

        New Orleans has forever been a poet’s dream cave to mine, a Gold Mine, so to speak. Justin Lamb, Sunni Patterson, FreeQuency, Skye Jackson, Gina Ferrara and Brad Richard are here. There is a New Orleans Poetry Festival every year; ten years running. There are poetry jams going on in New Orleans, ten different (at least) locations around the city. If you’re interested, you will find them. Why go watch poets expound their thoughts? I don’t know, but somehow it’s a pretty cool thing to do; who knows who you’ll meet and maybe hook up with on an intellectual mammalian level?

        What are poems about? In The Daily Feast, Bart Schneider writes poems about sunny side up eggs, dirty martinis and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Raych Jackson wrote: A Sestina For A Black Girl Who Does Not Know How To Braid Hair (a sestina is an intricate thirty-nine line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end words in six stanzas). A verse pattern split into two 7/4 measures and a single bar of 8/4 followed by a one bar of 7/4 is quite evident in John Lennon’s song All You Need Is Love.

        In short, in conclusion and in the end as we know it, we are all poets and writers; we all have the ability to write something down that will be considered poetic if only we are able to use words to express ourselves. Simple. You look, you feel, you imagine and you articulate.

        Face it, you might not be able to write poetry starting: “I think that I shall never hear a poem as lovely as a beer” or “By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water…” but you could write something; like I just did:                  EARLY MORNING VILLERE STREET

“The woman crosses the busy street

to the dead grass school yard

hair the color of new blossomed gardenias.

 cawing for crows that swoop catching peanuts

 flung like wishes from dandelion

school busses and garbage trucks

rumbling like rabid prehistoric behemoths.

The air still on humid southern mornings hanging

as blanket on the city that they call The Big Easy.

 Clouds like cotton candy indifferent to it all

the woman finds peace in the caring.”

Try it