Last night we decided to out for steak.  Spring is still hesitant, and the weather was damp and chilly.  At the end of our street was a girl on her way to prom, making her way down a long driveway to the waiting car.  Her dress was light green, sleeveless, and low cut.  And she looked absolutely miserable as she shivered through the drizzle.  Topeka has three great roadhouses for steak, but they're all at least a twenty-minute drive from our house, so we settled on Longhorn, which is only so-so, but is close.  I managed to eat most of my meal except for the sweet potato tots, which were cloyingly sweet.  All seemed well until 1:20 a.m. when I had maybe ten seconds to get from the bed to the bath.  So much for a simple meal of salad, potatoes, and meat.

I was thinking some more about Story City, my hometown.  It has a good name for an English teacher, though, originally named Fairview, it was actually renamed after Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, not for its narrative tendencies.  I loved growing up there.  Between school, church, and scout activities, there was always something to do.  Six nights a week were scheduled with activites for most of us, and when the town is about six block by six blocks, no one needs a parent to chauffeur him.  That we had our own library and movie theater made it even better.  My parents and I lived with my grandma, whose house had a double lot.  On summer evenings it was a great spot for games of capture the flag or touch football or, when we were younger, hide and seek.  There was another vacant lot a block away with wild strawberries and wonderful trees for climbing. 

Still, as the last blog suggested, all was not Edenic.  In my class, as well as the one a year ahead, there was the girl who suddenly disappeared to go "stay with her aunt for several months."  In the older class, the girl was pretty and perhaps too popular.  In my class, she was plain and a little "slow."  There was nothing uncommon about this; it seemed to happen every year.  My best friend, Kathy, had a prolonged visit every summer from her "cousin."  Everyone in town, except Kathy, seemed to know that the cousin was really her half-sister from her mother's earlier indiscretion.  I don't know whether there had been a period of shame, but by the time I remember, the mother was a pillar of the Lutheran church. 

There were 33 in my high school graduating class--22 boys and 11 girls.  The class had been remarkably stable for the entire time I was in school.  Perhaps 27 or 28 of us had been together since kindergarten.  Yet there were some anomalies: three of the 22 guys turned out to be gay.  And within a year of graduation, three of the 22 were dead.  Two were killed in a car accident, where, I assume, drinking was involved.  Another, so the story went, was twirling a pistol like a Western hero, not knowing that it was loaded.  His finger accidentally hit the trigger.  Some things were hard to know for sure; gossip was the unvarying bitcoin of the community, but how reliable it was was uncertain and what the adults let slip before us children was unpredictable.  When I was very young, the adults would slip into Norwegian when they didn't want us to understand but as the first generation immigrants didn't teach their children the mother language, this strategy didn't last long.

Racy Peters and her family were outsiders.  They arrived in maybe my sophomore year and bought a big and presumably expensive (by small town standards) house on the southern edge of town.  No one knew what the father did; he didn't work in Story City.  Rumor had it that they were wealthy and "artsy" (i.e., rather strange).  No one welcomed them, and they made little effort to fit in.  On the other side of town (not that the two sides were that far apart) lived the Munsens in perhaps the biggest house in town, set high on a hill, overlooking the park and school.  Although they were good Norwegians and long-time residents, they didn't exactly fit in either.  Dick Munsen ran the local Chevy dealership, and they seemed to have more money than the rest of the townspeople.  They were considered "uppity."  Their daughter Sylvia (who named a child Sylvia?) played the cello and went to Ames to play in an orchestra, while the rest of us played trumpets and clarinets (and in my case the baritone) and were in the band.  When Sylvia went to Brazil and became a member of the Brazilian National Sympathy (and married a Brazilian!), that was further proof of the family's oddity rather than an object of pride.

Despite the talk, Dick Munsen was extremely kind to my father, who always had a difficult time holding a job.  He usually worked as a car parts salesman in garages in Ames, about ten miles away.  But something always went wrong, and he moved from one garage to the next until there were no more to choose from.  I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that one year he was the janitor at my school--just what every kid wants: his father in the school's hallways.  But children made my father nervous, and that job didn't last long either.  Dick hired my father, protected him and his difficult personality, paid him the best salary he had ever earned, and made sure that he had health insurance.  I don't know whether people gossiped about that but it was a boon to our family.

In retrospect, Story City may have been more Winesburg, Ohio, than BeaverCleaverville, but at the time, I loved my childhood and the easy living of a small town.  Of course, when I was 17, I left town for good, ready for a different sort of life and different kinds of adventures.