Sample Pages: Vogel Flies South (page 3 of 3)
motorcycles and I wondered about the men who were at the head of the column. What were they like?
When I was not watching television with my mother, I would play with my toy soldiers. I had hundreds until I reached high school. I collected them. Even now, I cannot pass on an antique store without checking to see if any other army is represented, an army that I did not have. Initially, my war games were unsophisticated. As I grew older, I studied history so that I could recreate battles, in whole or in part.
When we lived in the garage apartment, my mother built a sand box underneath the stairs. My father installed a pulley system so that my mother could lower toys to me. I would call out on Saturdays for my mother to lower more soldiers or I would send back my World War II soldiers to be exchanged for cowboys and Indians. I was a purist in my occupation of war. Some children would have cowboys struggle with German soldiers, but not me. I rigidly kept the armies together. Only rarely would an Arab fight a German, and then I thought that I could somehow reconcile the situation. Surely, Rommel's army must have run afoul of the Arabs.
My mother was beautiful. She worked during the day at the newspaper office. It was rare for a white woman in the '50s to work outside the home in my hometown, and it was difficult for my mother. She was a shy person. She didn't like doing things alone. It must have been an ordeal for her to catch the bus every morning and make the trek to the newspaper office. Because she worked for the paper, I became a minor celebrity. Whenever the paper needed a picture of a kid doing something, I got the job. I appeared mailing a letter to Santa Claus. I stood on the street corner welcoming visitors to the rose festival; I stood in front of the school in September, a harbinger of the new school year. Even later when I became buck-toothed and overweight during puberty, they took my picture.
My mother was a victim of her father, who was an overbearing man, who ruled his wife and children like a potentate. He was tall and thin, shaved his head, and wore wire rim glasses. Mean though he was, he was not unattrractive. He was an inventor and he created several things that advanced the plumbing business. He was funny, a man who told long, involved stories that were full of wit, and he was a hunter, Faulknerian in fact. There were times in college when I would sit and read Faulkner in attempt to escape a course that I didn't like; and as I read, I would imagine my grandfather and his cronies.