Living on Patton Street

When Jan and I were little, in the early 1950s we had visitors to our home every day. There was the bread man who came in his white truck with the big arrow on top, the milkman, the mailman, and the insurance man.

Janet and I would wait out on the front porch on our second floor apartment for these guys to show up. This was before the green aluminum siding went up, so the porch still had a white wooden railing and post. We'd lie down on the floor so that the man wouldn't see us-or at least that's what we thought, giggling and they'd say hello to us. They were all nice guys. When they had delivered the white glass milk bottles, or the bread, or whatever, we'd yell after them "What those swinging doors!" It was a saying from one of Red Skelton's sketches on his TV show.

The insurance guy was different. Remember, this was way back when nobody locked their doors, and the world was friendly. He'd simply walk in and come up the stairs and go straight to the "lowboy" which was actually a buffet, open the drawer and pull out the monthly payment slip booklet. Mom would give him a check and off he'd go. He was another happy and kind guy.

In our dining room we had a table and chairs, a highboy and a lowboy. The highboy was a china closet. I'm pretty sure this came from my mother's Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors. Closets were cupboards (pronounced "cubberts." ) There were a lot of ethnic sayings in our life, back before television smoothed out the American English Language and made us all talk pretty much the same. And with a Scottish grandmother and a PA Dutch grandmother, we had a hodgepodge of saying and names for stuff.

When we were bad, Mommy would point her index finger at us and stroke the index finger of her other hand toward us and say "Heees, Heees." This meant that we should be ashamed of ourselves. German thing, from Mommy's maternal grandmother, Alice Luella Trythall Royer, I'm pretty sure. When my Scottish grandmother was not feeling well, she'd say she was "off her feed." And things that cost a lot of money were "too dear." People weren't funny, they were "comical."

And, although American English says that the properEnglish term is Scottish, she was SCOTCH.

My mom swore like a sailor. Her whole family did. When she was angry at someone. not the kids. she'd say "She can go shit in her hat and pull it over her head." And she said "god damn it" a LOT, And Hell, and all those words we as little kids knew were not things we should ever say. We never thought it was a double standard or anything. Those were just words only adults coud say.

One day, when my grandparents were up at our apartment for dinner (The Scottish grandmother who never swore...) Janet and I were trying out some of Mom's favorite swear words. She quickly took us into the living room in front of the fireplace and sat us down. She said, "You can say all those bad words you want, but never, NEVER say PHOOEY. Which was great reverse psychology. That's all we said from then on.

The "F" word was not in my parent's vocabulary. When I was a teenager I used the F word, and my mother's hand came out of nowhere and slapped me in the face. She told me that she NEVER wanted to hear that word again. And she never did. To this day, it's not in my conversational toolkit. I guess reverse psychology only works on little kids, huh?