Free Milking the Moon by Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark Page A

good parts happened in French. When the going got really good, it was in French, not English. So I knew one day I had to learn that language and find out all I’d been missing.
    Children played hide-and-seek, and those were the sounds you heard for blocks around at twilight. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Coming, ready or not!” Then you’d hear these giggles as people were found. We also played statues, where somebody puts their head against a tree and says, “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, stop,” while the rest are running around. When you hear “stop,” you have to stop and be a statue. The one who was counting gets to choose who is the best statue. Then that person gets to do the counting and all of us have to run around again and be a statue when we hear “stop.”
    On special nights the children from several houses would get together and play steamboat. Steamboats were when you took an old shoebox and first cut out crescent moons or star shapes or flower shapes. Then you lined the box with scraps of colored tissue paper that came from candies or oranges. Then you filled the shoebox halfway with sand or ashes and you had two little vigil lights from the church and a long string attached to the front, and you’d go up and down the sidewalk pulling your steamboat. The procession of steamboats would be one block long, going up-and downriver. And you’d be saying, “Toot-toot! Ding-ding! King’s Landing! Demopolis!” And it was a pretty sight, those little illuminated colored boxes moving along. Playing steamboat. You didn’t do it every night. You’d sort of check with the other children: “Are we going to do steamboats tonight?”
    The other thing children did was the penny poppy show. You saved odd things, like an unusual wine cork which came out of a bottle of port from a Portuguese ship, say. Or you saved a lizard skull that had been found somewhere. You saved a piece of colored glass. You saved a broken mother-of-pearl comb. And you would dig a little hole which you lined with either broken mirror or tinfoil. Then you arranged all your unusual things in that. You covered it with a piece of wood or a piece of cardboard or maybe some banana leaves. Somebody had to pay, either two banana caramels, or one penny, and you’d let them see your penny poppy show, just for a minute. You’d pop it open and pop it shut. For a penny or two banana caramels. That’s a penny poppy show.
    I remember once, somebody in the neighborhood had put a used condom in one. She didn’t know what it was. She had found it in the shrubbery near the Baptist church. And she didn’t know what it was. This was a little girl who always had fresh roses in her penny poppy show and dolls and antique mirrors. And then a used condom. She’d washed it and had it lying out. Of course, the little boys knew what it was, and she was about to burst into tears because she thought we were laughing at her penny poppy show.
    Most people went in around ten-thirty. If it was really hot, the men would stay out forever. They’d be drinking juleps, or there was a drink called Cuba libre—very fashionable during the twenties and thirties—which was Coca-Cola with dark rum in it, about half and half. Very cold. Coca-Cola then was not sweet, and it was said to have a pinch of real cocaine in it. It did give you a lift in a hot climate, on a hot August day. It was called “the pause that refreshes”—that was the ad—and it was. Everybody at around ten in the morning, and in midafternoon when they woke from their nap, wanted a Coca-Cola. The more old-fashioned wanted iced coffee with a slug of black rum in it, but most people wanted Coca-Cola because it really gave you a lift. After all, it was a chemist in Atlanta who invented it, boiled it up in his backyard. A Southern drink for a Southern climate. So the men would stay out on the front porch, rocking and talking and sipping their Cuba