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

libres.
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    I come from a vanished world of big dinners at high noon, afternoon naps, suppers at twilight, and long evenings of hide-and-seek and rocking on the front porch. It was a different world. I can never remember being bored. I never knew what boredom meant until I had my first office job in New York City. In Mobile, it seemed to me that everything was so exciting. A thousand details to consider. A thousand details. And everybody was so busy, they didn’t have time to quarrel or feud. They might frown and snap at each other, but that was the end of it. There were no hours of solemn crankiness. That’s a recent thing. Everybody had their tasks to keep the whole show going. So nobody had time to have their liver irritated by concealed frustrations. Everybody had their little tasks, and everybody contributed. It was understood. Everybody instinctively took up their tasks, so they could sit around on the front porch and giggle in the evenings. No radio. No television. Not much traffic. So the minuet of daily life was a rhythmic thing. You did the same thing every day at the same time.
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    Now this was not a fixed, Yankee, do-or-die schedule. If anything out of the ordinary happened—STOP—and consider it. Southerners will stop everything, but everything , even a war, to hear a funny story or a juicy bit of scandal. And of course, if there was going to be a parade, everything stopped and everyone rushed to Government Street to see the parade. There were so many parades, not just at Mardi Gras. When the circus came to town, there was a parade. I mean elephants, and red-and-gold cages with lions and tigers and baboons and marching bears. When the beverage called Nehi came out, in a tall bottle “as high as your knee” (it wasn’t), there was a float I’ll never forget. It was a well-turned female leg in a high ankle-strap sandal covered in gold leaf and a bottle of cream soda as tall as that knee. There was a tall female leg and a tall bottle, and that was all there was on that float. And it said, “Nehi has come to town.” Then on Memorial Day, the Confederate veterans marched down Government Street in their gray uniforms to the Confederate section of Magnolia Cemetery. And sometimes a bunch of neighborhood children would get together and make their own parade.
    If a dancing beggar came through the street, everybody stopped everything to watch that beggar do that shuffle dance and collect in his tambourine. Even in the height of the Depression, people found pennies for anybody who entertained. And if the pie man came—he had this little thing full of hot ashes and had these apple turnovers that were so good. Everybody stopped everything to get an apple turnover. If a special boat was coming in—let’s say a Greek boat was coming in—everybody went down there to see this Greek boat coming in and the goodies that came off the boats.
    In those days, in Mobile, people weren’t as serious about the eight-to-five world. In fact, there was no eight-to-five world. There was only the twenty-four-hour, “live this life on this planet” world. And it’s why I haven’t lasted very long in the eight-to-five world. I tried it in New York, but I couldn’t take it.
    I think of the carefully ordered lives of so many people that I see much younger than myself. Get up in the morning and they turn on the weather report and then they have their breakfast and then the children are taken to school. And then they go to their offices. And the wife gets to the washing machine. And goes to shop. And then he goes to some greasy spoon downtown for lunch. She either meets other ladies at some place or she heats a can of soup at home. Then she goes to pick up the children. And it’s all of them, rows and rows, house after house, of them all, and at night they turn on the TV. They are all living what I consider the kind of boredom that causes cancer. Or murder within the family. Or early divorce. Or children who turn out to be either