When I was a small boy, the term "self-serve" was unknown in the village. In my explorations of Second Avenue West, it was inevitable that I would turn south to make a circuit of the two south blocks of Main Street, which was lined with small businesses. There were personal contacts everywhere; there had to be. The impersonal world of credit cards and computers was still decades away.
At first it was difficult to overcome my shyness, but after two summer's time, I had entered every place of business and had seen in them a cast of characters as engagingly eccentric as any who appeared on the big screen in Frank's Movie Theatre. A child's ticket to a Friday night movie was ten cents. A further ten cents might be expended for some Blackjack chewing gum, all of which was stuck under the seat by the time the film ended. Everybody in the village knew everybody else. The business men knew the names of the kids and the cats and the dog and the cows and the horses and "Chicken" Lloyd's prize rooster. I was Little Billy and was treated with a certain deference because my parents were good customers --- except at the pool hall and the bootlegger's places.
It was during my third trip to the Russian barber for a 25-cent haircut that I knew my acceptance on Main Street was complete. He said to me, "Yesiree, Mister Billy. I tell you true. If you don't soon change, you gonna be always like dot." It was an accolade; it was what he said to his grown-up customers. I had arrived. Before I left his shop, he wagged a finger at me and said, "Next month you gonna need a shave."
On those rare occasions when there was a dime to spare, I liked to go into the old Canada Café where the smiling Cantonese owners treated me like a long-lost friend.
I liked the smell of the place. I liked the corner where containers of ice cream, variously flavoured, were nestled in a box filled with river ice. I liked looking at the pie case, with my eyes lingering longest on a magnificent Boston Cream Pie. When a smiling Oriental asked, "You wanna pie?", I shook my head because I had no money. The man said, "You come back later. We save some."
Another good place to visit was the place we called "the Jew's store." It was owned by a generous gentleman in a skull cap who, when the season required, was patient in providing me with just the right running shoes at just the right price. Almost anything needed was for sale in that store, except fresh meat.
There was a meat counter in the general store further up the street. I remember an open barrel of herrings and another of pig hocks. I remember the big scale. The store keeper insisted on weighing me. I weighed 48 pounds. My friend Geordie weighed 64.
The storekeeper said, "You need to get bigger. Tell your mother to feed you Sunny Boy Cereal." I did and she did and, eventually I noticed a few little bumps which I could call muscles.
My Uncle Charlie, Aunt Eliza's husband, was the butcher in the third general store. Charlie smoked cigarettes, drank beer and used naughty words, but I was nevertheless permitted to go to watch him butcher a beef in a pasture west of the village. When I returned, I was bouncing a blown-up cow bladder. I burst into Grandma's house when she was having one of her regular conferences with her two daughters and shouted, " A cow bladder makes a goddam good balloon." My career as an apprentice butcher ended at that very moment.
The drug store had a secluded ice cream parlour decorated with Currier and Ives prints. I had a chocolate soda there one fine summer day. You just ordered the treat you wanted and a human being brought it to you. Summers later, I took girls into the parlour to hold hands. It cost me the price of another chocolate soda. At the time, I thought it was worth it.
I didn't spend much time in the offices of the automobile and implement places. Usually, I just went out on the lots to sit on a tractor and pretend to be a World War One fighter ace. Or go up on a Holt Combine and pretend to be the Admiral of a huge fleet.
I visited the offices of the lawyer and the insurance and land agents only once, but I went more than once to the bank. I liked to see the man they kept in a cage and the other fellow perched like Bob Cratchit on a high stool in front of a high desk. I wasn't welcomed very enthusiastically in the bank. They knew I had no money and they had no intention of giving me a loan.
All the little boys liked to go to the railway station to watch the big steam engines come puffing in. The agent there had come with the first train and he stayed until the day he retired. He was a serious fellow, always looking like he was running the biggest transportation system in the world.
I was a budding connoisseur of horse operas and liked to go to the livery barn to look at the horses. Once, when my parents refused for the hundredth time to buy me a horse, I decided to run away from home. I put on my cowboy hat and took up my Buck Rogers Disintegrator water pistol and moseyed down to the livery barn, where I intended to steal a horse and gallop off to a Hollywood ranch. The two young men at the barn were very helpful. They mounted me on a large pig. I fell off into a pile of fresh pig poop. That's when I decided running away wasn't a very good idea.
They are all gone now. I am thankful they were there for me. I am glad I wasn't a child in a world of electronic images. I am thankful I grew up learning from real living, breathing, speaking human beings. I am glad that even a little boy could observe and listen and try to measure their qualities
