Peggy and the Monkey and the MG and Me
My cousin Peggy is three years older than I am. We have been close ever since we were very small children and she dressed me up in little girl clothes like I was one of her dolls. As far as I know, only one photo exists of me thusly attired, which is one more photo than I wish there were of me thusly attired.
I once told my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to
marry Peggy.
Grandma Swartz, standing nearby, reacted in typical
Grandma Swartz style. “Oh, Stevie, you can’t marry your first cousin! Your
children will be deformed! They won’t be right!”
Mom’s wise reply: “For heaven’s sake, Mom, he’s only
five years old! He’s not really going to marry her!”
Why our children would be deformed was a mystery to
me, but it didn’t really matter in the long run because Peg and I never married
each other anyway.
Peggy and I got to discussing birthdays once when we
were kids, and we came to realize that I was born on September 22, and she was
born on December 22. “We were both born on the same day in different months! Maybe
that’s why we’re such good friends,” Peg opined horoscopically. It’s as good a
theory as any, I suppose.
 |
| L to R: Peggy and me. No, just kidding! These are Trolls that Peggy gave to me after we were adults. |
Dewies. You play Dewies by tying a length of string around a small toy—any small toy will do. Then you drag it behind you, periodically saying, “Dewie!” while making it jump. This was what we called “fun” in the late 1960s. (Was this, perhaps, a precursor to Mario and Luigi? Interesting hypothesis!)
Trolls.
Trolls were a popular toy back then. You can still purchase them: ugly little
naked creatures with stubby noses and long, fuzzy hair that can be styled, kind
of. Actually, the hair could be styled as long as you didn’t cut it short—which
I did once to one of my trolls at Peggy’s urging. The hair then stood straight
up and looked ridiculous! (As though it didn’t look ridiculous before?) I must
have been pretty young when this happened, because initially I thought, “Oh
well, it will grow back.”
It didn’t.
Flying Horses. This is a great game to play outside on a breezy spring day. You find a big, open area, and run around it with your arms outstretched, feeling the wind in your face, feeling your hair being ruffled up, pretending you are a horse with wings. It helps if you whinny every so often too.
Steed and Fawn.
Steed and Fawn were probably Peg’s greatest creations. Children of nature, they
lived in the wilderness, far from others. Peg and I wore normal clothes when
playing Steed and Fawn, but in our imaginations they were adults who wore very
little clothing because, well, they were children of nature living way out in
the wilderness, far from others, and they had to make their clothes from animal
skins. Small animals, apparently. I suspect Tarzan was a prototype for Steed’s
physique and apparel, and Fawn’s clothing was likely based on scantily clad
women we had seen on other TV shows.
I don’t remember exactly
what Steed and Fawn did. I think sometimes they hid down by the railroad
track and talked about eating dirt, because we had heard that dirt has vitamins
and minerals in it, and you can actually survive on it if you have to. Sadly,
most adults aren’t aware of this, hence their propensity for starving to death during
famines. Or sometimes Steed and Fawn would sit on the bank of the little
trickle of gray water that ran down the ditch at the back of our property (this
is a true thing) pretending we were two scantily clad adults sitting by a
river way out in the wilderness, far from others, waiting, I guess, for
something to happen. Maybe a famine, so we could eat dirt.
Life Changes
At some point we had to endure the sorrow of long
separations, since when we were still young, the Brinkerhoffs moved to
Massachusetts when Uncle Russ was transferred there for work.
I remember one event from when the Brinks moved away. We
had all gotten together in Fredericksburg as a family—the Skaggses, the
Brinkerhoffs, and Grandma and Grandpa Swartz. After the Brinks drove off that
evening for the last time to head to Massachusetts in the morning, I came into Mom
and Dad’s bedroom and caught my mom and Grandma Swartz sitting on the bed
crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I had never seen both of them
crying at the same time before.
“Oh, we’re just sitting here having good cry because
Millie’s moving away!” And then they looked at each other and laughed as they
wiped their noses.
“A Three-Hour Tour . . . a
Three-Hour Tour”
I don’t know how long the Brinks were in
Massachusetts, but after a number of years, Uncle Russ was transferred again,
this time to Florida. Visiting them in Massachusetts had been fun, but visiting
them in Florida was great!
It was during one of those Florida visits that our two
families took a three-hour boat tour of Fort Lauderdale’s canals. I remember it
was a rather cold day, and the tour guides unrolled a clear plastic curtain
over the front of the boat to serve as a wind break. The problem was that the
“clear” plastic was pretty thick, and it distorted everything you were observing
to the point that it was inscrutable. I mean, there are things that are
scrutable, and there are things that are inscrutable, and that plastic curtain simply
could not be scruted at all.
This sent at least one family—a group of people who
knew very little English—into a rage. Frankly, I don’t blame them. We had paid
for a tour to see the homes of the rich and famous from the city’s waterways,
and now the people running the boat were obscuring the view!
“What are they saying?” someone asked my mom.
“I don’t know. They don’t speak English.”
“They speak some English,” my brother Keith
murmured to me. “I heard the dad use one certain English word over and over
again!”
Yep, he was right. I had heard it too. I guess if
you’re only going to learn one word in another language, it should be a
powerful one that can be applied in a variety of situations.
Gators, Bamboo, a Monkey, a Zoo
As part of the tour, we debarked on an island where
there was a small, dumpy, ill-run zoo with animals in cages that were too small
for them. But what did we know or care? We were kids, and it was the seventies,
and they were just animals after all!
My brothers and I noticed something we had never seen
in real life before—the tall trunks in the wooded areas weren’t trees, they were
huge bamboo stalks! One brother pointed it out to another—“Look! This is
bamboo!” A nerdy-looking dad nearby heard the comment and said to his chubby
little boy, “Look, son! Bamboo twees!”
And with that, the phrase “Look, son! Bamboo twees!”
immediately entered the Skaggs brothers’ “List of Phrases You Can Repeat at Opportune
Moments and Always Get a Laugh.”
Another exhibition you could see there was a Native
American man wrestling alligators. There was no question, it was a thrilling
show: we stood outside a four-foot-high concrete barrier while a man with black
hair and skin darker than that of anyone in Fredericksburg wrangled the huge
beasts. The show culminated with his holding a gator’s jaws open and sticking
his head between them.
Afterwards he took a plastic bottle with the top cut off and
walked around the perimeter, begging for money. The emcee said this was his only source of income. Dad put a buck or two in. At
the time we thought nothing of it. Now, looking back, it makes me pretty sad. I
mean, here we were, taking a vacation in a nice boat on the waterways while our
guide said things like, “And that house with the tennis court belongs to Chris
Evert. The one over there with the blue roof and huge swimming pool is one of
Merv Griffin’s homes.” And then we stopped here for some cheap family entertainment
provided by a descendant of the people who used to dominate this area—and he
had to beg for our spare change.
I remember one other event from that day. A spider monkey
was held captive in a cage that was surrounded by a fence to keep people back far
enough to avoid his grasp.
Peg has always loved animals. That afternoon she was
enjoying an ice-cream sandwich, and she broke pieces off and reached far over
the fence. The monkey would stretch out his long, skinny, hairy arm, take the chocolate
and melty ice cream from her fingers, and gobble it down, obviously enjoying it
immensely. It made both of us laugh.
Later that night, after we were back at the
Brinkerhoffs’ house, Peggy started laughing again. Peg was prone to do this—laugh
aloud at her thoughts—and it was always worthwhile to ask, “What’s so funny?”
“Remember when I fed that monkey today?”
“Yeah.”
“I just realized that when the ice cream was all gone . . .
I licked off my fingers!”
“Gross!” And we both cracked up.
Teenagers
Peggy could always see the humor in situations, even
if it was at her own expense. For example—this was during those “I’m struggling
with my complexion” years for both of us—we were sitting watching TV one night,
and she was munching on a bag of chocolate chips.
“You see this?” she said to me, holding one of the
little cone-shaped pieces of chocolate between her fingers.
“Yeah.”
She put it on her cheek. “Tomorrow it will be here.”
The years passed, and the Brinks continued to live in
Florida. After Peg was old enough to drive, she owned a snazzy little blue MG Midget. When
we visited, she and I buzzed around town in it with the top down.
No, I was never interested in Peg romantically. (Well,
not after I was five years old.) But I loved riding in that MG with her. It was unbelievable—here I was, a skinny, pasty-faced fourteen-year-old with braces and complexion issues, wearing thick aviator glasses, and I was whizzing around Fort Lauderdale
in a convertible sports car, chauffeured by a very attractive blonde
seventeen-year-old girl with a dark tan and groovy Foster Grants.
This kind of thing never happened back in Fredericksburg!
As we flew past other teenage guys, I smiled
condescendingly, careful to appear not to notice them. I hoped they would see me
with Peg and wonder, “What’s he got that I ain’t got?”
The answer to that question, of course, was that chicks dig skinny, pasty-faced fourteen-year-olds with braces and complexion issues who wear thick aviator glasses. Everybody knows that.
Copyright 2023 by Steven Nyle Skaggs
 |
| 1976 MG Midget. (Public Domain photo) |
Comments
Post a Comment