A ROOTIN TOOTIN "HOPPY" BIRTHDAY
published in The Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin (9/23/2012)

Birthday # 7, old enough to carry a loaded weapon.

By Merlin Lessler (aka the old coot)  

My 7^th birthday party seems like it was yesterday, not sixty some years ago. We didn’t go to Chuck E Cheese or MacDonald’s playland. We didn’t go bowling or to a theme park. It was a birthday like all birthdays back then: cake and ice cream at home with a handful of friends from the neighborhood. Ones who lived close enough to walk or ride their bike. A lot of moms didn’t drive in those days and even if they did, Dad had the car at work. Birthday parties were a neighborhood thing. 

from left, Sharon Larusso, me, Lind Merz, Cookie Soldo, Pearl Horowitz, Woody Walls

The games were the same at all birthday parties. Pin the tail on the donkey started it off. Somebody always got caught peeking. Then came musical chairs, three from the kitchen, three from the dining room, lined up so each faced an opposite direction from the one next to it. A parent or older sibling would drop the needle on the record and seven kids (the maximum number we were allowed to invite in those days) would march around the chairs hoping to be in front of one when the music stopped. 

When it did, there was a mad scramble for a seat. The kid who ended up on someone’s lap was out, as was one of the chairs. Eventually it got down to two kids and one chair. The winner got a prize: a ten-cent balsa wood airplane, a yoyo or a Baby Ruth. It didn’t matter; it was a treasured trophy. Not every kid won and not every kid got a prize. Not in those days. We were lucky; we learned how it felt to lose. And, more important, we learned not to gloat when we won; we knew the next time we might be the one to lose.

Then came the cake, a special cake. Usually from mom’s kitchen, but once in a while from a real bakery. Two layers, frosting in between. And chopped walnuts pressed into the goo around the side if it came from a bakery. “Happy birthday to “the birthday kid” on top. What a thrill to see your name written in colored frosting!

The candles were lit and the first verse of “Happy Birthday” was sung, followed by the “How old are you verse” and then the response solo, “I’m seven years old, etc. Then came the spanks, one for each year and one to grow on. Something your friends were eager to supply. It helped get rid of the jealousy. The birthday kid would bolt down his cake and ice cream like a starving kid in China (which is where we were told all the starving children lived back then, kids who would love that pile of lima beans on our plate that we were made to finish if we wanted to leave the table). The rest of the kids at the birthday party took their time, savoring every morsel and putting the birthday “boy” in his place, making him wait to open his presents. Except, they were just as anxious to see the wrappings torn off as he was. They wanted to see his reaction to their gift. It was almost always something they wanted themselves. As soon as it was opened, they grabbed it and tried it out. Smart parents knew what to get their kids for Christmas; they simply kept track of what they picked out for their friends. 

My seventh birthday was a big one! Seven was the age of reason, or so it was claimed back then. You were old enough to be responsible for your actions. (Now, it’s more like 25, and even then you might get charged with child abuse for forcing a “kid” that age to move out and get his own place) My parent’s bought me a set of  Hopalong Cassidy guns. I was finally old enough to be trusted with a loaded cap pistol! Like most boys of the fifties, we lived for Cowboys & Indians, cap guns and bows & arrows. “Hoppy” was my favorite. Roy Rogers ran a close second, but Hoppy’s gun and holster set was flashier. Corporate profits of the companies that made caps for the toy guns hit an all time high in that era. Especially on the south side of Binghamton where gun battles raged day and night and a blue haze from smoking cap pistols shrouded the hills. Those “Hoppy” guns were the best birthday present I ever got. Until I turned 40 that is. That’s when my mother handed me a package wrapped in black paper. Inside were those same guns. She’d saved them in her attic all those years and thought I’d appreciate getting them as a re-gift. She was so right! Happy birthday to me! All over again.

                                                   my grandson, Atlas, wearing my Hoppy guns

BEWARE THE SCARY "DEAD FINGER': I'LL GET YOU IN THE NIGHT
published in the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin (10- 21- 2012)

The Dead Finger!

By Merlin Lessler

 It’s that time of year again. Halloween! The second best holiday in the year. Ask any kid. Why? Because, kids love to be scared! You don’t have to be an old coot like me to know that. It’s been going on since we lived in caves and dressed in animal skins. It’s inborn, inbred and invaluable. Kids need it; it helps them learn to handle themselves in a real emergency, whether they live in a cave or a high-rise condo. It’s why we pop our faces in front of a new baby and say, “Peek-a-boo!” It’s impossible not to. They love it; they wave their arms; a smile breaks across their faces, and a squeal of delight issues from their lips.

Scaring kids has become politically incorrect, but the politically correct crowd is wrong. They are fighting human nature and the kids subject to their influence will find a way to get a dose of terror, in spite of a movie rating system, the V-chip and other mechanizations crafted by a bureaucracy hell bent on separating little Bobby and Suzy from the joy of getting scared out of their wits.

 I was lucky; my era was loaded with scary things. We had full access to fairy tales; we had unregulated Halloween traditions, steeped in the macabre, and we had movies that kept us under the covers in a cowardly attempt to ward off Dracula, Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The greatest terror in my young life came at the hands of my mother, her left index finger to be specific. She set up the situation with a whopper of a tale, claiming she found a finger when she was a teenager. A railroad worker severed his hand while repairing a railroad car, or so the tale went. She was playing nearby and after the ambulance took him away, she found one his fingers near the boxcar. She took it home and kept it in a box.

“The box I have in my hand right now,” she said, as she pulled it from behind her back. “Do you want to see it?”

Of course I wanted to see it. I was scared to death, but I had to look. “Go ahead and take off the cover,” she teased. So, I did. There was nothing in the box except a bed of cotton.

“Where is it?” I cried. She reached in and removed the top layer. There it was, a ghastly, sickly looking, pale finger with a deformed and bruised nail. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

“Breath on it,” she said, “See what it does.” I blew on the box and the end of the finger slowly rose from the bed of cotton.  I was terrified. I loved it. After a few seconds it nestled back down. She put the top on and explained, “It can only be out in the air for a few minutes; otherwise it will start to decay.” Then she left the room to put the finger away.

She wanted to let me enjoy the scare, before telling me that the finger was hers, dabbed with white shoe polish and pushed up through a hole in a matchbox. I should have recognized it; I’d been there when she shut it in the car door and crunched the nail a few weeks earlier. And, I guess I was daydreaming at dinner that night when she told me it was her finger in the box. I went to bed thinking about it, wondering if it was rising out of the box and coming after me.

 
My father cleared up the mystery a few weeks later. He came into my room to tuck me in and found the covers over my head. He asked me why I was sleeping that way. “So the dead finger can’t get me,” I confessed. He laughed and then straightened me out, told me the truth. I continued to sleep with my head under the covers; the habit (and fear) had become ingrained. Eventually, I crafted my own matchbox coffin and used it to scare the kids in my fourth grade class. I ended up sitting at my desk, long after the dismissal bell, writing an endless string of, “I will not disrupt class or scare girls, ever again” Even as I wrote; I knew it was a lie. The dead finger would be back. How could it not be? Kids love to be scared!