An excerpt from my memoir entitled “Just Walk Away”
Let’s go back a little to when our family first came to Iowa. We had lived in Chicago for about a year and then we packed up and moved to Marshalltown, the county seat and the most populous town in central Iowa with about 20,000 people. Marshalltown was and still is a small Midwestern town with corn, alfalfa and soybeans fields all around it as far as the eye could see. My dad had gotten a good job as an art and marketing director at Lennox Industry headquarters which was in Marshalltown at the time. Those were the days when if you wanted a special image for your advertisement you had to have an artist paint an actual picture. Well before the days of computers, AI and digital drawing. So, my dad honed his painting skills while he worked. My mom took care of me and when my brother and sister came along, she held down the fort at home. Mom washed dishes, kept the house cleaned well enough, talked on the phone with her friends and kept us kids in lunches and halfway decent, clean clothes. We were smack dab in the middle of the middle class. We didn’t have luxuries, but we had food on the table, medical care, a car to drive, one bathroom to share, sidewalks to draw hopscotch on and for bike riding, a yard to play in in a housing subdivision of similar folks. But that housing subdivision house came later.
The first place we lived was a rented apartment on North Street. It was just me and mom and dad at first. My sister Antoinette Jean (whom we call Toni) was born a year and a half after me and my brother Raoul James (whom we called Rollie) was born two years after Toni. Oh yeah. Those god-awful names were another way we were different from everybody else. Mom said she gave us those names because, “I wanted to give you kids an appreciation of things French.” That’s exactly how she said it. So, did we get an appreciation of “things French”? I’ll say no effing way! What a pain in the butt those names were!
I got called Ree-Nee or Eye-Reen over and over again. My last name was even more difficult for the troglodytes (sorry, troglodytes, I guess I’m a snob). People said Ben-Noor or Ben-Nore in a half assed way trying to pronounce it correctly, but they didn’t have a clue. At least they tried so I’ll give them that. The phonetic pronunciation of Buh-Noit became the norm. What can you say? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet so it really was no big deal what we were called.
I had to move to California to overcome the bumpkins and when I did, I decided to uphold “cultural integrity” and pronounce my last name Ben-Wah the way it’s supposed to be pronounced in French. A part of me wanted to shove it back to all those people who mangled my name growing up and just give it to them in spades. I’ve never looked back, and I will defend my pronunciation until the end.
The streets in the North Street neighborhood were lined with towering elm trees, and their branches were like cathedral arches over the streets. This made it shady and more tolerable in the hot, humid summers. We listened to the cicadas in summer that buzzed in the trees all day droning their mantras, and we rode our trikes up and down the wide sidewalks pumping our little legs as fast as they would go. These were our “To Kill a Mockingbird” days. We even had a Boo Radley character in our neighborhood who would walk the streets stopping at street corners and peer around uselessly like he was lost. We called him The Crazy Farmer much the way the kids in Mockingbird might have spoken. He was dressed up in dirty old worn-out baggy overalls, and a wrinkled shirt. His arms hung down the sides of his body and his lower lip stuck out like a ledge. He was just as mysterious as Boo and also just as harmless.
Mom had a big old-fashioned pram, and she put us kids in it and pushed us fast for fun. I can still remember sitting inside on the mattress with the sides coming up high so I couldn’t see anywhere but straight up. I looked up at the trees streaming by while hanging on to the sides. When I was big enough, my little sister and brother got in it, and I pushed them myself.
When you look at the picture of the house at 101 W. North Street you see three windows on the diagonal. This was an interior stairway that went up to the second floor where our apartment was. The outside door went directly to the basement. Filtered through the tree’s leaves you can see the two windows above the sink in our kitchen, and at age 1 or 2 I sat in the sink to have a bath and looked out those two windows. I also remember that my folks had a tiny art studio on the third floor where that dormer is. If I went there again, would it be as I remember it, or would it be different? We played on the porch and when Grandma Frieda came to visit, she snored so loud she scared the ever-livin’ beejesus out of me. I thought there was a bear coming to eat us. I wasn’t even 5 years old yet.
Mom took us to play at the lush and beautifully landscaped Riverview Cemetery a few blocks north of our apartment. It had a decent-sized central lake with a fountain in the middle with big white swans sailing gracefully around. The swans on land were territorial and mean and would chase you to try to peck you if you got too close. So, we kids would taunt them, and they would charge at us all puffed up as we screamed and ran away. There were very big monuments and mausoleums in that cemetery as a tribute and memorial to who I don’t know. Probably the rich and famous of Marshall County. On the northern edge of the cemetery there was a bluff overlooking the Iowa river bottom and flood plain. Standing at the top of the bluff you could see down there, and I always wanted to explore but I never did. It looked like nasty, scary things lived there, and they probably did. Anyway, if you consider muskrats and beavers nasty and scary, then, yeah.
As we got a little bit older, one of our regular destinations was Mayer’s North Street Market, a half block away from our house. We could see it from our porch steps. I remember they had blue popsicles in the ice cream freezer, and they were my favorite. I think the flavor was raspberry. The Mayers were a kindly older couple who were like grandparents to us kids and they had no objection to us wandering up and down the aisles of the tiny store looking at all the items on the shelves.
Raymond Cartwright and ShariFern Judge were my playmates. Raymond, my mother told me, would come to our door and plead, “Cuh May cuh mout?” Remember, nobody in Iowa could pronounce my first or last name but he had an excuse because he was probably only four years old. I was Scout and he was my Dill.
As I said before, we kids had the run of the small vicinity around our house and in the summer, we’d troop over to Mayer’s and I would always get the blue popsicle. The blue stained your tongue. We’d go around sticking our tongues out to gross everybody out. Who knows what made it blue or if the blue was safe to eat? In those days people didn’t know what they know today. For example, mom cooked in an old fashioned aluminum skillet without a second thought. When we got older, we rolled mercury around in our hands as a toy and our folks sprayed snow-like asbestos and threw tinsel on the Christmas tree as a decoration. Almost every man smoked, of course, and a lot of women did, too – no one knew about secondhand smoke – and there was lead in paint, DDT for mosquito abatement, and no seat belts in cars. Every summer the mosquito abatement truck would drive around the neighborhood belching a giant cloud of some poisonous, noxious smoke from a sprayer in the back end. Nobody went outside to play in it, but nobody kept us locked inside with the windows sealed shut either.
Anyway…
R L Benoit - Writer/Artist 