That Snows the Goat

When I was six years old, my family lived in Admiral Roads Apartments in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s difficult to describe locations relative to the buildings because of their strange placement. They were two-story buildings, placed so the small ends of the buildings faced the street. A rusty metal door centered on the end of our building was the entrance to the janitor’s apartment and the furnace room. It was always securely padlocked, unless the janitor was inside. I don’t know if it was because he was big, black, or both, but all the children were afraid of the janitor. In front of the janitor’s door was a concrete pad as wide as the building and about ten feet deep. The on the end closest to the street sat the garbage cans that were shared by the building’s tenants. A short three-sided picket fence, with its peeling white paint covered by a gray patina of spilled garbage and coal dust, shielded the view from passersby. Nearby was a large propane tank, used for the apartment stoves.

The buildings were placed in pairs, each with four entrances on the side that faced its mirror-image across the courtyard. A sidewalk ran parallel to each building with shorter sidewalks leading up to the concrete stoop at each front door. A twenty-foot wide strip of grass lay between the sidewalks, revealing which occupants had friends in the facing building by the paths that crisscrossed in the grass.

Our parents watched us play games in that courtyard, as they relaxed and talked, sitting on their front stoops in the early evening. We also enjoyed playing in the large grassy area between the ends of our buildings and the railroad yard fence. It bordered most of the back of the apartment complex and we enjoyed the noisy exhalations of the steam engines as they moved back and forth, coupling and uncoupling cars as the engineers built their trains. We waved at the engineers, they would blow the whistle and wave back, and sometimes throw fat chunks of yellow chalk to us. I never wondered why they had chalk in the engine cab, but would just rush to get my share. The chalk was big, each piece a handful compared to the pencil-thin pieces we bought in the five and dime store. It was much better than store-bought chalk to mark out games, messages and pictures on the sidewalks.

Our mothers weren’t as fond of the trains as we were. The big yard also contained the clothes lines used to hang out laundry to dry. I remember my mother rushing to rescue her laundry when she heard a train coming into the rail yard. The soot from the engine as it puffed back and forth, shuttling the rail cars to build new trains, stained the clothes she had worked so hard to clean. I believe she didn’t think the chalk was even compensation.

We had other visitors to our neighborhood beside the trains. Every few days a large truck, the size of today’s largest U-Haul trucks, parked on the street. The black men inside the back tied the canvas curtain out of their way, jumped down, and taking a huge pair of tongs, caught and carried the huge blocks of ice shoved across the wooden floor to them. Anyone needing ice for their icebox placed a cardboard card with “ICE” written on it in their window, and as the men came down the sidewalk, they knew where to knock, and then place the block of ice in the icebox. In summer, my friends and I would hang around the truck, hoping to get one of the pieces that chipped off as the man in the back separated the transparent blocks for delivery.

“Can we have some ice?” we’d beg, and sometimes the iceman would scoop up a handful of the perfectly clear chunks and offer them to us. We each grabbed a piece, and began to bobble them from one hand to another, not just because of the cold, but because as it melted, the water running off washed away any dirt that the ice had picked up from the truck floor. When we thought it was clean enough, we sucked the ice water from our piece until it was small enough to put entirely into our mouth. We didn’t believe in the germ theory, having never heard of it.

About once a week, a smaller truck came through selling vegetables. Our mothers came out and bought what they needed, after haggling over the price. We did not hang around this truck.

The fish man also came around weekly, selling fresh fish that was stored on crushed ice, displayed in basket-like containers hanging from the sides of his truck. The ice was within easy reach, but after one boy scooped some up and found it tasted just like fish, we had no more interest in it than we did in the vegetable truck.

One truck vendor we loved to see was the candy man. He had a pickup truck with a home-made wooden cab on the back. He pulled up, blew the horn a couple of times and then climbed into the back to conduct business. I remember the different candies I used to buy: wax lips, first a toy, and then you could chew them until their sweetness was gone; little wax bottles shaped like Coke bottles, but full of different colored sugar water; jaw breakers, hard balls of candy that changed color as each layer eroded away; fire balls, like jawbreakers, but hot; miniature ice cream cones, topped with fluffy Easter chick-like candy; and my favorite, candy cigarettes.

Lucky Strike was the brand I wanted, and I’d open the pack, carefully separate each of the four fragile pairs of candy cigarettes, then place them back into the package, unless they broke. In that case I just popped the broken butts in my mouth and crunched them right down. The good ones I “smoked,” imitating adults I had seen. Like Pop, I’d pinch it between my forefinger and thumb after taking a drag, and then shift it so I could tap the accumulated ash from the end. It was hard to resist biting off the end as I smoked, talking with it dangling from my lips like Bogart.

I don’t remember all of the different truck vendors who sold their wares along our street. There always seemed to be one kind or another nearly every day. Back then, my mother couldn’t drive a car, and unless the store came to her, she would have to wait for my father to be available to drive her into town. As far activities went, if we weren’t in school and wanted something to do, we played in our neighborhood, and always outside, unless it was raining. This was life for me in the early 1950s.