Down on the corner....

It’s been a Wednesday all day long t’day….started off early, early this morning with one of those robotic calls purporting to be from the IRS telling me they were going to sue me and that I should call immediately…I hung up on them…then they called me back ’n I hung up on them again…and then I was awake so I got up ’n played Solitaire for an hour before going back to bed ’n didn’t get up ’til 10:20 in the AM….I hate to start a day like that…

After a leisurely breakfast ’n multiple cups of coffee, me ’n Willy walked downtown…half a block on our street, turn left for half a block on California and we’re right in the middle of Old Fair Oaks…

Old Fair Oaks reminds me a little bit of South Shore when I was young…or what South Shore might have become if the economy had been a wee bit better back there…

I told someone t’other day that I felt fortunate that I had grown up in a town that had a ‘corner’ for us to hang around…we had a wonderful corner in South Shore, what with the Tea Room ~ it was Bennett’s Tea Room when I first hung out there, later Teddy Thompson took over ~ he didn’t really change anything, it was still a great place to spend an afternoon…two rooms made up the customer part of the place…a large room with a long counter and tables ’n chairs ’n those big old Hurricane fans…well, it was before air conditioning, y’know…a smaller room off to the side with oldfashioned wooden booths that were covered with carvings, initials, names, hearts with  arrows struck through them…a veritable history of South Shore teenagers….

The school bus would pick up kids there in the mornings ’n drop ‘em off in the afternoons…hot dogs (with a great onion sauce) were .10 cents and hamburgers were .15…a bottle of Pepsi was a nickel but went to a dime around ’54…I think that’s when I developed a coffee habit becuz coffee was still only a nickel…

I’ve been a lot of places in this world, got friends from all over, I’ll tell you not everyone had a corner…I think we were lucky……Justin Other Smith