HOWDY DOODY EAR MUFFS [F, 9-6-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of an Old Man—HOWDY DOODY EAR MUFFS [F, 9-6-24]

[This is a continuation of the column of 9-4-24]

 

In later years…even at the time, really…I knew that Carolyn, once in a while, maybe, gave me a hint that she might say “yes” if I asked her for a date. But there was no way I could do that, not only because I was too awkward and afraid, but because I was immobile. My family didn’t have a car until mid-way through my junior year, when I could help pay for one, which was mid-way through Carolyn’s senior year. [She was only one semester older, but that put us into different graduating classes.] I would have had to walk three miles into town to her house and then get her to walk downtown to the Storm or Ohio movie theaters or to the soda fountain at Troutman’s Drug Store. Not a very romantic plan.

Worse, I would have had to drive our farm wagon into town to take her on a date.

I first fell in love with Carolyn when we were both ten years old. We had just moved from Indianapolis to the little hardscrabble farm near Oakland City. One Saturday, my father and I hitched “Old Prince” to the wagon and went to town, to get feed ground. I felt like a real Western guy, riding into town on a wagon. It was just like the radio shows.

The problem was… nobody else in town was on a horse-drawn wagon. It was after WWII. The economy was booming. People had cars. Only my father, blind in his eyes and blind to the present, thought a horse was the way to get around. Of course, when he had been a farm boy outside of Oakland City twenty years before, that was the way it was.

On that wagon seat, I was getting introduced to how “out of it” I was, what it was going to be like to be [soon] on welfare, without a car, without a place in the social system. It wasn’t like being on a radio show at all.

But, standing on the sidewalk as we drove by that day, waiting to cross the street, was a girl I had not seen before in my first couple of weeks in school. A wonderfully pretty girl, to be sure, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, but what really got my attention was her ear muffs. She was wearing Howdy Doody ear muffs!

Howdy Doody was brand new then. I had not seen the TV show. I did not see TV until the twelve-inch, black and white, floor cabinet set in the lounge of my dorm in college. But I knew about Howdy Doody. He was the current rage all the kids in school—at least those with TV sets--talked about. I had seen his picture in a magazine. Now I was seeing his face on the ears of the prettiest girl in the world. What a combination! I knew I would be in love forever.

That’s a fun memory, but there are no regrets attached to it. Even if I had later asked Carolyn for a date, and she had agreed, she would have soon realized her mistake. She was, after all, not just the prettiest girl in school, but the smartest. She would have dumped me, though, more graciously than most of my high school and college girlfriends dumped me. Worse, though, would be… I wouldn’t be able to do this fantasizing now, about what might have been.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not regretting. All the girls who dumped me did me a great favor. Carolyn would have just been another dumper who cleared the way for me to find later the true love of my life.

Yes, this column is fantasizing about what might have been, but not regrets for what might have been. It is about appreciation for what was. And is.

But I still remember those ear muffs…

John Robert McFarland