We were now living in the fourth house we had occupied in the same number of years of my life.  This house sat on a dusty unpaved road on the eastern edge of Drumright, Oklahoma.  Calling it a “house” is a compliment. It was little more than a shack.  My Grandma Beavers lived just around the corner but that was no cause for joy for me.  As “Gramma” she was a total “bust”.   Belle Beavers was an dour always-old woman with a dark side to her nature and a mean streak that made her unpleasant to be around.  But she was the only grandparent available to me.  Having her as my only grandparent role model helps explain why I never became a grandpa who goes around saying things like “Let me tell you about my grandkids”.

That summer, one or two of Dad’s brothers came for a visit.  They were obviously wealthier than we were for not only could they afford to travel, they owned a camera.  Just before leaving they took a picture of a barefoot, tow-headed little boy wearing patched and threadbare trousers cut off just below the knees.  A nondescript shirt hung loosely on his upper body.   He was standing in front of a rough, wood-framed house that Webster could justify placing alongside the word “dilapidated”, in his dictionary.  Years later my youngest son Nathan insisted the picture could not be “real”. “No one could live in that house”, he maintained.   We did.  I was the tow-headed boy.

While living there, Mother kept whatever perishable food we had in a wooden ice-box.  Not a refrigerator, an ice-box.  It cooled food the same way today’s picnic coolers do; with chunks of ice.  Ice was delivered a once or twice a week by a truck that came by carrying huge, 300 pound pieces of ice, covered by a tarpaulin.   The driver used his ice pick to separate the 300-pound pieces into whatever size the housewife needed.  The ice company provided each customer with a poster board sign about eight inches square with the numbers 50, 75, 100, and 300 on each of its borders.   When mother needed ice she put the card in our front room window.  The iceman could see it from the street, so whichever number he saw on the top edge of the card was the amount of ice he brought in and put into the ice compartment.   If the parents weren’t home, he left a bill on top of the icebox.

Mother’s usual order was for a 50 pound block of ice.   Although I hadn’t yet started school I knew enough about numbers to know that 100 of anything was more than 50.   I knew what 50 pounds of ice looked like because I had seen it delivered many times, but the image of a 100 pound piece of ice fascinated me.  I could not imagine how big it must be.  One day, when I was alone in the house I saw that ice card in the window with its customary 50 along the top edge.  I knew how the system worked. My curiosity led me down a dark path.  I rotated the ice card so that 100 appeared as the top number.  The iceman probably wondered about it, but he dutifully brought in a huge piece of ice and crammed it into the ice compartment of our icebox while I watched in awe.   When Mother got home, picked up the bill, looked in the icebox and saw what had happened, it would have taken a glacier of ice to cool her Scotch/Irish temper.  She knew what had happened and who the culprit was.  Whatever punishment she dished out to me must have fit the enormity of my crime because I have never forgotten how I wrecked her pitiful grocery budget for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.   It did nothing, however, to diminish my curiosity.