What's on my mind today? But I think I will write 13 things I love about my Hometown when I was kid.
1) It's a small town in central Kentucky, the heart of the Bluegrass. The town is so lovely that when Cameron Crowe was filming his semi- autobiographical movie Elizabethtown in Kentucky did he go to E-town and film? Hell no, he came to my Hometown and called it Elizabethtown. That's how beautiful it is.
2) I went to school in an old convent! I swear. It was torn down in the mid 1960's when the new school's construction was finished. It was three school rooms. Two in the old house and one in an adjacent building that only the 7th and 8th graders occupied. I have so many great memories about that old school and the school ground....
3) The Merry-go-round on the old school ground. It was a monster! Shaped like a bell on a steel post it rose up at least eight feet into the air! It not only went around and around, it also went up and down much like a tilt-a-whirl. Our favorite game was to load it up with bodies, three to a plank seat, and go around and around and up and down and try to throw off as many people as possible! Another game was "smash". You would put one person in the middle they would have to dodge the oncoming "tilt". Man, how did we ever survive!
4) I love that I could miss the bus and hustle to school in less than 10 minutes.
5) Downtown use to have three drugstores and two five and dimes. I went to Ben Franklin's on the cornor to buy the new Beatle 45's when they were released. Cost 99 cents I believe.
6) At the Wilson drug store they had a cigarette machine almost at the front door and we would sneak in undetected and buy cigs for twenty five cents a pack! We preferred Larks back then.
7) The swimming pool! It was a pool that required a membership and everyone had one. My summers were spent waiting for Dad to come home from work and take us to the pool for an hour! When we go older we lived at the pool those summers, first on the swimming teams then as teenagers hanging out all summer long.
8) Riding around. In a small town there is literally nothing to do! So, we would climb in cars and "ride around". We would call each other and say, "Wanna ride around?" You would pick people up and drive through Main Street downtown and head out Frankfort St to the Dairy Queen, pull into the parking lot and circle behind the building and then head back down Frankfort, through down town and turn around at the convenient store and head back up through Main street. Cruising. You'd honk at those you knew. Honk honk honk. You'd pull over and talk to boys and sometimes switch cars to ride around town with someone else.
9) While riding around town Friday and Saturday night you would put a twist on it. You would look for someone older to go through one of the three liquor stores and buy beer. Sometimes you would risk it and drive through yourself. If you scored you'd head out and drive around "in the country" and drink your PBR or your Little Kings! I know most all the back roads in "Wufford" Co.
10) There are many beautiful horse farms in the county. When we were kids my Dad would pack us in the car and we would drive around the back country roads and look at the horses.
11) Everybody knew everybody in the town. So if you were doing something wrong on one side of town it did not take long to get back to your Mom. One of my favorite stories is when my kid bother Pat decided to follow us to school one day. Mom got a phone call from one of her friends who lived one door down from the school, "Hello Theresa, how are you? Well, that good, where is Patrick?" "Outside in the back playing." "No he is out front of my house heading to the school on his tricycle!" Pat was always a roamer and without fear.
12) There was always adventure about when I was a kid. Either playing on the Rail Road tracks or in the tunnel, or riding bikes over the rock pile there was adventure at every street corner.
13) I love the fact that my husband grew up in the same small town and share all the same memories of Times gone By.
2 comments:
Lovely list-(found your blog, BTW, from the Thursday 13 link)and made me remember my own memories of growing up and main streets and drig stores and five & dimes(my father ran one for years) and Ben Franklin stores(there is still one in Chatham, Massachusetts that I love to poke around in whevnever I visit there)and Dairy Queens. :-)
Growing up, I had relatives living in Lexington, Ky. and always loved visiting--so pretty around there and the accents were so exotic to my New Englandy ears. Would love to explore more of that area in the near future...
This is one of the most joyful posts I've read, ever. Love it. Tomorrow I'll try to come back and read more of your posts. I see, from a downward glimpse, you like cook books which is rather exciting as I am a cook book obsessive!
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