Many believe that the formative years are your life between birth and eight years old. Although I can see what they mean by that as that is the time when who you are begins to take shape, I feel that what you remember and your experiences can affect who you are as a person just as much as what you are taught. Yes, early years teach you the basics, walking, talking, feeding yourself, potty training, but I feel that you learn so much more between ages six to twelve that truly shape you. You learn to read, basic math skills, socializing with classmates, communication skills, history, geography. You start to understand the world outside of just your neighborhood. You do kid stuff.
This is the period of my life where I lived in Redgranite, Wisconsin. A very small town that only had about six hundred people living in it when we moved there. At one time it had been a much larger community of over two thousand inhabitants when the granite quarries in the area were in full swing. In the twenties, the change from paving block to concrete and asphalt for roadways began to put the dagger in the granite business there. The great depression twisted that dagger and did even more damage to the community as a whole. Not long after that the quarry began to fill with water. With no one working it and pumping the water out, it didn’t take long. I heard a lot of rumors of what’s at the bottom of the quarry growing up. Everything from cranes and mining equipment to cars to campers to complete trains to mobster bodies. Almost all of these have been disproved over the years by divers, but they were fun stories back then.
Living in a community of this size means that everyone pretty much knows everyone. You’d go to one of the four local restaurants at the time and everyone greeted you by name and asked how your family was. In some ways it was nice, in others, well let’s just say you get a speeding ticket, and everyone knows before you even get home. My mother could have attested to that. I believe her one and only ticket in her life was gotten when she was coming home from Oshkosh and was a bit distracted and in a hurry. She got pulled over for speeding, and by the time she started her shift at the restaurant, they had a little toy police car with her name on it proudly displayed in the pie case for all to see.
We got to Redgranite the summer before I started first grade. At that age and in a community that size, it was easy to make new friends. My first good friend was a boy nicknamed Popcorn. He shared my love of Matchbox and Hot Wheels, and he had a basketball hoop on his garage. It was also nice that he lived right by the softball diamonds and the park and was only a block away from our house. We had so much to do around there that we were never bored.
As the school year started, I got to meet the rest of my classmates and I latched on to even more people. Even some of the girls in my class were fun to hang out with. I didn’t really have that “girls are icky and lame” idea at the time, because my female cousin was one of my best friends. Always has been. I also think that being a small community and small class size helps boys and girls to interact with each other much better at that age, and I personally feel it lends to more respect between the sexes. My Mom worked the day shift at the restaurant known as Griff’s and Dad was out doing his Real Estate selling thing, so when I got done with school for the day, no one was at home to watch me. The solution was for me to walk from the school, that was a block from our house, down to the restaurant downtown and sit there doing my homework and watching Woody Woodpecker until Mom got off work. I must have been a hit with the other waitresses there because one would always bring me a dish of twist ice cream with butterscotch topping when Mom wasn’t looking. I wonder where those magical powers over women went when I got older?
About once a month or so, we got to go to Elmer’s Pizza for dinner. To this day, I love their pizza. So much so that it’s my go to for my birthday every year. It’s become a tradition that means more to me than it probably should, but hey, you only turn….every year once. My family and friends look forward to making that run too. They just wish it wasn’t in February because it always seems to snow that day. I’m saving a discussion on the day of my birthday for another day, but just know that I’m not super exited that it lands on the day it does. For that purpose, I started doing what I like to refer to as an Un-birthday. I share it with a close friend who also has a birthday at a cruddy time of the year, and we share it with all you people out there born during Wisconsin winter. This Un-birthday is a floating day. It happens some Saturday in June or July, when you know the weather will most likely be pretty nice. We just celebrated this yesterday as I’m typing this, and we went to (drum roll please) Elmer’s of course. Its pretty amazing the amount of memories that flood your brain just from the taste of a particular food. I practically relive those six years there every time. Almost all those memories are good too.
As with my hometown in my last post, many things have changed over the years there, but a ton haven’t. Our old house has been re-sided and changed very little. Our old garage has been torn down and a new larger one fills the back yard. The F/S Service Station kitty corner from the house hasn’t been in operation for years, but it still stands. Our old church burned down several years ago. The building that housed the arcade has been torn down. The building my Dad ran his business out of still stands and I think is an antique store of some kind. My Uncle’s Real Estate office is gone. Griff’s hasn’t been Griff’s for a long time, and I think is closed completely now. But that small-town feel is still in the air there. And going back there still brings that good feeling in me. Would I feel the same way if I had continued to live there through my High School years, or would I have gotten to that “I can’t wait to get out of this place and never look back” stage that so many do. Who knows?
That’s all for now. I decided to split this up into two parts because I want to start telling some of the many stories of my years in Redgranite. Many of them I find quite funny, silly, stupid, you know, kid stuff. I felt if I did that on this post it would be way too long. So, if you want to read about those, tune in next week.
We’re all in this together. Luv Luv.