Calendar Crazy -- Part 2

a hometown calendar

CHILDHOOD / NOSTALGIA / CALENDARS

my childhood home — love that porch!

YES, I CHANGED THE COLORS. My eyes are just as old as me and anything I can do to make it easier to read I will do.

---

I remember like it was yesterday, the walk out the backdoor of my childhood home in Cheektowaga, NY. A modest one-step down alcove with a door to the cellar/basement on the left and the “backdoor” exit onto the driveway. The front door didn’t get used nearly as much although it did lead to the best feature of our home, a nice front porch, two steps above the rest of the world. The backdoor alcove had a few memorable features I remember:

• A catchall closet that mom used for some cleaning supplies, dad used for his shoeshine gear, and the three boys, a screwed-in pencil sharpener. That was the only reason that one of us three boys might even open that door. Over time, it came to hold stuff like umbrellas and the like. That door was a left swing, opening out parallel to the exit door.

• A door without a lock that you could open and close led into the kitchen. For a family of five and later six, this was mission control for the 3 bed, 1 bath ranch house. The space behind the entry door to the kitchen had a hanging spice rack as I remember. No space was wasted in my childhood home. The house had an efficient layout but space was still at a premium.

• As you stepped down into the alcove from the kitchen, there was a door that led to the basement. That was a right-swing door opening into the alcove. For some reason, we had a chain security lock near the top. I think that must have been installed as a whim at some point or perhaps a fear that one of the boys might tumble down the stairs. That seems the logical conclusion (Ockham’s razor) as our parents did not favor locking us in the basement that I recall.

• The last door was the actual exit to the outside world which was to the right as you stepped into the alcove. There was also a screen door. Whenever the paper was dropped off or an advertisement, you could hear the hydraulic return close the door as it was probably not set to sufficiently dampen the force. I think the screen door signified the handoff of responsibility to Dad. Mom was an expert homemaker and if she had felt responsible for the screen door I have no doubt she would have mastered the adjustment screw that would ease the closing pressure on that door. There were two concrete steps down to the driveway. By my calculation, 60 years later, that would have meant that the pitch of the driveway to the front of the house was perhaps 12 inches since the side door was a total of three steps down and the front was two steps. This was a pretty flat one-car width driveway.

• So there you have it, an alcove, perhaps 3 feet deep and 7-8 feet wide with 4 doors each leading to a vastly different result. It seems that homes of the day were built with a limited footprint and efficient layout where no space was wasted.

Steady readers of my newsletter must accept the segues at times as I make my way through a story or a memory. This posting project is about calendars. The only adornment in that back alcove, near the center of the space, was a calendar of the monthly flip variety that was typically a tight spiral-bound affair. I think we sometimes got it from the Church but at some point, I think that mom may have moved toward a nature-based set of pictures or perhaps dogs for each of the twelve months. I remember that it certainly was Church-based at some point because the “holidays” included some unusual Latin or middle-English names for the weeks before and after Easter and Christmas. Cheektowaga was a 90% Polish-American enclave and there were a lot of Roman Catholic Churches dotting the landscape. So this was my FIRST CALENDAR!

I do not recall any other calendars in our childhood home except the pocket calendar from Hallmark that Mom always seemed to have nearby. That was the calendar that described the traditional and modern anniversaries and seemed to contain an awful lot of important information that Mom committed to memory I would imagine.

Our childhood education took place at the neighborhood Catholic Parish named Queen of Martyrs. Wow is that a loaded name for a Church? I do not remember that anywhere in that school where there was a calendar prominently displayed. All of the classrooms seemed to have the ABCs plastered above a four-panel blackboard and of course a prominent cross but that was about it. That brings to mind a joke edited for brevity. I was able to find it, of course, on the Internet so it must be sufficiently memorable for someone to write it down. Here it is compliments of Reddit:

A 13-year-old boy has difficulty with mathematics, failing in public school.

His parents were not religious but after a friend's suggestion, they felt a private Catholic school may be more effective. His grades began to rise dramatically after this switch. Asked what has helped him so much, he responded

"When I saw the person nailed to the plus sign I knew they meant business!

Tomorrow, I will begin this journey about calendars in earnest and all sorts of things related. In the meantime, if you even possess a paper calendar, take a look to see if it contains the moon codes on it. They are a nice guide to what is ahead if you go out for an evening walk. I hope you will join me. As always, your comments are the fuel to my improvement, so please take the time if you can. Here is a song inspired by growing up where I lived. While a studio version of a song for a band defined by the road, this was the one I found of the highest quality. You have to wait until about 2:30 for the iconic reference. Buffalo has always been a great rock-and-roll town.

19+

---

---