It may be that I've lived too long in the same place. Or it might be that living long in the same place can make one's history richer. And there is the possibility of both.
Little Rock now has the "East Village" section of development east of Interstate 30 downtown. There are nice things happening there on "Shall Avenue," which I long ago knew as Shall Street. It was in a warehouse and industrial district where the Nabisco cookie warehouse was located in employment of my dad through the 1950s and '60s until I was 16 or 17.
Over those decades, my dad worked nights--from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.--on a two-man crew loading cookies onto Nabisco delivery trucks. He'd wake me sometimes around 1:30 a.m. with the sound from the kitchen table of his clanging his spoon against the glass filled with his favorite after-midnight snack--crumbled cornbread and buttermilk.
For a time, as I have written over the years, he also ran by mornings a rural garbage route in south Pulaski County. By "ran," I mean he did it by himself.
He could be a cranky man. It was perhaps that he never caught up on sleep.
I got a letter a few years ago from a man who worked with him at Nabisco for a short time and wanted to extol him to me. He wanted me to understand that my pop toted boxes of cookies--and changed ceiling light bulbs--in a warehouse that was unheated in winter. I hadn't imagined such a thing. In my world there was indoor heat.
The perk for his two kids was that he could bring home damaged cookies. My sister and I feasted for years on shards of Oreos, vanilla wafers, Chips Ahoy, Lorna Doones and Fig Newtons.
He stopped working there after we got a late-night call that, while changing ceiling light fixtures, he'd fallen from the ladder and crushed his ankle. He limped the rest of his life, up a ladder to paint houses or carrying a toolbox through the doors of rent houses he maintained for the friend from church who owned them.
All of that is to establish context for the fact that Shalah and I were on Shall "Avenue" Saturday night for dinner at the Sterling Market in the former Sterling paint building. And I found myself remarking to Shalah that we were somewhere in the vicinity of where Dad had worked more than a half-century before.
We were eating barbecued navy beans, thrice-cooked crispy potatoes, greens and cornbread--a fancier, exponentially more costly version of my standard home meal from that time. Then, it was home-grown or paid for from that Nabisco pay envelope containing, on the occasion I counted as he did, cash in the amount of 70-something dollars.
Then we headed home, not quite at dusk, and it hit me: Sterling Market is in the 500 block of Shall and the Nabisco warehouse was at 405 Shall St.
I crept the Jeep to the end of the block, peered at the door of a white office structure connected to two warehouse doors, and saw in big numbers "4" and "0" and "5."
I couldn't tell if it was occupied. I don't know if it's soon to be restaurant or office complex or Lord knows.
What I did know was that I was transported to the 1960-61 range--'50s-extended, prior to looming assassination and unrest. And that it was right there, that very spot to which I pointed.
Dad drove his little family of four to there. Then he walked into the office and brought out the daytime office staff to watch my sister Judy and me--7 and 5, or maybe 8 and 6--wiggle in the hula hoops he'd just bought us, mine light blue and Judy's yellow.
And it was that same place--and maybe the same occasion--when he instructed us to demonstrate the Chubby Checker twist, though dancing was against the religion Mom was teaching us but that Dad didn't have--yet. It wouldn't be long before he'd be poring over that Bible and calling the preacher, maybe his best friend, for help on the meaning of scriptures.
The office staff laughed and applauded. A grinning Dad shook his head and said a whimsical profanity, which was high praise, roughly meaning "I'm proud but don't know how to say so."
I don't remember what Mom was doing. She might well have been sitting in the car thinking it was her duty to disapprove of the revelry.
Judy, for the record, says she remembers the day but not herself hula-hooping, owing to her shyness at the time. But I do.
What I plainly remember is planting my right foot forward and working the shoulders and hips hard in rhythm with the happiness that was all any of us needed for music.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.