1. One morning around Christmas a year or so ago, I awoke out of a dream, and realized these people had been with me in my dreams.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
How strange that sometimes that Ghost of Christmas Past really does come to us. Last night in a dream, I was Christmas shopping again with my mother in the little river town where I was lived as a young girl in the 50s. The temperature was 30 and a cold biting wind blew off the river making one's every step hard and jarring. All the old street people were there. Maybe they weren't really street people, but they were NOT the mainstream by any stretch.
There was a fat little man who was the street sweeper. The thing that made him unique was that he had lost a leg in the war and had a wooden leg. Not an artificial limb that looked like a real one, but a 'peg leg.' In fact, he was dubbed 'Pegleg Pete.' You could always hear him even if you couldn't see him. You could hear him 'tap taping' along the streets and sidewalks all day as he worked.
Then there was the little old lady who was always dressed very dramatically. She always wore a very large hat like you might see in the "Gibson Girl"
pictures of the late 1800s and early 1900s. She had a china doll like quality with her rosy red cheeks drawn in perfect little circles and lipstick extending beyond the lip line to make a perfect voluptuous little mouth. They called her Carolina Moon. And rumor had it that when she was a young woman she had been a stage actress in New York.
Every few years there was an organ grinder and his little monkey who would come to town. They were not there all the time, or even every year. But would blow through every now and then. It was quite a show to me and quite annoying to my mother who thought they were incredibly silly.
There was the homeless couple. Actually a mother and son. No matter what time of year, they dressed in heavy heavy coats. People used to say that they had thousands of dollars sewn up in their coats. When I was in high school, I learned that the man had been a valedictorian of his high school class, but before he got through college had a mental breakdown and was never able to be functional. So he and his mother who had pinned all her hopes on him wandered the streets in their heavy wool coats.
And there was the cripple who sat alongside his tin cup in the doorway of this store or that playing his guitar and singing. I always remember people putting money in the cup but I never remember seeing any in it. I thought that strange, but his pockets must have been hiding what I could not see.
Where are the colorful characters like this now? Maybe I just don't see them, but now it seems the streets are full of gangs, and perps, and pimps, and hos. I know now that those strange people of my youth were incredible people, surviving incredible odds.
I miss them.
