The Lovely Chocolate Mob - By Richard J. Bennett Page 0,5

I think, was the fact that they loved each other.”

I looked up in time to catch Miss Planter peering directly into my eyes as I finished speaking. She averted her gaze and went back to her writing. It was as though she had this “I don’t believe what I’m hearing” look on her face. She wrote a little on her clipboard, and said, “I see. Sounds to me like you had a stable home life. Did you know your place in the home?”

This question puzzled me. “My place? What do you mean?”

She said, “I mean, did you feel welcome at home; were you comfortable where you were; did you fare well as a child?”

I paused again here. “I guess you could say I fared well. I’m not really sure at times. I knew what my role was, which was to keep out of trouble and to find something productive to do, or else Mom would tell Dad that I wasn’t living up to my potential. If I didn’t do my chores, that would be a sure sign to Mom that I was a child in need of correction.”

Miss Planter wrote some more, and then asked, “What type of chores did you have in your family, Mr. Owen?”

“Let’s see,” I began, “there were different chores at different stages in growing up. For example, as a small child, I was expected to help Mom in the kitchen. This was really a means of Mom keeping an eye on me; I really wasn’t much of a help at all. I’d sometimes get a wash cloth and clean the dining room table and chairs, sweep the kitchen floor, and, if Mom handled the water, mop the floor, but that was only if she let me. At other times, I’d help to wash the dishes, but I think I only got in the way; Mom was the real worker when I was a toddler. Later I’d be following Daddy around on Saturdays, whenever he didn’t work. We all did that; I learned how to mow the yard by age 10, and soon found this was a trap, because after that it was an expected chore from then on. But it was something I could accomplish rather well, so I didn’t mind doing it, not too much, anyhow.”

“You didn’t mind helping out the family, as a child, then?” asked Miss Planter.

“No, not at all,” I replied. “Keeping the home running didn’t all fall on our young shoulders. Most of it went to our parents. The older we got, the more work we took on, but we were never overwhelmed.”

“What did you do for fun?” asked Miss Planter.

“I was always looking for something for fun, but mostly I read comic books and watched TV”

Miss Planter looked at me, as if she were trying to figure out a puzzle.

“Not very typical, I know,” I said. “Guess I was kind of a pre-nerd growing up. Sports wasn’t my thing; television and entertainment was. And our television was black and white, with an antenna on top of the set to catch the two major stations in the area. Lovely wasn’t a very big town then, and this was before UHF came along.” Miss Planter looked puzzled again, so I explained, “UHF stood for Ultra-High Frequency, a cheaper brand of television station. We didn’t even know the UHF stations existed until one day we got to playing around with dials on the TV and found them, but the reception wasn’t very good, although at night they did okay. They offered more entertainment, or more cartoons.”

Miss Planter was becoming easier to read, because she looked at me as though I had a hole in my head. So I gave her more information to ponder: “But my real interest was westerns.”

“Why westerns, Mr. Owen?” she asked.

“Westerns were morality plays with quick solutions. There were heroes and bad guys, with nothing in-between. You knew who the good guys were and who the bad fellers were. You had an idea who was going to get killed and who was going to get winged in a shoot-out. The good guy always won, because it was his series and he had to live to have another show the next week.” Miss Planter was tuned in, so I included more to interest her. “Oh yeah, there were girls on the shows, too. The good girl always got the good guy.”

That remark made Miss Planter smile. “What happened to the bad girl, Mr. Owen?” I suppose she said that