MADISON, Miss. (Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008) – After years in storage and covered in thick grime and dirt, we officially took my childhood bed out of retirement.
We brought the head board and foot board to my in-laws on Sunday. There, Pam’s mom hand-cleaned the wood with oil specially made for antique woods. And on Monday, we all got together at our house to assemble the bed and formally dedicate it for another 20 years’ of service. Fun was had by all.
The bed is Western-themed and dates back to when kids played the politically incorrect game of cowboys and Indians – you know, the game where kids pretended to be (and sometimes dressed up like) Indians and cowboys and then united to systematically destroy everything in sight.
We’d run around the house and the yard with cap guns blazing madly. Sometimes I would play by myself, hop on my horse (Blaze by Mattel), pretend I was someone in charge and high-tail it over to the bad guys’ hideaway (bank robbers, perhaps) and right whatever went wrong.
Man, we were violent kids. Shooting. Killing. Firing guns on everything and everyone in sight. And it didn’t stop there. We watched all the Western TV shows, watched Tom & JerryThe Three Stooges (who also were incredibly violent). cartoons (possibly among the most violent of the theatrical cartoon shorts) and laughed at
Heck, I remember being in my elementary school yard during recess when I was in the first grade and playing Bonny and Clyde, in which a bunch of us would (pretend to) rob banks and shoot innocent bystanders who just happened to get in the way.
And I remember being insanely jealous of a girl friend (not girlfriend, mind you, a girl friend) whose parents took her to see Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonny and Clyde.” I wanted to see it badly, but I remember Mom and Dad thought that girl’s parents were insane, nuts, screwed in the head. They told me that movie was too violent for me I still wanted to see it.
Well, I finally saw “Bonny and Clyde” on home video back in the mid 1970s (a VHS tape, no less) and thought then – and still think today – it is a motion picture masterpiece that says more about our American culture and lifestyle than anything else made in that period (what I like to call the dawn of the 1970s golden age of American cinema).
But I digress.
The photo on the left is my childhood bed as it looks today after me, my wife, my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law put it together Monday night. Pam found the actual bed frame at Goodwill and my in-laws had a couple of wooden slats on which the box spring sits.
Now it’s just waiting for a child.
Meanwhile, we have just about finished moving Camryn into her new room at the house – the room that used to be the guest room. We moved the mainframe computer from that room and into our official in-home office. And we have a new chest of drawers on order for Camryn’s room.
That’s about it for now. Check back on Wednesday.
Copyright 2008, Terry R. Cassreino, all rights reserved
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