Dairy Calves and Saturday Matinees

We were living in a trailer park on U.S. 1, the north-south highway from Maine to Miami. U.S. 1 hugs the coast, runs through towns and business flourished in its wake. I – 95 came years later, made the trip fast, monotonous and decimated roadside enterprise. The trailer park was a child’s playground, on one side a wooded lot of gnarly live oaks hung with Spanish moss. We climbed high into their wide, thick branches. To the east, an easy walk past a dump to the river. The “river” along Florida’s east coast isn’t really a river: it’s a lagoon, as my brother tried to tell me long ago, an estuary of brackish water. We caught fiddler crabs at its mucky edges, watched boats mutter past on the inland waterway.

Dairy calf, usually muddy

I was eleven and then twelve when we stayed on U.S. 1 while Dad’s boat was at the Daytona Beach Boat Works, dry docked for repair and painting. I had most of sixth grade in the same school, a rare event in my life, and a bike. Bikes were freedom, and I was still young enough to make friends quickly. Three or four of us rode our bikes on sandy washboard roads to the dairy, where weaning calves were kept in separate pens, crying for their mothers. Scrambling over wooden fences, we squished through mud and manure, slapping away flies, to pet the calves, who butted their frustrated heads against our legs.

We never saw any dairy workers. It was as if the cattle lived on their own in that maze of pens and stalls and fields, a bovine prison without guards. One day without realizing it, we climbed into a corral that bordered a bull’s quarters. In my memory, that dairy bull towers like King Kong, red-eyed, drool-muzzled, horned and hung with balls the size of grapefruit. He bellowed and charged the barricade between us, which shuddered and creaked as if it might crack like a peanut shell. We were back over that far side fence before we knew we’d done it. I jumped down from the top railing to land squarely on a board with a long rusty nail aimed straight up.

I don’t remember pain. I remember the sight of the pointed tip of a nail pushed against the top of my manure-smeared tennis shoe, yanked my foot up instinctively, in revulsion, watched a bubble of blood ooze. We were a long way from home, had no choice but to get on our bikes and ride. My companions were solicitous, cheered me on till we got there. Mom calmly got the bloody shoe and sock off, took me for a tetanus shot. Writing this, I tried without success to summon those bike-riding friends, their names, their faces. We soon moved again and like others before and after them, they faded from ghosts to gone.

Poster for 1956 Movie

My family didn’t go to movies. We went to drive-ins once in a while, my brother and I in pajamas, with our pillows in the back seat. I don’t remember the movies we saw, must have slept through most of them. But as a family we never went to a movie theatre together, much as we never went to restaurants or took annual vacations.

Not doing those things didn’t keep me from finding out about Saturday matinees. I had a weekly twenty-five cent allowance. Instead of walking to the drugstore soda fountain to buy myself a dish of chocolate ice cream with marshmallow sauce, I saved a few quarters for the movies. I got on the bus on U.S. 1 by myself, paid a dime and went downtown to see “Love Me Tender.” I had a portable record player and a few Elvis 45s. Although I liked Fats Domino and Bill Haley and the Comets just as well, I did like the Elvis songs and girls at school were talking about this movie.

“Oh, Elvis,” my mother said, flicking her hand, “girls screamed over Frank Sinatra the same way.” She had no use for such behavior.

The theater was squirmy with kids. Some from my class were there. It didn’t occur to me to join them. That sort of social ease wasn’t something I’d learned. I found a seat among strangers as first a serial, then a cartoon and finally the movie began. Spoiler alert: in this movie, Elvis dies at the end. When the lights came up, a group of girls behind me wept inconsolably, clasping each other’s hands, tears streaming down their cheeks. They didn’t move, were eager to tell me they were staying for the next show. Those girls were alien creatures to me. The movie was O.K. But Elvis didn’t really die. And if it upset them so, why were they subjecting themselves to it again? My mother’s daughter, I left confused and dry-eyed.

For seventh grade we moved again. New school, new classmates. Perhaps that location was too far from Saturday matinees, but it was more than a year and another new town before I saw one again.