Flipbook Corn

Outside the window an endless ocean of tall green cornstalks stretched for miles alongside the highway.  The perfectly aligned rows at 70 miles per hour always reminded me of the quickly turning pages of a flipbook; the motion shows incredible speed yet remains anchored in time and place. Unable to escape its roots; tethered to where it was planted.  The corn reminded me of the ceaseless waves of stalks surrounding the place where I grew up.  

Rural Indiana is exactly as glamourous and exciting as it sounds.  Farmland and gravel roads rule the landscape.  Tractors big enough to stretch ditch to ditch on the back roads as they sloth through the grided countryside.  The biggest hills come in the way of highway overpasses, if your area is lucky enough to have one. Towns small enough that trips to the big grocery store, the one that has the good meat selection and all the different Oreo flavors, are planned as day excursions rather than a quick trip down to the corner.  

Ossian was one of these little towns.  When I grew up there, the population was somewhere around 2,000 people – all connected.  There was the chief of the volunteer fire department who had the big pond down the street that was always skimmed and had idyllic colored blue water with a perfectly arranged border of baseball sized granite.  Every year he would put on the pancake breakfast at the fire station to raise money for new equipment.  The owner of the NAPA store whose wife played organ for the church and who used to take me with him to watch the dirt track races across the state line.  

Between the two stop lights in town was the Ossian Tavern where all the locals met for a beer, right next door to Nel’s Cafe where the regulars had survived off the morning corned beef hash and eggs for years.  The barbershop still had the rotating red, white and blue barber pole that spun signaling welcome and was where I got three lines buzzed into the side of my head when I was 10 because my best friend told me it was cool.  We would go to City Market across the street and spend our spare change on penny Tootsie Rolls and Bazooka Joe unless we were feeling brave and decided to splurge on the nickel Atomic Warheads that were so sour it made our eyes twitch and our mouths pucker.  The local bakery on the corner had county-wide fame.  There was always fresh stock of glazed donuts, cupcakes, and chocolate eclairs that we would fill our stomachs with on the days we got our allowance.

The Marathon station had a seating area in the back, and every morning the small-town heads-of-state would meet for their warm beverage of choice before starting their day. They’d discuss the latest happenings or talk of crops or town projects.  On Saturday mornings I went with my dad to the old men’s meeting where I would sit with a hot chocolate and a Tiger Tail, laughing at the flurry of cheesy jokes I’d heard hundreds of times or try to look interested when they were discussing town politics I was too young to understand.

The summer evenings brought sunflower-seed-littered baseball diamonds hosting our little league games, flanked by concessions of popcorn and Big League Chew.  The bleachers were always full; nearly every parent in town would be watching, waiting for their child to take the field.  Those too young to participate would be on the nearby 5th grade playground or chasing each other through the dandelion fields as thunderstorms flashed lightning in the distance.

The Men’s Association would plan the fair every fall, and Main Street would be full of small carnival rides, trailers selling corn dogs and Zum Sticks, and the carnival games where you always came suspiciously short of winning the giant stuffed panda.  The Big Wheel race would be held on Saturday morning, where kids would fly past the Pizza Hut truck that came from the next town over, hoping to get a plastic trophy and bragging rights for the next year.  The whole town would watch the afternoon parade as the fire department, Future Farmers of America, and the local bank would slowly float by behind tractors or in classic cars showing a vivid display of small-town Americana.

The side street always held Bessie’s Movement, when squares with numbers painted in them lined the street and folks would place bets on where Bessie the cow would drop her business first.  It was always next to the Scrambler or the Gravitron.  Those of us who had the guts would ride for a few tickets and try to hold down the plethora of caramel corn and candied apples we had chased with fresh squeezed lemonade.

In the winter, my best friend Greg and I would hide behind the snowbanks lining the freshly plowed roads under the bronze glow of streetlights and throw snowballs at passing cars before running into the back alleys behind the flower shop or post office.  To escape the cars that stopped, we would slink through the side streets, boots clopping and snow pants swooshing against our legs. We always believed one of the three police officers in town would take us in for being out past curfew, though it was more likely that someone’s mom or dad would call ours and we would end up grounded for a few days until we did it all again.

Sometimes we would sneak into the graveyard at night, wondering if the angel statue would glow like all the rumors said it would.  We would examine the old howitzer cannon put there to memorialize the veterans, believing the paint spatter on it was blood remnants from some battle past.  We’d always be afraid that we would see a ghost, but never wanted to be the one chicken out, walking the rows of headstones in the dark with eyes squinted almost shut just in case.

My house was at the corner of LaFever and Church Street, just down the road from the 8-mile creek and the sledding hill.  Our folks always told us to stay away from the creek bridge because the hoodlums would sometimes go underneath with a can of spray paint and tag the concrete in acts of midwestern defiance.  It was on the very bank of that creek where Greg and I, fresh off completing the D.A.R.E. program in school, brought the town marshal to show him the marijuana plant growing in the brush that later earned us a signed certificate of appreciation.  It was the creek we always talked about one day floating end-to-end on foam rafts but decided against because of the pipe that dumped in from the water treatment plant and that one time we saw a cottonmouth.  

My mom used to regale my sisters and me with tales of our house being haunted by a plumber who must have died there.  I always believed he was electrocuted in our basement that flooded when the heavy rains seeped through the cracked foundation walls.  Every time I had to go down there to put something in our cinder-block-stilted washing machine, I’d be sure not to look in the side room by the furnace where I was sure that he lurked.  She had told us one day that when my dad’s car keys went missing, I kept telling her a ghost took them.  I don’t remember it, but she swears it to be true.  When she asked God for a sign, she says the ceiling started leaking from the unused bathroom sink upstairs.  There she found the pipes disconnected and the keys sitting in the p-trap.   

There was a door on the second story that led to the flat-topped roof of the breezeway and down to the roof of the garage.  Greg and I always talked about how dangerous it would be to jump from the roof down to the yard 10 feet below, until one day we did it and walked away with nothing more than green stains on the knees of our Levi’s.  The grass in our big back yard was always cut, a point of pride for my dad on his small, yellow riding mower.  It had a concrete pad that for some time held my mom’s old Fiat 500, next to the old toilet that had been planted with flowers and the giant decorative rock that eventually got moved next door.

When the big summer storms came through, our yard flooded and we would splash around in our swim trunks or catch the big earthworms that came to the surface and keep them in a bucket to feed our pet painted turtles we caught in the creek.  When the yard dried, we would play wiffle ball with all the other kids in the neighborhood.  Sometimes we’d break out our Louisville Slugger’s and play pumpkin ball using the big red kickball instead until the lights came on or somebody got called for dinner.

We didn’t know how sheltered we were in a small town and were too young or too naïve to know it couldn’t stay that way forever.  August 23rd, 1991, I was getting ready for school and the morning news was playing on our old wood-cased console television while my dad drank his daily cup of hot Lipton tea with a teaspoon of sugar because he never got a taste for coffee.  The anchor mentioned something about somebody named Gorbachev being in trouble and the screen flashed with pictures of Soviet tanks and troops marching.  

Sirens shrieked down our street.  In a small town everyone goes to the window or outside when these things happen.  I stood with my dad next to our mailbox as fire trucks, ambulances, and police and sheriff’s cars flew towards the railroad tracks just beyond 8-mile creek.  From our front yard, we could see a train stopped at the crossing.  Back in the house, the phone rang off the hook as I watched a commercial for the new Super Nintendo.  Word got out there was an accident; the train struck a car at the street crossing before ours; teenagers on their way to school who probably didn’t see the warning lights due to the sunrise.  

Frantic calls were made from the parents in town, trying to get through the busy signal on the other end of the line wanting to know if their child had made it to school.  The principal and secretary couldn’t answer them all.  At the end of the morning, three families would learn that their son or daughter never made it to class that day.  They were members of the little league team, the winter sledding crew, the back yard wiffle ball games.

The whole town went to the memorial services in the gymnasium.  Gates were installed where the Norfolk Southern crossed Mill and LaFever streets.  Three teenagers laid to rest amongst the glowing angel and the old howitzer.  Parents wrought with grief over the too-soon passing of someone else’s children, all the while breathing sighs of relief and clutching their own.  

Last time I was home was quite some time ago.  The flipbook corn rows lining the roadside haven’t chased me for years.  When I went back, I let the fields push me down memory lane.  Past where the barber pole used to spin.  Past the parking lot where snowballs flew, next to where the penny candy once was.  Down LaFever street, beyond the haunted house of my childhood with the big back yard near the meticulously maintained pond.  Over the eight-mile creek bridge beside the sledding hill.  Blocks away from the little league fields and Big League chew.  All the way to the railroad crossing, where the cross arms blocked the road as a small bouquet of faded plastic flowers rustled in the wind of the passing train.