A first stab at a cogent “weave” from Harry

Like an internal conversation in one’s head rather than at a campfire or in the locker room or over a barstool stream of conscience topics can flit by often connected together by common themes or other qualities.
For me my life in Kansas offers up many memories like my first unfriendly snowball fight. I was in fifth grade. Skipper Slais had been in my classes and I remember him as an enthusiastic kid and one who brought a photograph of a giant snowman that his older brother and some friends had built. I was impressed with it. On one winter day walking home from Loman Hill Elementary school one of the Jansen kids, a new transfer into my Loman Hill Elementary was engaged in a snowball fight on one side of Mulvane Street with two kids. One of them was Skipper and the other was a vaguely menacing sixth grader. I didn’t think the numbers were fair so I offered to help the Jansen kid. We whipped snowballs for a few minutes then the Jansen Kid yelled out he had some engagement to go to and ran across the street leaving me in his formerly unenviable position. I whipped some more snowballs for long enough to make a show of it then said I needed to leave too. The older vaguely menacing kid walked up to me and asked with a sneer “are you afraid.” Damnebly I could only think of one thing to say “No.” Ratcheting it up because the fifth grader was claiming not be be afraid he challenged me to a fight. I gamely put up my dukes as he did and we circled each other neither punching or hitting. And then Skipper Slais marked himself on my memory by “washing my face” from behind with a snowball.
It was so damned unfair as I wiped the snow off my face some tears hid in the meltwater. I began to walk away from the fight to my house only to hear the older kid yell you’re crying which I denied with a sniffle without looking back.

Image of the apartment building by Georganne Welty painted to illustrate a story by Harry Welty
I met the Jansen kid when I lived on the then outskirts of 1960s Topeka. We lived in the old four room apartment building that housed the caretakers of the SBA up on the hill across from Gage Boulevard. (I think)
The SBA was then the headquarters of the famed Menninger Clinic. On Wikipedia I discovered it was probably w. 6th Avenue where I lived. Two psychiatrist brothers set up their world-famous clinic in what had been a 1920’s attempt at private retirement community set up as sort of retirement insurance called the Security Benefit Association only without bottomless government financial banking. The many buildings that now hosted the clinic were also used when I lived across from the hill for other purposes which I discovered in first grade. An early Topeka television station was housed on the remains of the SBA and my first-grade class took a tour of its studio in a fieldtrip. I remember walking around a large empty room with television monitors and cameras set up all over witch put the images of curious first graders on the cathode ray screens were saw as we walked past them. My family’s first television showed up in about 1955 when I was four years old and took its place in our upper floor apartment in the old caretaker’s apartments. It was the source of most of my early memories. I developed a phobia about hypodermic needles then when I saw a free government made Ag short on veterinary care of farm animals. The massive needle I saw stuck into a horse’s haunches was not a good one for me to carry around in those early days of TB and Polio shots.

I revisited the SBA campus a few years later when my Dad made the acquaintance of kid Jansen’s Dad who must have been a caretaker of one of the old SBA buildings. The whole darned multifloored apartment building was his family’s and these kids happily showed me around their immense abode of corridors and empty rooms.

I’m already tired of this weaving and I promised to take a neighbor to medical appointment at a quarter to noon. So, I’ll stop here with serious doubts about the utility of further weaves. At least until this last sentence there were no penises mentioned.

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