“Man, I like that wine.”
That was 4-year-old me, pulling my brother along in a small, red wagon outside of a tiny house in Bloomer, Arkansas. I heard that story 100 times through the years. It was one of the old man’s favorites.
Apparently, left to our own devices for just a few minutes, I’d secured a bottle of cheap wine from my parents’ refrigerator and ended up on the sidewalk, brother in tow on said wagon, chugging away. When I saw Dad and Mom, the famous — at least in our family — words came forth: “Man, I like that wine.”
I don’t have many memories of Bloomer, a place so small and obscure that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Bloomer is a township of 860 people in the northwest part of the state, about two and half hours south of Joplin, where Dad, my brother and I were born, and the same distance west of Little Rock.
According to legend, the unincorporated community got its name from gypsies who used to hang bloomers out for all to see. So, how did we end up in the middle of nowhere? As I’ve written, the old man liked to move around, almost always for business.
In the months leading up to my birth in 1976, my parents really tried to make a life in California work. Dad had been out of prison for a while at that point and had a good job managing a print shop, where my mother worked, for his best friend Jean Ann. Financially, they simply couldn’t make it work.
“We wanted to stay in San Diego,” Dad said. “We both really liked it. We looked and looked for a house, and we applied for one in the ghetto. I remember it was $60,000 in 1976 for a two-bedroom dump, and we couldn’t qualify for it.”
So, Dad and Mom moved from sunny San Diego to the Ozarks in a Volkswagen van. The old man gave every penny they had to my Aunt Bobbie and Uncle Bob, a story I heard not long before Dad died. That said a ton about the respect Dad had for Bob and Bobbie. I can count on one hand the number of people my father would have entrusted with $20, let alone a few thousand.
“Everything we had, I gave to them, because I knew I could trust them,” he said. “And, as you know, I didn’t trust anybody. They were good people, and we always got along.”
As I’ve written in this space, Dad and Mom struggled for a long time, especially in the early years. In 1979, Dad decided he needed to learn a trade. Enter Bloomer, Arkansas, where a buddy of the old man made stained glass lamps and other items.
We moved from Neosho, Missouri, to Northwest Arkansas, where Dad learned the stained glass trade. One of my few memories of our one-bedroom house is an office stocked with the material, which proved to be dangerous for a 4-year-old. I still bare the scars on my knees from running and falling onto pieces of glass.
“You probably should have gotten stitches for that,” Dad said. “But, we didn’t have the money.”
The stained glass business lasted a few years. My parents made $805 at their first craft show in Coffeyville, Kansas, and thought they were going to be rich. They were wrong. Finally, after years of just getting by, Dad shifted to leather goods. Nearly 40 years later, he was well known on the crafting circuit as the “Leather Man.”
“Have you ever seen the lamps he did?” Aunt Bobbie said. “He was a master craftsman.”
An artist so dedicated to his craft that he didn’t notice his 4- and 2-year-old sons shotgunning a bottle of wine.
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS SERIES 2022
Part IV: How the heck did I misspell that?
Part III: A partridge and an electronic sign