I Didn’t Know
I didn’t know how bad I had it.
I didn’t know how good I had it.
My earliest recollection in life is living over a tavern.
(This probably explains my love for poetry.)
I remember, at least I think I remember,
a brown bear on a leash dancing at the juke box.
No, I wasn’t drinking, nor was the bear,
but we might have been the only two.
I remember the painters and carpenters early in the morning
stopping in for an eye opener on their way to work.
And the Swede that showed up bare foot in the dead of winter
after his wife hid his shoes so he wouldn’t go out drinking.
Shortly before I started kindergarten we moved -
to a different house - over a different tavern.
It was called Danny’s. They served nickel beers
and I was three blocks closer to school.
Danny had a fetish for manikins.
He placed them randomly around the bar.
My half blind great grandfather,
visited us from out of town.
He complained bitterly one night as he came upstairs
about the guy in the bar who wouldn’t speak to him.
One day the painters came to paint a new
Rheingold beer sign on the side of our house.
I was so pleased to think
that my house was being painted.
Across the street was another bar, the Television Inn.
They had the first TV that I had ever seen.
While in that bar I heard a lot of adult language.
Not the kind that causes movies to be R rated,
but instead lower case adult language, covering everything
from the Cubs to God, and with equal reverence.
This bar also had a bookie in the back room.
One day, as I watched from across the street,
I cried as the bookie, Whitey,
was being cuffed and loaded into a paddy wagon.
I didn’t know how bad I had it.
I didn’t know how good I had it.
Curt Vevang