Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: Out among the lights with Petula Clark

By Marc Munro Dion

Things I liked when I was in fourth grade:

My dog. He was a big boxer dog named Joey. He had big black jowls and sad brown eyes, and he loved me.

My mother. She was a bank bookkeeper. She used to take me to downtown Taunton, Massachusetts, on Friday nights, back when the whole world got paid on Friday, and she would buy me a limeade at the Woolworth's, and she used to go to a small women's clothing store every week because she always had a dress on layaway, and the understanding was that she'd pay $2 every payday until they let her have the dress.

My father, a bartender who read European royal history as a hobby. On Saturday mornings, he would take me to the bar where he worked and sit me on a stool with a beer glass full of Coke, and I'd watch cartoons on the bar's color television. We didn't have color television at home.

"Shut up, my kid's here!" my father would explain to some patron who asked, "Gene, why are we watching $%^& cartoons?"

The nuns in my four-story, red-brick school. They lived in a two-story red-brick convent across the street from a pool hall and were probably the only people I've ever met who could see heaven as clearly as you can see Nebraska on a map.

Taunton itself, which was then a small industrial city in the Southeastern part of Massachusetts. Not much went into Taunton in those days, and not much came out either. We were self-contained, like a nut in a shell. The town knew only four seasons: Winter. Fourth of July. Red Sox blow it. Christmas.

My mother listened to the Top 40 station when she drove. My father listened to nothing when he drove, not even ballgames. In my memories of Taunton, it's always dusk, and there's always iron-gray slush in the gutters, and the car radio is playing Petula Clark's version of "Downtown."

I loved a small candy store called Mac's, where they sold those long strips of white paper dotted with pastel buttons of candy. They were my favorite, although they barely qualify as candy in any enjoyable sense of the word.

I loved my mother's mother, who lived with us. She had asthma and what we now call COPD and what was then called "a weak heart." She couldn't really play with me because she couldn't breathe well, so instead she taught me to read before I went to kindergarten. Also, she made a tremendous egg custard. When she died, she had nothing of value to leave but her engagement ring. She gave it to my mother and said I should give it to the girl when I got engaged. I did.

"The light's so much brighter there," Petula Clark sang. "You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares."

Uvalde, Texas, has a Walmart. People take their kids there and buy them candy. There's a sports bar called Big Al's. The bar my father worked in was called Ace Nichol's. The song on Mom's car radio may be Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Grandmother may be called Abuela, and she may not have much to leave but an engagement ring.

For the innocent souls that left the broken little bodies, I know what you left.

I didn't know any of you, but we're from the same place, only you never got a chance to look back fondly.

But we'll go back. As Petula Clark sang.

"So maybe I'll see you there. We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares."

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