Armourdale

This is a song that I began when I was young,
Every year it changes and it's never really done.
Why I keep on writing it I do not really know,
But for all I've seen and done it's all I have to show.

- from my barely started song, "Lifesong."

The story begins in Armourdale, a labor-class neighborhood on the south side of Kansas City. In the early 50s it was one of the stinkiest places in the world. Armourdale was adjacent to rail yards, stockyards and meat packing plants. It was cradled in a loop of the legendarily polluted Kansas River where slaughterhouses dumped what was left after they rendered livestock. A couple of soap plants spewed chemical filled smoke that didn't help the smell at all.

It was here that my mother's parents raised seven kids and lost one in a tiny three-bedroom house with no yard. This is where my mother grew up. And this is the one place my family returned to again and again during the first quarter of my life. I grew up in a half dozen homes in several states but I visited Armourdale as often as my parents could afford to, until both my mother's parents were gone.

In 1951 a flood drowned the stockyards and covered Armourdale with river sludge. My grandparents rebuilt their destroyed house and bought the lot next door, giving them an actual yard for the first time. A little while later my parents began dating.

Both of my parents lived in relatively poor neighborhoods and attended tough city schools. But they weren't like the other kids. What was unusual about my parents and what they had in common was that they were both exceptionally presentable.

First, they were very attractive. They looked like well-groomed versions of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae from the Al Capp comic strip. And they spoke well, always using proper diction, pronunciation and grammar. They had impeccable manners and erect posture.

And they were intellectually presentable. They aspired to read good books and listen to good music and to contemplate good philosophies. They were people you could take to the symphony and not be embarrassed by them.

Dad entered the Army around the time I entered the world. It was a short two-year hitch and the Korean conflict had just concluded.

When I was about one year old I contracted pneumonia. Mom blamed herself. She said she had just bathed me and wrapped me in a towel, then carried me outside and down to the apartments' laundry room and back in cold weather. I was hospitalized at Wright Patterson Medical Center, the closest military hospital to where my father was stationed and a place since rumored to have performed alien autopsies a few years prior to my visit.

I was isolated from my parents and placed in an oxygen tent. Dad said that before this event I was a happy, loving little kid. He said he and my mother visited me at the hospital and could see me through the ward window. They waved and smiled. I gave them a dirty look and turned my back on them. For many years after that time my usual facial expression was a pissed off frown.