Red.
Green.
Orange.
Blue.
Smears of sticky color burn holes in the black sky, looping and whirling, riveting my five-year-old eyes.
Two batons, tipped at both ends in fluorescent paint, flung high into the night spinning, caught on their fall by a svelte majorette standing tall in plumed hat and white boots—Marie Cumming, our downstairs neighbor.
#
I barely remember Dwight. It dwells in a hazy time between active toddlerhood and full-fledged littleboyness.
My father had finished his chemistry degree at Knox, plus a few teaching courses at Normal. He was teaching chemistry, physics, and driver training at Dwight Township High School.
Dwight was a very small town in North Central Illinois. About 2,800 people then.
Memories flee, circle, and evade. What I mostly can recall is a small, warm klatsch of teachers and townspeople.
#
We lived upstairs, above Rogers and Marie Cumming.
Rogers Cumming—whom people called Roger Cummings, imagine that—was a music teacher and band master. Dapper and energetic, with a shiny bald dome, he was proably around thirty, only a little older than Dad.
Rogers’s wife, Marie, was a honey. She did not hold an official teaching position, as far as I know, but was very musical. She was also statuesque, blonde, and fair of face. She gave lessons to young girls on baton-twirling, one of the social graces in mid-century, small-town Illinois. Occasionally she could be seen performing, herself, in the uniform of a drum majorette. She was a knockout!
Rogers and Marie had a Wurlitzer organ in their living room. Often, Marie, my sweetheart, sat at that organ and rolled out a rollicking version of my favorite song, “The Too-Fat Polka.”
A year or two before, my favorite song had been “Bingo Bango Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo,” a novelty song recorded in 1947 by Louis Prima and his band.
But Marie and I were beyond all that. We were sophisticates.
. . . Good night, sweet princess,
And flights of angels sing thee to they rest.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
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