Eighty Memories for Eighty Years: #3 Dixie Cups and Jackknives

In the early days of my childhood, there was an annual Dominion Day pot-luck church picnic at the Crescent Road Park. For the first time, I saw men whom I had previously only seen in dark suits, white shirts and conservative ties, now madly hopping in gunny sacks across the park, or tying two of their four legs together for a 3 legged race, and then falling miserably on the ground in their haste to beat each other across the finish line. I couldn’t figure out why older men would do that.

As well, Dixie cups of vanilla ice cream were served at those picnics – small containers of melting ice cream served with wooden spoons attached to lid of the ice cream.

The lid, one could pull off with a small round cardboard tab.

I can still feel the taste of the wooden spoon in my mouth.

Perhaps I licked mine more than most people.

Finally I own my own jackknife.
I have been wondering why I have been
carrying it around with me on the side of my walker.
Finding it a bit heavy, I have stored it elsewhere.
No game of mumbley-peg in my future.

That park rims the brow of the Crescent Hill and is only a couple of blocks away from the church. The original building was finished back in the early 1940’s. People who donated money to the church had their names painted on some of the bricks that and when I was small, I could go looking along the outside walls of the church to find those names, peering up under the bricks.

As well, my father would play mumbley-peg with the 12 year old boys out on the lawn when Sunday School was over.

When I was small I was on the circle of onlookers. I was there wondering if I would ever get a jackknife of my own so that I could play that game, although I was not sure I would be invited in, since I thought it might be a game associated with having the priesthood.