Toward a Natural History of Reinhardt Boys

Long before first grade, we Reinhardt kids left our homeplaces and began exploring the outside world. My little world basically consisted of two or three streets—Eastwood, Pinecrest and Fuller. My family’s 945-sq. ft. house rested on a large, treeless lot of what my mom called “black gumbo” dirt. Fast growing mimosa trees were planted in the front yard and much parental elbow grease went into nurturing Bermuda and St. Augustine lawns, over what had once likely been a cow pasture or cotton field and before settlers a part of the Grand Prairies of North Texas. My parents’ battle was against the Johnson and nut grasses.



Colors, odors, moving things all captured my interest—ants, crickets, grasshoppers, doodlebugs, lizards, frogs, horny toads (soon to become extinct in North Texas), and most fearsome of all the preying mantis. Storm clouds, water running down street gutters, propping myself on the curb to hold my bike up, watching the garbage men work in the narrow allies, and the smell of honeysuckle (and its sweet drop of nectar) captured my attention. Like the toad, I moved through the hot days of August barefoot, my thick callused soles protecting me through grass, dirt, gravel, concrete hot enough to fry an egg, and melting road tar. I was yet to have a conception of the CO2 load that my later addiction to air conditioning would cause to our planet.

Neighborhood children, and especially the older kids, taught me the ropes, which mostly consisted of play. Our playing was overlain with play words, some of which I repeat below:

One potato, two potato,
Three potato, four,
Five potato, six potato,
Seven potato, more!
[Then the child would remove the fist on the word "more" and the game would begin again.]

continuing with an

Eenie, meenie, meinie, moe
Catch a n*gg*r by the toe
If he hollers make him pay
Fifty dollars everyday
My mother told me to choose the very best one,and you are not IT.

[I think the “not” was added if the leader wanted to switch who was IT at the last instant. It seems to me that older girls were always in charge of not only the counting out, but also the transmission of the oral childhood culture.]

[When I was very young, I remember the neighborhood kids using the above rhyme for one of the favorite neighborhood games--Kick the Can. http://www.gameskidsplay.net/Default.htm
This is an exciting combination of hide and seek and tag. One person closes their eyes and counts to some high number, while everyone else hides. Then, the person who counted (who has incidentally been guarding "the can") has to run around the neighborhood and find everybody. The tricky part is that once a person is found, they have a race, where the person who has just been found has to try to kick the can over before the counter tags them. When that game gets boring, there seems to always be those kids who will hide in a dumb, easy to discover place, with the intent of sprinting for the can if they're caught... it's a good game for building paranoia into your character.]

Xxx and Xxxx sitting in a tree,
K- I- S- S- I- N- G.
First comes love,Then comes marriage;
Here comes xxx with a baby carriage

[With a four leaf clover or a rose:]
She loves me, she loves me not

[With a four-fingered Chinese paper contraption we folded from our notebook paper or Indian Chief tablets:]
1,2,3,4 and folding out the edges, Boy, Girl, Nigger, Squirrel or pretty and ugly girls’ names.

Fatty, Fatty, two by four,
Couldn't get through the bathroom door,
So he did it on the floor,
Licked it up and did some more!

See ya later, alligator.
After while, crocodile.

Silence in the courtroom! The monkey wants to speak.
[Used to call order to allow someone to speak.]

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.

Big talk, little action.

99 bottles of beer on the wall

Cow patty on a lonely road.

[To the tune of "On Top Of Old Smokey" ]
On top of spaghetti
All covered in cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When somebody sneezed

Whistle while you work
Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini bit his weenie
Now it doesn't work.

I'm Popeye The Sailor Man
I live in a garbage can
You’ll never get rich [I'm mixing this with "You're In the Army Now"]
By digging a ditch
I’m Popeye The Sailor Man

Twinkle twinkle little star,

Hello operator please give me #9

Ring-a-ring the rosey
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes [I don't think we Texans could say Atishoo! Atishoo!]
We all fall down

Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall;
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

[From the Internet: I've seen these terms used by adults to categorize children's playground rhymes where the last remaining child is selected as the seacher for hide & go seek, or {saying the rhyme two times in succession} the last two children become the team captains:

choosing "it"
counting out rhymes
elimination rhymes

[Many of these are skipping rhymes.]

****Note that contrary to some books I have read, it seems to me that more often than not children want to be chosen as "it".BTW: when the two team captains are chosen, one at a time they chose members of their team by calling out the name of the remaining children. I believe that it still hurts to be the last child or one of the last child selected. When the children I meet with choose team captains, they use a choosing it rhyme like:

Eenie meenie minie mo
catch a tiger by the toe
if he hollers let him go
ee-nie meen-ie min-ie mo.

The children huddle close together in a semi-circle type formation. The child who selects the captains {because he or she raised his hand first and me or another adult picked him or her] stands in front of the other children. Each child in the semi-circle extends his or her right foot forward. On each word {or in the case of the last line, on each syllable} the "leader" points to each successive child's foot. The leader can not skip a child or add additional words or syllables. The child who the leader is pointing to on the word "mo" {pronounced "moh"} is out and the rhyme is repeated until there is only one child left. That child is "it" or [in the case of competitive games with two teams-one of the team captains].

The same "leader" then starts the rhyme again with the remaining children to pick the second team captain. However, when that game [such as relay races] is played, and the group has time to play that game again, the way we do it in my groups is that the two new captains are the two children who were picked last.I think doing this helps build those last picked children's self-esteem.]

At age 7 or 8, I accompanied my parents and neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Laird for a Friday night dinner out, I think to an Italian restaurant in the Lakewood area. The food was delicious and the beer flowed freely among the adults, my Dad an aficionado of Budweiser beer and Viceroy cigarettes. We drove home in the darkness of the night, I in the back seat sitting between my parents, and I offered to tell the group a joke. As the youngest of two, with a bully big brother and fairly soft spoken parents, I was not a particularly verbal child so my confidence to tell the joke was remarkable. Here’s the joke, reworded a bit from my childhood vocabulary:

A French man was seated in an airplane alongside a Negro man. The French man began a conversation by sniffing his right index finger from base to tip and saying “Cherie.” The Negro then began a sniff at the elbow and continued up the tip of his finger and said “Jezebel.”

My mother, always high strung in this type of intense social situation, let out her usual quick and high pitched wail of guffaw. Mrs. Laird followed with a deep laugh, joined by the two men, who also thought it funny, especially from the mouth of a child. I, of course, knew nothing about French or Negro male or female sexual organs, or sexual stereotypes, or anything else that I was saying. I did intuit that the joke was a subtle blend of racial and sexual putdown. Mrs. Laird asked me to tell another joke but I could not think of one. The next morning, my big brother got in trouble because obviously he or one of his friends was the source of the joke.

And so my learning began, in a culture dominated by Southern male prejudice and sexual imagination. As I grew older, I learned about other peculiarly American (and often American Jewish) male thought patterns about sex, that being the great American commercial enterprise and export product, male-oriented pornography.

"In his book about Marilyn Monroe, [Norman Mailer] wrote, 'Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.' If you are seeking an explanation for why pornography takes up most of the Internet, there it is. "
“Maestro of the Ego“
By Lee Siegel . New York Times
January 21, 2007