Wild Kingdom

The "wild kingdom" of my childhood consisted of rats, cockroaches, flies, sparrows, and ghosts. There were few dogs on Clark Street but all the grocers kept a cat around to keep the rats under control. Then there were the horses that pulled the milk, bread, and ice wagons. Occasionally someone would come down the street on horseback. Strange, now, to think of men on horseback in the heart and gut of the city, but this was the forties - a time when our electric refrigerator was the first on the block. Hence the daily appearance of the horsedrawn ice wagon. One morning I crossed the street, heading for the alley that led to my school over on St. Urbain Street, and came upon a crowd gathered by the milkwagon. An old woman lay on the street, covered by a blanket, and the way I heard it the horse had gone crazy and ran her down. Later, at recess, the word was that the old lady died and the horse would be shot. The horse was back the next day. It must have been a ghost. As for the lady, I didn't know her and wouldn't recognize her if I saw her again. If I did see her, she would have been a ghost, too. There were many ghosts on Clark Street. Any time some kid got in an accident the story among us surviving kids was he got killed. Later, weeks or months, he'd be back on the street - obviously a ghost. No one was ever injured in my childhood days - we didn't know what it meant to be injured - if you got hurt you were dead. We didn't really know what death was, either, come to think of it. Reality was all mixed up and full of contradictory facts, yet in our minds completely opposing certainties could easily co-exist. For example, it was a fact of life that we'd get bigger as we got older. The evidence proved it. Our older brothers, our parents, everyone was bigger and we understood that we'd get older and, therefore, bigger. My friend and I were out on the street one day comparing the ages and sizes of our grandfathers. My grandfather is so old he's as tall as that building, I said pointing up at the three story textile factory a few yards away. It was logical and I believed it even though my grandfather lived with us and I saw him every day of my life and could see that he easily fit under the ceiling of our normal sized flat. Yet I wasn't making it up. But back to the wildlife. Most of the animals in my environment were some form of vermin, even the birds. I'd seen pictures of glorious birds, big and beautiful, but all I saw in real life were dull sparrows, and you couldn't get close to them. The others you wouldn't dare try.