WEST VIEW PARK PART 2

The lines in front of our little trailer never seemed to get any shorter and on days when there was a special school picnic at the park we never stopped...unless Maggie (as we were now encouraged to call her ) decided that we all needed a break. Out of the blue she would suddenly unhitch the big wooden shutters on the front of the trailer... closing up the front completely......oblivious to whomever was standing in the line...after announcing "THAT'S IT". Then the four of us would lean against the counter or sit on a milk crate in silence until Maggie and Helen would decide to re-open and face the kiddies again. Every once in awhile when my partner and I are working on some necessary but tedious project I'll eventually say " That's it." He's pretty well trained at this point and will act accordingly.

Selling Ice Balls on a hot summer day in Kiddeland will quickly fire anyone's imagination. Doing that in a cramped little trailer with two kinda big women with mild to serious mental conditions will enhance that vision. My cousin was about 15, and a capable ice ball server. We always featured two flavors in the upside down jugs with little on and off faucets. In spite of my cousins' expertise, Maggie was his nemesis, and she really got in his way. If a little kid couldn't decide if he wanted cherry or orange she'd just give him anything and say "next". If he wanted cherry and she was in the midst of giving him orange, she'd simply slip the ice ball from beneath the orange and pour on the cherry.

Then there were the bees. Summer sun....a crowded stand....very sugary syrup....and the bees were everywhere. Sometimes they'd get into a jug of our syrup, especially when Maggie would place a pail under the syrup dispensers to save the dripped liquid....then pour that into an empty jug and call the brownish concoction "tutti fruitti"...(with an occasional bee floating in it). This horrified my cousin, the ice ball king at this point, but his pleas fell on Maggie's deaf ears (literally). The show had to go on.

Now I'm three years older than my much referred to cousin, thus I had a car, and we decided at one point to give "the girls" a ride home. I had a two door Chevy at the time, and getting these two women into the back seat was a monumental task for some reason, and it seemed to challenge everyone involved. They both tried to somehow back into the car, with Maggie shouting " Get IN Helen...GET IN!". Now it crossed my mind at some point that perhaps these two had never been in an automobile before...but that seemed unlikely, and whatever the problem was, we were changed forever more. By the next morning when I picked him up for work I was already shouting " Get IN Helen " before he even reached for the handle. From that day until the present, my cousin has been called "Helen"....by me...by my family...by our friends...and once in front of one of his co-workers.

The look he gave me was memorable. Through the years he's tried to make " Maggie"...or "Margaret" stick to me....but it's never been etched into my life the way that "Helen" has stuck to him. The last part of the West View experience will have to be tomorrow...I need to take a break and call Helen.