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Bric-a-brac and memory: I keep this probably well over a century old student's slate in my office. When I was a child in Iowa, we lived across the street from the Otto family. The Ottos were a very nice elderly couple, probably in their upper 80s at the time (early 1980s) ...
Mr. Otto was a First World War veteran to give you a sense of their age. They lost their only child in a tragic bicycle accident many years prior, and sort of treated my brother and me as adoptive grandchildren since they had none of their own ...
We spent many hours in their house, reading about new developments in transatlantic flight and the up and coming Mussolini in their encyclopedia set from the 1920s, listening to who knows where in the world on Mr. Otto's ham radio set, and eating candy ...
They sometimes "lent" us some of their son's toys, like an antique Wyandotte cork gun and this school slate. They just were genuinely nice old people, in contrast to our other elderly neighbor Mrs. Kerr, a hunched nonagenarian with two canes and a nasty disposition ...
She kept old soda bottles full of marbles on her window sill, probably from when she played as a presumably happier child while her parents read newspaper articles about the bombing of the Maine and the McKinley presidency ...
Mr. Otto's funeral was the first that I attended as a child. Anyways, a snippet of life on West 10th Street in Davenport, Iowa almost forty years ago or so.
