Who better to teach the game of War to a four-year-old than a man who managed to avoid blistering agents in Europe? That man would be George.
George and the boy turned the cards week after week until the child recognized every number and every face in the deck. George explained that you play the cards dealt to you and that a card’s power depends on the one it goes up against. He taught the boy that loss can turn to victory, and vice versa, and that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. “We don’t have chickens” the boy replied.
George and his wife Mary Jane would have made wonderful parents but that wasn’t to be. They found prayers of fertility to be tricky. Across the street the prayers of a couple with more children than they planned were answered with even more babies, each more beautiful than the other.
Mary Jane and George began to borrow the boy next door. Saturday
mornings became a ritual. The boy would watch for Mary Jane to raise her kitchen blinds as a signal that he should come over for a second breakfast.
Mary Jane hailed from Kentucky where hams, sausages, eggs, biscuits, syrup and canned fruit grow on trees. The boy, a runt with the puffy eyes of the chronically malnourished (he wasn’t), would knock off everything Mary Jane could throw at him. She also introduced him to his coffee, mostly steaming milk and sugar.
Mary Jane would sit the boy next to her on the couch and they would “visit” over her candies (this was decades before Forest Gump, mind you). Each chocolate sat in a neat row in its own paper doily. Fussy tissues separated the layers. She taught the boy to identify the shape and color and squiggle on top of each one, then guess what was inside. She never reached for his favorites, he could only assume she had bad judgment in chocolates.
These were the first times the boy was allowed to venture out of his house on his own. It was only a few yards between back doors but it was as heady as stepping out of a spacecraft. Unlike the astronauts who came later, he wasn’t aware that his every step was being triangulated from those two kitchen windows.
The couple knew that time and maturation was working against them. They knew the boy would eventually cross the street and go off kindergarten. Families had begun buying television sets and the Funks would never be able to compete with Ramar of the Jungle and Sky King. They knew that Mighty Mouse was on the way.
