Once Again The Fate Of The Wanting Habits-The Eternal Search For El Dorado  

By Ronan Saint John

Recently in drawing some comments about my hone of its many guises, the most common one that the location was somewhere in the American West during Spanish-cowboy days) I mentioned that for a kid like me, a projects kid, such legends played into the wanting habits all kids from such places had about having “enough.” That comment above all others, maybe reflecting the times or readership, drew sighs of disbelief. Disbelief that a child’s wanting habits were so strong that they would be worthy of comment some fifty years later. The kicker was a reader, a young reader from the tone of the remarks, never had heard of such a term as “wanting habits” except in an old-time Bessie Smith song from the 1920 Down-Hearted Blues. On the one hand I was glad that this person’s frame of reference was so remote but also flabbergasted that some people, young or old, had no clue that a determined part of the population had such desires, and had had them unfulfilled.

Now there is no way that what I, and every project kid from my project, or any growing up project after World War II called that ache in our hearts “wanting habits” but that is what they were. That is as good a way to put the condition, still lingering in the background today, that I felt. You see what that young reader was, is clueless about is that some people grow up in desperate poverty not necessarily of their own making. The classic statement of that would come from hard-pressed mothers when you asked for say a dollar to go to the double-header Saturday afternoon movies. The answer: “we barely have enough money to pay the rent never mind that.” That refrain punctured all my childhood (until, old enough, I figured out way to get stuff that I could sell to do what I needed to do not always legally) in some variation for we were poor dirt through all that period until I got to high school and we got some partial relief.     

         

Memories, sharp memories come back of endless bouts of breakfast oatmeal, of having Karo syrup sandwiches, yes, the blood sugar level was through the roof, endless bologna and cheese sandwiches and Saturday franks and beans. More. Wearing older brothers’ hand-me-down whatever condition including what must have been generations of patched jackets and trousers. Many cold nights when we could not pay the oil bill and could get no more credit. Having girls, girls I was interested in from the ranch house development newly built up the road from the projects dismiss me out of hand once they knew I was a projects boy. Yeah, those wanting habits came in many forms and guises. So don’t tell me that there were no wanting habits developed back then that lasted in some cases a lifetime. Don’t tell me an El Dorado dream was hooey either.