What to Know About the One-Year Garage: 1960

It was just after six on a sleepy Saturday morning a couple months ago and I was driving the Beehive’s snow-white Toyota Cross through sludgoville, heading to the foo-foo coffee shop next to the junior college. The flight back to New Sludgoville was scheduled for noon and I still had to pack and was feeling a little rushed but I made sure I drove slowly. Twenty-five miles per hour is the posted maximum all across town and you can count on good ol’ Deputy Randall to be hiding out there somewhere in his black-under-blue Police Interceptor waiting to nail you for even a couple over the limit. Tell it to the judge, sir. But I didn’t mind driving slowly that morning because it had hit me the night before that aside from returning to sludgoville for Big Sis’s or the Beehive’s eventual funeral it was very likely the last time I’d ever visit my beloved NoDak hometown. Thought I’d better take the morning’s opportunity to check out some of the important sights of my life one final time. Shoot some pics to help my increasingly glitchy memory banks link this place to that face. And at the very top of my list was Old Man Granger’s house. Figured it might make a good Mile Marker story too. You never know.

This is Part Two of a three-part series. Click the link to read Part One.
It had been a glorious NoDak autumn Saturday morning for twelve-year-old me. I’d woken to a gorgeous orange-red sunrise and the cool prairie breeze drifting across my face as it blew through my opened window. All the birds outside were merrily greeting the day in song, all the robins and wrens and sparrows and meadowlarks and mourning doves, even the peacocks and ducks and geese and swans calling out from over at the Deaf School pond. I’d jumped out of bed and into my routine early, stripping off my pajamas and putting on my weekend duds before pouring myself a heaping bowlful of Lucky Charms then parking out on the living room couch to watch cartoons on our big thirty-six inch color console RCA. Four hours later—after Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner and the Jetsons and Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats and Archie and then Fat Albert—it was noontime and the Lucky Charms were long gone and I was hungry again so I’d decided to hop on my StingRay and ride across town to Grandma Lettie’s to see if she’d make me one of her world-famous fried bologna and Miracle-Whip sandwiches but when I got there she wasn’t home. Figured I’d wait for her a bit and headed out to her backyard to climb Big Olie, the giant oak she’d planted as a sapling fifty years ago when she first bought the house, but as I walked up to Olie’s trunk, I glanced across the way at Old Man Granger’s place and noticed something interesting—the walk-in door to his garage was ever-so-slightly ajar. Hm.