Poem: I Grew Up with Tom Mix

Here is the poem that Maria read on Andrew Fielding's radio program.

I Grew Up with Tom Mix

I grew up with Tom Mix

and Roy Rogers,

Hopalong Cassidy,

the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

The good guys always were wore

white hats so it was easy to tell them 

from the bad guys.  Little boys had cap

guns and six shooters with holsters. 

Some of the boys

even wore cowboy vests and boots. 

We believed the story.  We listened

to the brown counter top radio,

made of imitation mahogany tan netting

over its speakers.  We’d pull kitchen chairs

up to the counter on the built in china closet,

and in the kitchen, heated by a huge black iron

coal stove, we’d listen to the programs.

We had to imagine their horses, their white hats,

miles of open space and mountain ranges we

had never seen, our imaginations filling in the

gaps left by whatever we didn’t know,

 the places we’d never been.

The radio let us leave behind that Paterson

apartment, transported us to the great valleys 

of the West, to covered wagons, the saloons,

the shootouts on dirty, unpaved streets. 

Our real world had boundaries built by my

Italian parents and the streets 

we were allowed to travel, 

the Riverside Oval on one end and Fourth

Avenue and Mastalia’s grocery store 

and Burkes’s candy store on the other, 

and in between, the children we played

with each day. But huddled near the radio 

we could go anywhere, be anyone,

imagine lives

so different from our own, exciting 

and dangerous, where at the end of each

program we knew no hero we loved 

and admired ever died.  

copyright 2012, The Place I Call Home, NYQ Books.