Looking Out: A boy can really do something with a submarine
“Did it come today?” I ask my 10-year-old brother Billy, who is coming in the house from retrieving the mail.
Billy is 18 months older, and every year promises to buy me a BB gun when I get to be his age, but I never do catch up and he never buys me the gun.
We’ve been checking the mailbox on the front porch all summer, as soon as we hear the mailman. We’re too young to know how lucky we are to have an audible mailman.
He’s a whistler, and not just an ordinary whistler. He whistles complex songs and can whistle loudly and in perfect pitch. Today he was doing the “William Tell” Overture as he walked down the sidewalk with his big leather bag.
“No, doggone it,” says Billy, shuffling through the stack of mail. “But here’s the new Superman comic book.”
He plops down on the couch and starts reading the comic book.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I sigh.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. No mail,” he says.
Mom was curious last spring when we kept asking for Frosted Flakes and each ate two bowls every day.
“Don’t you want some Raisin Bran for a change?” she’d ask.
“NO!” we’d say in unison. “Frosted Flakes.”
Why can’t she realize that by sending in 10 Frosted Flakes box tops we’ll get a toy submarine that will actually streak across the bathtub, submerge and then resurface? Can’t she read?
Billy and I discuss the issue and decide not to tell her because we know she’ll remind us of our unhappy experience with the secret decoder ring we had won by sending in Wheaties box tops a year before.
Not only had it taken months to arrive, it turned out to be a stupid little trinket. It took a long time to write a coded message and even longer to decode it. We had discovered, Billy and I, that we had very little secret information to share. Then Billy lost the ring in a game of marbles he played with an older kid at the park.
But a real submarine! This is a toy that a boy can really do something with!
Getting the mail was an adventure. Real letters written by real people. Great big Sears and JC Penney catalogs. Boys’ Life magazines. Superman comic books. Plus a bunch of junk for our parents and our older sister, Susie.
The weeks crept by. It was almost time to start school again.
One day I am playing in the backyard when I hear the unmistakable sound of our mailman whistling “Stars and Stripes Forever,” doing an amazing job on the piccolo parts and thumping out the bass rhythm by slapping his leather bag.
I race around the house to the mailbox, open it and there! Right on top, bearing the Frosted Flakes logo was a box. Our submarine!
Billy sticks his head out the door and tries to grab the box out of my hand. He ends up tearing a new Superman comic book. We run around the house to the backyard and open the box. We are so excited.
Minutes later, after Mom helps us fill a tiny chamber with baking soda, we place the submarine in the bathtub we had just filled and watch it veer a few inches and sink. It never comes up.
It is another piece of cheap nothingness.
Fortunately, three strips of Scotch tape and our Superman comic book is ready to read, so the day isn’t totally ruined.
The next day, we switch to Raisin Bran.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: A boy can really do something with a submarine
