My family raised me to be a unique kid. By the time I tried to mainstream it with the Girl Scouts, I was already listing my favorite film as Harold and Maud. Guess who didn’t make that movie night suggestion on her own? To this day I still haven’t seen the classic 80’s kids movies like The Goonies. But I’ve seen the PBS documentary about the Donner Party more times than I can remember.
Death was always present in my childhood but not in a bad way. Trips to the cemetery were something to look forward to because we always stopped by the Dairy Queen on the way home. And stuffing your kids with chemical ice cream-like substances is one normal American tradition my family embraced.
I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries. But the one where I’ve racked up the most frequent visits is the Charleroi Cemetery.
Charleroi, Pennsylvania is the town outside of Pittsburgh where my mom’s family is from. Its nickname is The Magic City, and it’s about as fitting of a title as Baltimore’s Charm City mantle.
But it is, in my mind, the quintessential American town. I’m sure kids growing up in California or Alaska have their own version of what a quintessential American town looks like. However, all my relatives own real estate in Pennsylvania cemeteries (trust me, I’ve been there) and that’s helped form my image of America.
When my great-grandparents, immigrants from Ireland and Germany, were living in the area, the town was filled with glass factories and coal mines. My grandparents spent their free time in drinking establishments celebrating the melting pot culture with simple names like the Belgium Club or the French Club. If they got tired of those, they could work their way over to places with more clever names, like The Four Aces, or my favorite, Sit n’ Bull.
I can’t tell you if Sit n’ Bull has anything to do with the notable Native American leader Sitting Bull, but I can tell you that no one ever had to explain to me that bull shitting was another term for hanging out and talking. I heard the term enough that my young mind just absorbed it without question.
Sometimes adults would abbreviate it to B.S.’ing, but that was done mostly to shorten the length of the word, and had nothing to do with protecting children’s ears. I remember standing on a chair to answer the rotary dial phone in my grandma’s kitchen when her sister, who lived up the hill in the house where they were all born, would call asking what she was up to that day. I would scream the question to my grandma watching soap operas in the other room (it would be years before my civilized friends trained me not to do that anymore). She would reply, “Just B. S.’ing with Norma,” and cute little me dressed in candy colored corduroys would parrot it back over the phone and that would be the end of the call.
Norma’s full name was Norma Jean, but having stayed in one town her whole life, she had no need to change her name to Marilyn, like that other Norma Jean, Ms. Monroe.
Norma’s probably up in the Charleroi Cemetery now, too, just like the rest of the town.
The ZsaZsa Balza Column 