My parent's landlady would come around every once and awhile. She was a chain smoker and I cannot remember her name. My mom would talk with her and I would go off and smoke clothespins in the hallway. Yes, I pretended that the clothespins were cigarettes and would mimic the landlady. My mom actually took a photo of me smoking clothespins in the hallway. One day while my mom was talking with the landlady, I ran up to them and the landlady's cigarette embedded itself in my neck. Today you can still see the burn mark from the landlady's cigarette.
On the weekends my parents would hang out with the Arnolds and they had a son named Kevin, who was my best friend. Our parents would sit out in the Arnold's backyard with our mother's drinking brandy alexanders and our father's maybe beer. I can't remember because my dad doesn't drink that much. While our parents were hanging out in the backyard, Kevin and I would be upstairs playing in Kevin's play room. He actually had a designated area for play. At our apartment the play room was the whole house. Kevin was a good friend but much older than me. He was already in school and I just was anticipating starting kindergarten at Lincoln Irving. Kevin and two other neighborhood kids who were much older than Kevin helped me celebrate my 5th birthday. I remember a picture my mom took of me in Bert and Ernie bell bottom blue jeans, Kevin in a blue shirt and the two neighbor kids whose dad was never home and when he was he was drunk.
Our apartment was mixed in amongst some single family homes. At the end of our street was a huge drop off that overlooked an old abandoned school. There was a metal cylindrical shoot that protruded out of the third story. During Halloween, this building became a haunted house. I would sit with my parents on our front porch and listen to the kids screaming and ghouls rushing out of the haunted house. They used the shoot as a way of escaping the ghosts and ghouls. I was very frightened of that building throughout the year.
My dad had a metal detector and one spring I was walking with my dad as he swayed the metal detector back and forth. At one point the detector began making noise, my dad dug into the soil uncovering a buffalo nickel. It looked just like a regular nickel but had a picture of a buffalo. My dad told me that it was an old nickel. We spent lots of time at the park with that metal detector. The park was fun and was within walking distance from the apartment. I don't remember a playground but large statues of men on horses and a huge hill that overlooked downtown Moline. We would go sledding in this park during the winter.
