Hopping Hearts

Certain visual cues would prompt specific stories from Mammam. My brother used to enjoy pointing out the various cues – sometimes repeatedly. Mammam would unknowingly oblige – again and again and again. It sounds mean, I know, but we needed to laugh - we couldn’t cry any more.

When Mammam walked in our kitchen in Tharptown, something there would prompt her to tell us about Dyngus Day – a story that took place in her youth, as most did, when the girls chased the boys with long switches – whipping their legs as they ran. Only now, with a knowledge of that tradition, do I realize the humor she saw in that story. Frankly, I also find it easy to imagine the joy one might get from dumping water on some one’s head to wake them in the morning – something else that was apparently common on Dyngus Day.

Mammam would look out her front window at the low ridge where the railroad track used to be and she would tell us about the time the train hit the cow. In its repeated telling the story slipped away from its inceptive moment and as it slipped, exaggerations and related notions clung. Every time she told a story it was a new truth.

As I recall it, she and the other neighborhood kids were playing in the field around the tracks when a train struck a cow that was standing in its path. “That train hit it SO hard it knocked its heart right out of its body, but that heart kept beating and beating! It beat so hard that it bounced all the way down the tracks to the silk mill!” She would imitate its movement with her hand on the counter in a gesture that might also illustrate the hopping of a bunny. The silk mill was about a half mile from where the cow was struck. She’d continue, “That heart beat and beat all the way to Franklin Street and we chased it and chased and it just kept hop-hop-hopping! – all the way down to the silk mill! – we chased it and laughed and laughed!”

This current map of a section of Shamokin shows the route the heifer's heart hopped (A) – it went in a westerly direction. B is the site of the former Eagle Silk Mill, C is where Mammam lived most of her adult life, D is where my parents currently reside and E indicates the house where my father was born.