Walking the Big Valley
A Little Off Center
by
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Chapter 56—Lovely Girl The detachment commander at The train ride home was very long and very crowded, and when John got a passenger seat, he wanted to keep it at all cost, that is until a lovely girl standing in the aisle beside John made eye contact with him and fluttered her lashes until he felt so guilty he couldn’t stand it. That was the case when he stood up and said to her, “Here, take my seat.” He had to conceal his anger because he had the window seat and the soldier who should have given up his seat was sitting on the aisle right beside her. In a short while, the culprit in the aisle seat was in obvious bladder discomfort, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he finally had to get up to go to the restroom. John immediately seized this opportunity to jump in his vacated seat beside the lovely girl. The girl no doubt assumed John was a very fast worker as she volunteered the information she was single and was living away from home in Washington D. C. Her trip was evidently very exhausting because her eyes soon dropped shut and her head came to rest on John’s shoulder. In order to make her more comfortable, John placed his arm around her shoulders, and it seemed to make her rest even better. After the culprit returned from the restroom, he stood in the aisle and glared at them. This lasted only a short time until they arrived in the Washington D. C. where the lovely girl had to get off the train. John struggled mightily with his better judgment to keep from jumping off the train with her. After the slow ride up the coast on the plush, upholstered Southern Railroad train that stopped in every tank town, John and Harry transferred in Washington D.C. over to the Pennsy cattle cars, which made up for the discomfort of their wooden seats by going ninety miles per hour non stop into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The furlough flew by and ended when Ralph took John back to Harry’s for the ride back to the On the train ride back to Washington, John opened a shoebox full of sandwiches, bananas, and cookies, which Mrs. Thomas, a neighbor of John’s mother, had packed for them but Harry was feeling too down in the dumps to help eat it so John reluctantly ate it all himself.
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About the Book
These stories, categorized by “Early Life”, “Military Service” and “People I Have Known” are in the form of essays. They are authentic and are intended to enlighten as well as entertain the readers, some of whom may have their own version of the same period and who can perhaps relate to many of the stories. This book sifts through memories from the Nineteen Twenties through the Twenty First Century, starting with the last gasp of the “horse and buggy” days and extending through the “Great Depression”, “World War Two” and beyond. It is not a historic treatise but rather a personal recall of incidents and events which were of significance to the writer.
About the Author
J. L. Durnin was born in 1924 into a family which was poor by today’s standards. This was not unusual because in 1924 everybody was poor by today’s standards. He experienced living through bad times and good times, although in retrospect they were sometimes hard to tell apart. When old men get together, each tries to top the other with tales of hardships and how many miles they had to walk to school. Fortunately, the author survived those ordeals and secured a comfortable career with a world-wide electronics company in the heyday of its meteoric growth. Now retired, his time is spent learning new lessons from his precocious only grandson who came into his life in 1996 and who rides to school on a bus.