pennsylvania-ish BUDDY ME TO THE BATHROOM ON DARK NIGHT
IN
the attic of my home when I was growing up in Shamokin, the ceiling sloped down so that an adult had to duck when standing too close to the side walls. Fascinatingly to us kids, on the lower wall was a small wooden door, just big enough for a toddler to enter. It led to the dark, spooky crawl space above the kitchen, but we always called it the coobie hole and treated it like our own, private haunted house: Too scary to do more than twist the wooden latch, open the door and slam it shut before something terrifying reached out to grab us! When I grew older I noticed schools, daycares and even McDonald’s PlayPlace offering “cubbies” for children’s backpacks and shoes, and it took a while for me to realize coobie hole was coal miner slang. I guess whatever monster lived in our house actually resided in a cubby hole. That’s the thing about language. Kids don’t question it. They just repeat it. Which is why my older siblings always bet me in any race, and why we loved the shiny metal slidin’ board
at the playground. That thing was tall, and you could really fly down it. Sometimes we slid right off the end and landed on our doopas in the sand at the bottom. Ouch! We’d cool off by slugging water from our neighbor’s outdoor spicket. Well, cripes ol’ Friday, we sure weren’t going to drink from the orange, mine runoff waters of Shamokin Crick. An even better way to cool off was to sit on a swing and enjoy an ice-cold fudgickle. On really hot days, you had to eat it quickly. Summer also brought fresh, ripe tamaytas and mangos, which could be used in a delicious spaghetti sauce. If you’re not from the Coal Region, you might think someone is putting a tropical fruit in their spaghetti sauce, but rest assured, for reasons I’ll never understand, we always called green peppers mangos. We always knew when the ladies were making spaghetti by the sharp, tangy smell of simmering mangos. One thing about having four sisters was that you never had to make that scary walk down a dark hallway to use
the bathroom at night. I’d just shake the shoulder of the nearest sleeping sister and ask, “Buddy me to the bathroom?” and she’d tumble out of bed without question. I’d do the same for her, stopping only to slip into my beddies if it was a cold night. Kids don’t always understand grownups’ humor, which is why I never got the joke when, after a haircut, some older neighbor would always say, “Hey, Cindy, didja get your ears moved?” I’d touch my ears to make sure they were in the same place and wonder why that neighbor laughed. If my siblings and I misbehaved, my parents sometimes threatened us with a lickin’. But when we were just clowning around, my mom might say, “What am I going do with you? Chop you up for firewood and sell you to the sheeny.” We had no idea what a sheeny was because rag peddlers no longer traveled from house to house in the 1960s, but we also knew no one, least of all our loving mother, was going to chop us up for firewood.
Can you speak Coal Region? • spicket – spigot or faucet
• mango – green pepper • fooler – pacifier
• lickin’ – spanking
• bet – past tense of beat
• cripes ol’ Friday – No idea what this means, we said it all the time
• buddy me – go with me
• slidin’ board – slide
• crick – creek
• sheeny – traveling rag peddler
• doopa – Polish for rear end
• Fudgickle – Fudgesicle frozen chocolate treat • tamayta – tomato
• beddies – bedroom slippers • get your ears moved – get
my story – soap opera that a person was very interested in watching
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• slug – gulp a drink
• batroom – bathroom
a haircut INSIDE PENNSYLVANIA | JUNE 2021
• coobie hole – a dark, attic crawl space where monsters surely lived
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4/28/21 5:30 PM
