Every Friday night during my youth was spent at my grandmother’s home in the East End of Houston. She lived only a few feet off of Navigation Blvd. in the tiny house where she and my grandfather had raised eight children. The area was slowly overtaken by factories and businesses so the number of actual homes on the street became less and less over time. At the end of the dead end street was a huge warehouse for the old Weingarten grocery stores that dominated Houston at that time much as HEB does now. 

My mother and aunts and uncles were a noisy bunch who often had penny ante poker games while we kids played outside. From that vantage point we always enjoyed the aroma of roasting coffee beans from the factory not so far down the way from Grandma’s place. It always brought fond memories of the great times that I had with my cousins over the years. We were a lively bunch who felt more like brothers and sisters than cousins. Somehow back then we just assumed that Grandma would always live there and that our parents would be forever be engaged in an endless poker game that brought out their booming voices and ever present laughter. 

It’s a miracle that all of them and us did not eventually die of lung cancer because the smoke inside the house encased anyone inside in a fog so thick that it clung to our clothing until we washed the items that we had worn. I remember my eyes burning from the noxious fumes but none of us had any idea back then that the nicotine was dangerous. We just wanted an excuse to be outside and the smoke gave us that. Otherwise it would have been incredibly entertaining just to sit and listen to the sibling banter that always ensued. I honestly found interplay to be incredibly hilarious and entertaining. 

Nonetheless we kids wanted to breathe so staying outside was always preferable and we invented one silly game after another. The smell of that coffee from Maxwell House still lives in my brain. I brings back memories so lovely that it is almost as though I am back to being a kid again. Those were halcyon days when none of us seemed to have a care in the world. Our parents were beautiful and we were scrawny and scrappy and living kind of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn lives that seem to imaginary. That house and the aroma of coffee wafting over our play was heavenly. 

The best nights came when the adult poker games broke up early for one reason or another. My uncles Andy and Paul might have night shift work and have to leave or Uncle Willie would be taking his wife to the Friday night wrestling matches downtown. Whenever that happened our moms would suddenly decide that it was time for a visit to the Coastal Salvage store down Navigation Street where treasures of all kinds was on sale at rock bottom prices. There was no telling what we might find in the aisles covered with exotic items brought in from the Port of Houston which was not that far away. 

My mother rarely purchased anything but the hunt was the fun part anyway. The place was like a Turkish bazaar, a least that is how my mind imagined it to be. In the winter there were overhead heaters that blowed warm air from flames that seemed to be threatening to set the whole place ablaze. Surely, I imagined, pirates had to be involved with the enterprise. Where else would such wonders find their way to a spot near my grandmother’s house?

Sometimes when our games became boring and the poker party droned on we would sit down on the front porch of Grandma’s house and tell stories that more often than not frightened us enough to prefer braving the smokey air inside. Then we would settle down to watching even scarier shows on television or tuning in to the Friday night wrestling fest that was hosted by Paul Bosch. It took me a long while to realize how totally fake those fights were but the crazy personalities were fun to watch. There were always heroes and villains and a crowd roused up with enough beer to keep us entertained. 

We’d keep and eye on the time and whenever our mom decided to leave around nine thirty it was a sure sign that we would stop for ice cream on Telephone Road on the way home. The lady who always worked there seemed rather irritated when we just barely got through the door before the place was supposed to close. I’d order my usual butter pecan and my mother was sure to ask for banana nut. We lick those cones with the kind of joy that only children are fully able to appreciate.

Not all the gold in the world would have made us any happier than we were on those Friday nights. It never occurred to us that the times we knew would not last forever. First our grandmother died when we were young adults and nothing was ever quite the same after that. Then one by one my mother and her siblings also died. Now the angel of death has landed on three of our cousins as the rest of us grow older and ridden with aches and pains of the old.

We are spread all over the place now and it is rare for us to get together in one place. Most of the time that happens at funerals but even then we reignite a joy that is immeasurable. Sometimes on Friday nights when the wind blows I imagine that there is a whiff of that wonderfully aromatic coffee in the air. I think of those days and forget that I am older than my grandmother was back then. Somehow I hear my aunts and uncles taunting each other and laughing good naturedly while my cousins and I are barefoot and beautiful and carefree. It is such a lovely thought.