Burma-Shave Signs, a Brief History
of a small boy & compressed time
Dunnsville Virginia &
the Rappahannock River in the1950s
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We're riding along a back-country road towards Dunnsville Virginia. It's mid-June, 1947.
Peering out the side window from the right-hand back seat of Dad's dusty green Buick, nose against glass, my sister and I are bored and itchy from the long ride.
We squirm, dreaming of the lazy Rappahannock, three miles wide where our old farmhouse looks out over the river from the land named by our parents..
Dad chants LINDAN, it's named after you and your sister. LINda and DANny. LIN...DAN.
Linda teases that it has all the letters of her name and just part of mine. You just got the "N" she laughs. LINDA ... N.
Linda leans over and tickles N's belly-button.
Anticipation is no longer enough to make us forget car cramps and stir craziness on the long ride from Richmond. I argue. It's three-letters each.
Suddenly, there in the tall grass along the roadside, is a red sign with white letters.
The steel sign, three feet long and eight inches high, is fastened to a steel fence post driven into the sand.
At first we can't make out the weathered lettering.
As we get closer Linda reads it aloud.
That's all it says. I wonder, chin hard against door sill. It makes no sense.
The fields are filled with watermelons beaten bright by the sun. The melons fat, silent Buddhas, soak in Virginia's summer heat.
We pass some hand-lettered signs offering them for sale. WATER MELONS 5¢. Those signs we understand.
This one ... this red sign ... let's pause here in space and time. A mile of grass and hot watermelons pass by. Water melons in sunlight are dark green but in the shade of an occasional tree they are black.
We stop, pick and pay for three huge water melons. Later at Lindan we'll drop them into the chilly water of our springbox. Dad tells us ... again -
When I was a boy in New York City we lived on the same block as a watermelon pickle factory. They just used the rinds to make pickles, and they threw out the red part of the water melons.
I'd stop there on the way home from school and with my friends we'd stuff ourselves with delicious, sweet watermelon - for free! Wasn't that crazy!
Suddenly ahead I spy a second red sign, the same shape as the first. This one leans crazily towards the road, fainting in the heat. The paint on the Burma-Shave signs is like the red meat of a watermelon.
Interested now I strain to make out the words before Linda reads aloud.
Oh! It's a message, broken across miles of steaming summer road. Excited now we both watch, anticipating, staring through the heat waves shimmering up from the asphalt.
Towing our new boat, Teal II, the car weaves a bit from side to side; Linda and I sway in rhythm.
Every-other Burma Shave sign rhymes. As we guess the next rhyme we try to look back into the past: at the last Burma Shave sign but it's lost in the dust from our Green Buick.
A mile. A minute to rhyme.
Seed. Bead. Succeed. Bleed?
There! Nailed to a huge old oak tree, always on my side of the road, are white letters on red:
NEED!
Fantastic! There it is! The whole family reads and guesses. Toad. Blow'eed? A great game.
The advice continues at the next Burma Shave sign - rhyming with "road" -
Dad slows down a bit. It's an agreeable change since the kids are quiet for a moment.
reads the last sign.
Seventy years later, dust, heat, and watermelons in mind, I can see those red and white Burma-Shave signs.
At LINDA-N, two wild animals, Linda and I leap from the car and run crashing into Clara Washington, all three of us beaming with love.
Contrasting colors, like time, compressed in memory, expand to infinity.
...
...
Continue reading POETRY & SHORT FICTION, Daniel Friedman or select a topic from the closely-related articles below, or see the complete ARTICLE INDEX.
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