Memory is a funny thing. I saw the recent R/E sales photos of the house I grew up in on Jasper Street in Philly and saw the photo of the back bedroom and could remember my earliest memories of sleep. My army cot against the back window and my brother in a wooden framed, decorated, twin bed. The matching twin bed was in the girls' room belonging to my older sister along with a crib for my younger sister.
Later we inherited a double bed with a decorated wooden headboard, I think from my great aunt, her son recently deceased and a veteran of Guadalcanal. Nothing fancy, factory made, but the mentality then was that beds were something special, worthy of being inherited as furniture as in Shakespeare's second best bed willed to his wife etc. My great aunt no doubt wanted to get rid of unpleasant memories and her son's death in a VA hospital etc.
My brother's twin bed became my younger sister's first real bed.
The overhead light with its beige pressed glass shade. The hardwood floors, the radiator but I don't remember the exact curtains. The side window above the radiator in the modern R/E photo of the same space. Metal blinds on the windows in memory.
I did look at the closest in that recent photo and I instantly remembered how one night after a trip to the old Ellis Theatre at Bridge and Pratt Sts., I was petrified to open the closet that night for fear that Dracula was hiding in my closet.
I was five and one half, it was probably summer time and my brother and his friend took myself and older sister on the "El" train to the nearby end of the line to the theatre there.
Counting on my fingers, my brother was barely ten and he was mature enough and trusted enough to be let to be my guardian on a trip no doubt to see a Disney movie etc. But previews of the next week's coming attraction of (American Title) "Horror of Dracula" sent chills down my young back. .
Horror! White knuckles on the wooden arms of the cast iron seat with 1920s type automobile upholstery. Squirming and wanting the scary stuff off the screen and maybe even holding hands over my eyes here and there. Darkness, teeth, blood, screams...
The IMDB preview of that movie still pretty intense IMO.
Out of the theatre into the twilight, up the El train steps and off on the third stop and home. Now dark as night goes.
As it was, I the younger went to bed first on a schedule. My older brother got to stay up most nights and watch Steve Allen, prior to Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson on a timeline.
Alone with a possible vampire in my closet and alone in the bedroom. Left the light on. Fell asleep I guess. But I remember that movie promo and that closet to this day.
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