The Old Frog On The Corner Judith L. Bolton Mathat If you look in front of the Angels Camp City Hall you will see a smaller version of the Bullfrog that is made of solid poured Calaveras Cement that my father and Mel Price and others made up some time in the 50s and lots of them appeared in yards and gardens of those who worked or had them made from a mold I do not know where it came from. When my mother passed and my father remarried, sold the old home we grew up in, he had this frog removed from the wall on the corner of Mark Twain and Hillcrest and donated it to the City Hall. I never knew what he did with it for a long while and then when I found out always wanted to bring it home!! (What home, it belonged there.) How could I even think of such a thing...it must have weighed over 500 lbs.’!! (base and all). In the fall of 2013 when I was taking care of some personal business and staying in Angels I remembered the frog and found it sitting under the bushes, they were neatly trimmed and mulched, but the poor frog was literally peeling paint from up to the past 20 +/- years. It looked like it was shedding its skin! I asked the City Manager if I could give it some new color and he agreed it needed it. So even with a bit of snow and very cold, yet sunny weather, I found out this was considerably going to be a little more than just wiping off chipped paint and daubing some more color on it. I took a steel brush and sandpaper to that old frog I remembered the many many times it had become the boundary to sit on when being told to Stay in your yard! The place behind which, until we got too big to hide behind, was THE place to get behind before running and KICKING the Can out of the middle of the road. That corner where warm summer nights always found dozens of children from the neighborhood and beyond, enjoying the boundless end of day energies spent in fun and games running through the bushes, flower gardens, across lawns and yards of the neighbors. That frog was usually the BASE for Hide and Seek and many other games. This was the place where one (who was on “house restriction” could sit and day dream of the fields to run into and explore beyond that corner. Riding that frog to victory in its third jump of the Jumping Frog Jubilee contest for “lots of money” or like a day dream of a horse with fields of wildflowers to cantor and spring creeks to jump and splash pollywogs out of with Ed Wilsons cattle chasing us and us chasing them back! That frog with its coats of many colors (usually left over from some project, as long as it was some sort of green) took on a cleaner look, each layer of paint that had been splashed on so lovingly, by my father, revealed more and more flashes of personal memories. He had cemented that frog into the low, fender bending, block brick wall along the front of the house. Each layer of chipped paint, silently spoke of all those little legs of Bolton children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, relatives’ children and friends’ children gripping its painted cement sides. All those daydreams or play-dreams came “clean” from a steed so real and a “place” from which to watch their small town world go by! Who in the blink of an eye, outgrew that mount of memories where now its maker had relegated its location, now hiding under the bushes, in front of the Angels Camp City Hall. The new coat of green paint giving it a cartoonist look at least preserved its demise one more time. This old, cold frog still looks down on the little town in which growing up and going out into the world was rarely a daydream in a child’s eye, where an old coffee can could go flying by or the wheels of a car come rolling along and time moved on for all of us who mounted that fateful steed in innocent trust. Take care of those objects of your childhood and do not let complacency keep you from restoring their memories to your children and theirs. Thank you for keeping this page going for us older folks and helping to pass the baton to those younger ones as an honor to those who no longer live there or who have passed on. Each and every life has a purpose and a connection to us all.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 20:15:21 +0000
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