Today I scraped a corpse off the blacktop of our driveway. Doing so, I was reminded of an incident my mother told me.
She was born in the city of Troy in 1905, and spent the early years of her childhood there. Those years were the beginnings of automated traffic in the city, and fear of its danger was in the air. The story my mother heard was that of a little boy who ventured into the street and was run over by a truck. A big, heavy truck, which flattened the child so that his lifeless little body had to be scraped from the road with a shovel.
Today the victim was a toad and the scraping implement a garden trowel. But, nonetheless...
Monday, May 30, 2016
Saturday, May 21, 2016
I'm walking here.
He stands about 4 inches tall, with a cardboard body, and head and feet of wood. I can't pinpoint how he came to be in our house, but speculate that maybe our father brought him home. He always was drawn to novelty items, and this penguin was high tech intrigue at the time. Kind of like the Dribble Glass and the Whoopie Cushion that our father delighted in.
This penguin had no motor or wind up apparatus; he walked as if by magic. Or so the story went. I remember my father using the lid of his White Owl cigar box to fashion a ramp so the penguin could waddle down it. But the penguin could not maintain a true course and would soon fall over. His legs would move but his momentum carried him away, does so even to this day. I just tried it--no ramp has the right slope.
The penguin is in my house now, has been for a while. Dorothy gave him back to me on June 1, 2011.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Luxuries of Life, 3 Items
Back in the day, people didn't shop much, not the people we knew. They bought the necessities of life, but that was it. Oh, a present or two at Christmas time, and maybe a new Easter hat or pair of shoes, but all useful items anyway.
That's why I remember the things my father bought, three things. He worked all his life, 5 days a week, leaving the house at 6:00 a.m. and getting home each day at 5:30 p.m. Most of the time he rode in a car pool,his own car's reliability a sometime thing. I think as he neared retirement at age 65, he had worked his way up to a two-week annual vacation. He had neither the time nor the inclination to shop, but he did buy three things.
One Saturday, he went to a pet store in the city and came home with a parakeet. He had become interested in the then exotic bird at the dentists's office. When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I had a decayed and severely aching tooth, so he brought me to a dentist in Schaghticoke, named Dr. Bracken, as I recall. As the dentist probed into my aching mouth, he had a green parakeet perched on his shoulder. That dentist did nothing for my plight, but my father became fascinated with the antics of the bird. When he saved up the $9.99 he bought our first parakeet, also a green one. Maybe that was the only color they came in at the time. We all enjoyed watching the little thing perform, until, after a day of activity, little Dickie dropped dead, apparently of a heart attack. There was never an official cause of death.
My father did a lot of work around our home, inside and outside. Though not formally trained, he was skilled. He worked slowly and carefully, always using a plumb line in anything he was building. The plumb line was, as most things then, home made, or hand-made being a better term. A heavy metal washer suspended on a string served to do the job. But he splurged on one tool which made his building and repair ventures a little easier. He bought an electric drill. And he used it a lot, a handy way to drill holes in whatever needed drilling. But the drill had attachments that came with it, and this is where the luxury feature came in. One of the accessories was a buffer, and he used it to shine his shoes. I remember being surprised that my father cared that his shoes were shined. He only wore them to work, and to church on Sundays. My child's mind could not conceive of any vanity on my father's part. What did old people, in other words, adults, care about how their feet looked.
One day my father came walking down the sidewalk carrying a portable typewriter. I think he may have taken the train in to Troy on that Saturday, but my memory is vague. I think we were in high school then and maybe some of us were taking typing class. The typewriter was a small portable in a black and white checked carrying case. He must have used it himself from time to time over the years. I seem to remember he typed a letter to the State Police when one of our college classmates and fellow commuter was murdered amid a bizarre sequence of events. That would have been around 1958. That typewriter kicked around our old house for a number of years before disappearing into the ether.
That's why I remember the things my father bought, three things. He worked all his life, 5 days a week, leaving the house at 6:00 a.m. and getting home each day at 5:30 p.m. Most of the time he rode in a car pool,his own car's reliability a sometime thing. I think as he neared retirement at age 65, he had worked his way up to a two-week annual vacation. He had neither the time nor the inclination to shop, but he did buy three things.
One Saturday, he went to a pet store in the city and came home with a parakeet. He had become interested in the then exotic bird at the dentists's office. When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I had a decayed and severely aching tooth, so he brought me to a dentist in Schaghticoke, named Dr. Bracken, as I recall. As the dentist probed into my aching mouth, he had a green parakeet perched on his shoulder. That dentist did nothing for my plight, but my father became fascinated with the antics of the bird. When he saved up the $9.99 he bought our first parakeet, also a green one. Maybe that was the only color they came in at the time. We all enjoyed watching the little thing perform, until, after a day of activity, little Dickie dropped dead, apparently of a heart attack. There was never an official cause of death.
My father did a lot of work around our home, inside and outside. Though not formally trained, he was skilled. He worked slowly and carefully, always using a plumb line in anything he was building. The plumb line was, as most things then, home made, or hand-made being a better term. A heavy metal washer suspended on a string served to do the job. But he splurged on one tool which made his building and repair ventures a little easier. He bought an electric drill. And he used it a lot, a handy way to drill holes in whatever needed drilling. But the drill had attachments that came with it, and this is where the luxury feature came in. One of the accessories was a buffer, and he used it to shine his shoes. I remember being surprised that my father cared that his shoes were shined. He only wore them to work, and to church on Sundays. My child's mind could not conceive of any vanity on my father's part. What did old people, in other words, adults, care about how their feet looked.
One day my father came walking down the sidewalk carrying a portable typewriter. I think he may have taken the train in to Troy on that Saturday, but my memory is vague. I think we were in high school then and maybe some of us were taking typing class. The typewriter was a small portable in a black and white checked carrying case. He must have used it himself from time to time over the years. I seem to remember he typed a letter to the State Police when one of our college classmates and fellow commuter was murdered amid a bizarre sequence of events. That would have been around 1958. That typewriter kicked around our old house for a number of years before disappearing into the ether.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Reckless Abandon in Checkers and Politics
When I was about ten years old, I played a very impressive game of checkers. Good enough to compete with the seasoned checker players who honed their skills at the train station, once upon a time. Or so my father told me, and he was never one to hand out compliments unless they were well deserved, and even then with extreme scarcity.
My father and I would play in the living room, after supper, with the homemade checkers he had fashioned by sawing an old broomstick into sections. He painted some of them red, possibly with old nail polish, and probably about 18 of them, allowing for kinging, you know. The others remained broomstick color, a shade of brown. We understood they should be black. He sat in his usual chair by the window, and I on the floor, with the tan naughahyde-covered rectangular footstool between us. I don't exactly remember his teaching me to play, but I suppose he must have. I do remember that as my skill level improved, the games, usually a set of 3, would go on longer into the night, sometimes even being called because of bedtime. I'm sure he won most of the games, and I'm also certain he never let me win on purpose as a sop to a child. Checkers was a serious game. I remember once in a while we would tie: each person with an equal number of kings that made it to the double corners resulted in no contest.
When I was that age, in and around 10 years, I had the ability to lay out potential strategies based on whatever move my opponent might make, several, or more, moves ahead. That was the age of intense concentration before the complications of life developed.
I found that if I stuck to my basic game plan, I had the best chance of victory, or at least a very respectable effort. Even if the other player would disrupt my longterm strategy, I would revert to what moves of my strategy still remained, and that would serve me well.
Occasionally, though never in a game with my father, I would throw caution to the winds: ignore my usual strategy. Either because I was bored, playing with a lesser foe, or just because I wanted to see what would happen if I tried something different, I would play an entirely different game. Almost always I would regret it. My game would be in jeopardy, sometimes even suffering a loss.
SO: Just because you become somewhat disenfranchised with a system that has been in place for what seems too long, there is a definite risk in abandoning it in favor of something less tedious and more titillating. Beware.
My father and I would play in the living room, after supper, with the homemade checkers he had fashioned by sawing an old broomstick into sections. He painted some of them red, possibly with old nail polish, and probably about 18 of them, allowing for kinging, you know. The others remained broomstick color, a shade of brown. We understood they should be black. He sat in his usual chair by the window, and I on the floor, with the tan naughahyde-covered rectangular footstool between us. I don't exactly remember his teaching me to play, but I suppose he must have. I do remember that as my skill level improved, the games, usually a set of 3, would go on longer into the night, sometimes even being called because of bedtime. I'm sure he won most of the games, and I'm also certain he never let me win on purpose as a sop to a child. Checkers was a serious game. I remember once in a while we would tie: each person with an equal number of kings that made it to the double corners resulted in no contest.
When I was that age, in and around 10 years, I had the ability to lay out potential strategies based on whatever move my opponent might make, several, or more, moves ahead. That was the age of intense concentration before the complications of life developed.
I found that if I stuck to my basic game plan, I had the best chance of victory, or at least a very respectable effort. Even if the other player would disrupt my longterm strategy, I would revert to what moves of my strategy still remained, and that would serve me well.
Occasionally, though never in a game with my father, I would throw caution to the winds: ignore my usual strategy. Either because I was bored, playing with a lesser foe, or just because I wanted to see what would happen if I tried something different, I would play an entirely different game. Almost always I would regret it. My game would be in jeopardy, sometimes even suffering a loss.
SO: Just because you become somewhat disenfranchised with a system that has been in place for what seems too long, there is a definite risk in abandoning it in favor of something less tedious and more titillating. Beware.
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