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.