CONTINUED: Helping Out

I’m not sure I know why each of the chores I work on are helpful.  I just have a sense they are.  Call it instinct.  For example, it feels important to bark constantly while the vacuum cleaner is running.  The machine makes a scary high pitched sound, and I guess I’m trying to out-shout it.  Also in this category of what I do selflessly for my old servants is to lick the bottom of the shower almost dry.  Herself doesn’t seem to mind.  Himself does.  You’d think he’d appreciate my efforts, but all he has to say when he catches me is, “If I get Athlete's Foot,  I'll know who to blame.”   If he gets Athlete's Foot, it'll be the first time in twenty years anything athletic has been associated with him.

Among all the chores I perform, the one most helpful ... or so it seems to me ... is to bring home a dead squirrel for supper.  They haven’t cooked one up yet but I continue to pull the little critters through the back door and into the kitchen in the hope they will eventually want to try one.  Their diet is quite unimaginative.  Mine would be too if it weren’t for the great outdoors.

I also defend our home from a variety of truly dangerous characters such as the mail lady, the UPS man (Brown, he’s called) and those weasel-y little future real estate mavens, the Girl Scouts.  I won’t admit I like their cookies.  Because when they see me they want to pick me up and squeeze the daylights out of me.  That hurts, I tell you. Little girls … all they do is compete with each other.  Who gets to hug me first?  Who promises me the most cookies when they are finally shipped in?  And there’s always a girl who really, really, really would like to have a dog like me and would make plans to rescue me from my old servants in the middle of the night, but her current life plan does not allow any emotional commitments, let alone misdemeanor charges.

We haven’t exhausted my list of talents.  If I’ve known you for more than five minutes, I’m really good at just following you around so I can be there in case you need me.  I’ll always walk in front of you and you’ll complain about tripping over me, but in my culture the helper always walks ahead to make the path safe.

My all time favorite … cleaning up dishes and pots and pans.  Himself always wants to whisk them away into the dishwasher before I can get my tongue on any of them. He says he’s worried about my germs.  I wonder why he’s not worried when he licks the remaining ice cream out of the empty dish.  He should let me do it.  I’m the dog, after all.

When I learn to drive, you can be sure I won’t be taking him out for ice cream.

Copyright 2016,  David Griffin

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CONTINUED: The Good Shepherd

  

So in the library we talked and talked  ….. actually, whispered… as we rolled the book cart among the stacks and returned texts and tomes and James Michener best-sellers to their rightful Dewey Decimal homes on the shelves.  Sure,  I would try to kiss her back there in the stacks.  After all, she was a girl and I was a certified  idiot.  She seemed to understand and simply move out of the way. 

When I thought of it, I would wonder  about the two of us,  how a boy and a girl  could just click so completely on an cerebral level and  seemingly not have a  romantic interest in each other.  Or maybe that’s just my memory fooling me again. 

I wasn’t inexperienced with women.  I had dated a girl in high school, after all, and pledged my undying love for ever and a day.  But I lost her telephone number and she found someone else.  Mina  was quite different.  For one thing, she  never looked at me like I was crazy.  She thought what I said had value.  And she always said the neatest things.  She had the deepest thoughts and the coolest ideas about life and love.  I could feel the heat of her mind’s passions when I could get my mind off the heat of her physical attributes.

Her revelation of Harry was unexpected.  She didn’t tell me much about him … hardly anything … but immediately I felt threatened.  I told myself I should not feel anything except happiness for her.  After all, we didn’t have a romantic relationship.  But I wasn’t sure I believed myself.

Mina was an orphan.  She had no family of any note.  She had spent a few years in the 1950’s at the House of the Good Shepherd, an orphanage  just south of the Parkway.  Each morning before breakfast, the children would say a prayer to the Good Shepherd.  He was the grand and beautiful one who took care of his little sheep.   He loved them and was genuinely concerned for their welfare.

The orphanage was torn down in 1954 and replaced by a bowling alley and a regional office of the New York Telephone Company.  The children were placed out to foster families.  Young Mina was taken in by an older childless couple on Kensington Drive.  She was thrilled to have her own sunny bedroom and to sit down each night with “Mom and Dad” and have dinner and talk about where they would go on vacation come summer.  His vacation at the insurance office would be in August this year.  Everything was perfect and each night she would kneel down at her bed with her new doll and look around her room and thank the Good Shepherd for loving her so much. 

She returned from school one afternoon to find her suitcase on the front porch.  There was a note attached saying to wait there and a social worker would pick her up.  The couple had changed their minds.  The doll they had given her was not in the suitcase. She banged on the front door until her hands bled and she screamed into their windows and she cursed them and she vomited and she choked and she cried until she almost died, for Chrissake.  Plain old died.

She told me this one night in the book stacks and it was the only time I ever saw her weep.  Just tears now, there were no sobs.  They had gone off to hide, maybe to harden into a defensive callus for the future. 

Through her tears Mina asked of no one in particular, “How could she have done that?”  I reached out to her, but my hand stopped midway. 

In the summer of 1963 as my graduation approached I got a job offer in New York City.  It was a great opportunity and, truth be told, probably better than I deserved.  Mina was happy for me.   Attending  college part time, her graduation was a couple of years away.  She told me everything she had read that one could see and do in New York.  One evening as we wheeled the book cart back into the stacks, I told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.  She looked into my  eyes and I could feel her peer everywhere inside me.  I felt naked, but not the way I would have wanted.  

“Well,” I said, “New York seems awfully far away.”  

“So is the rest of your life,” she said. 

“And I would miss our…..times together,” I said.  She continued to peer into me.  After a moment, I relented and said, “I’m afraid, Mina.   I’ve never been anywhere and I’m afraid.  And…I would miss you.”   I knew she knew it.  She took my hand and brought it to her, opened my palm  and kissed it. 

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, “ I’d be home some weekends.  I’d come to see you. Maybe we could actually go out on a date.  Or something.”   She returned my hand, tenderly, and  placed it against my chest.

“But,” she said, “I’m seeing Harry.”

Harry?  Who the  hell was Harry?  She said his name was Harry and when she told me of him I didn’t want to believe her, but I never doubted anything she told me. 

“Who is Harry?” I almost shouted.  “I’ve never heard you talk about him.”   She looked up from my hand and said,  “You could say he’s  the Good Shepherd.”  

Mina never mentioned Harry again and neither did I.   I tried to, but like the time I had reached out to her and stopped halfway,  I knew there was something I didn’t want to touch or couldn’t touch.   I imagined it to be a kind of strength that wasn’t mine to investigate.  I didn’t want to hear the truth.  To this day I don’t know what I wanted to hear.

In two weeks the final semester ended and I was headed down the Thruway on a Greyhound bus.

I  was excited  and gloomy and scared all at once and I thought of Mina.  She had been right.  The rest of my life seemed a long way away.

I called her once from New York in late October.  She was civil, but distant.  I had lost my shepherd, but I wished for Mina the good fortune of finding her own.  I never saw or spoke to her again.

                                  ---o---

In the 1970’s the newspaper viewing room at the Utica Public Library was located on the second floor, hidden away in a corner and piled high with old papers and boxes of little coils of microfilm.  It was easier back then to find a parking space near the building and then make one’s way through the ornate and beautiful lobby up the staircase and toward the front windows overlooking Genesee St. 

Each week or so I would drive in from Syracuse where I was in graduate school working on my final project.    Sometimes I would bring my wife and two children and drop them off at my parents’ home on my way to the library.  

Rolling through the microfilm of the past 3 years’ newspapers and taking notes was tedious.  If I had known someday there would be an Internet and Google I would have seriously thought of delaying my thesis for 20 years.  For a break, after going outside for a smoke, I would often look through obituaries for the fun of it.  Not because death is humorous, but the family names and street names mentioned would often bring back memories and take my mind away from the task at hand.  On page three:

Shepherd, Harry Brent,  age 72, of Kensington Drive.  At rest on  September 23, 1973.  Devoted husband of Mina Hurley Shepherd.   Mr. Shepherd was a retired insurance broker and had previously been married to the  late Irene Lassely Shepherd, who died June 12, 1958.  There were  no children.

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David Griffin, copyright 2007/2016

CONTINUED: The Dupont Gunslinger

It should be noted here that the knife Dad bought me was an "el cheapo" and didn't hold a cutting edge for beans, even while whittling wood. Being the snoopy kid that I was, I found in Dad's dresser in the bedroom where he hid his special jack knife, with a really sharp blade that he used when we had to castrate pigs. That knife was really great for whittling and I don't believe that Dad ever caught on to what I was doing with it, cause I always put it back where I found it after I was done but he had to wonder sometimes about why it didn't hold the fine edge on the cutting blade. If the pigs complained, their complaints were pretty much contained in the squealing they did while the "operation" was performed on them. I still have that knife somewhere around our house today. I also carry a scar on one finger of my left hand where that knife sorta slipped one time and got me, but at least I was cutting away from my body (like Dad taught me to) and all I got was a deep cut that was fixed up with a bandage and carbolic salve. No 911 calls back in those days.

I got to be a pretty good wooden gun maker and along the way, branched off into leather work to make holsters for the wooden guns.

The only leather I had to work with was from old "high cut" boots or pieces of old harnesses that had become obsolete when Dad got the new tractor and the horses had to go.

Do you remember the "high cut boots?" Some called them "High Tops". They came to almost knee high and laced partway up the front and finished with the little hooks for speed lacing. Old photos show that they were the only fashionable footwear for hunters or engineers to wear out in the wilds. As for kids high cut boots, the pictures in the old Sears and Roebuck that really made this kid's mouth water showed the boots that had a nifty little pocket with a snap, sewed on the side of the right boot, and that pocket could hold your nifty Jack Knife. Boy oh Boy, how I wanted a pair of boots like that, but here comes the old refrain I keep singing-----my folks just couldn't afford the extra cost of frills like that. So I never got a pair of "high cuts" that I dreamed about.

Working with that old leather was not easy cause all I had to work with was my jack knife, and a nail for poking holes. To hold pieces of leather together, I poked holes with the nail and then using copper wire I salvaged from an old Model "T" coil that I broke apart, I could poke the wire through the holes and make a passable job of "sewing" the pieces together to make a holster and belt. My first holsters were kinda crude, but when Herbie Tischauser got a store bought Roy Rodgers pistol, holster and belt for Christmas and brought it to school, I saw a way to make a much better holster for my "piece".

Eventually, my side arms were upgraded to cap guns but I had to hang in there with homemade leather holsters and belts.

Fourth of July brought out the fireworks for more realistic sounds to go with the play guns. My folks would give me, when I got old enough and they could afford it, an allowance of maybe fifty cents or up to a whole dollar to buy fireworks in town at the Five and Dime Store, next to Mees's Drug Store. The store would stock up on fireworks for the occasion, and for a whole dollar, you could lay in a good supply of firecrackers and caps for my cap gun. The firecrackers were five or ten cents per package and five cents would buy you a box of rolled caps for your automatic gun or a box of disk caps for a six shooter revolver. Bottle rockets were cheap and fun but I don't remember that they had the M-80, the really powerful fire cracker you can buy nowadays.

The firecrackers were used for all kinds of fun, including blowing up ant hills and putting under tin cans to see how high they would fly. We had a three foot piece of half inch pipe that was pounded shut at one end and bent kinda like a gun stock, so when a firecracker was put in the other end and lit, it would make a passable shotgun.

I learned a valuable lesson the hard way one time when I stupidly put a firecracker in one end of an open pipe, lit it, and then sighted through the pipe from the other end so I wouldn't miss what I was shooting at. I was one lucky kid when it went off, cause all it did was scare the crap out of me without causing any harm to my eye. I never did fess up to my stupidity to anyone, especially my folks, cause I was afraid they would say-----no more fireworks.

My folks had an old cap and ball musket upstairs in the "seed room" that occasionally they would let us kids bring down and use for a firecracker gun, but then we had to put it back. I am glad now that they did not let us kids 'play it to pieces', because that old gun, (I think Dad bought it at an auction somewhere) now hangs on the wall of our family room where I still appreciate the old memories it brings about.

I continued my manufacture of wooden guns way into my high school years. One of my classes was woodworking down in the Agricultural building where us FFA {Future Farmers of America) took shop classes. I was working on a three legged milking stool for a project which was to be made out of a piece of 2 by 10 plank, and I saw an opportunity to make a round drum---- for a Wooden Thompson Sub-Machine Gun that I was building at home ----out of the same plank. That round Thomson Drum, to hold those imaginary wooden bullets, was a lot harder to make than the milking stool but Mr. Polich, the Agriculture teacher did not seem to mind that I was goofing off on another, not especially authorized, project and passed me anyway.

So----that's it readers, for this little story about the Kid Gun Collector and his wooden weapons. One of these days I will get around to a story about the real shootin' irons that we got into when we got older and responsible enough to carry them around.

 copyright 2016, Harold Ratzburg

CONTINUED Beautiful Baby

I happened one afternoon to pick on a young woman I knew only slightly from seeing her around the college campus from time to time.  She would eventually become my wife, but that winter day as I sat down across from her at a large oak library table my major intent was just to get her to talk to me.

She didn’t look up while I removed my jacket, sat down and arranged my books and notes. 

I let a few minutes pass before I spoke.

“You know,” I said, “I was a beautiful baby.  My mother entered my picture in numerous contests.”

She looked up at me, glanced behind her as if I was hopefully speaking to someone else, stared back at me for a half second and quickly lowered her eyes back to her books.  She didn’t speak.  She ignored me.

After a few moments, I pulled out my favorite baby photo, passed it across the table and waited for her response.  The baby in the photo was really me.  And I was really ugly.  Or so everyone told me.  Actually, I thought I was kind of cute, but admittedly not very cuddly.  In the snapshot I was well past six months of age and as bald and chinless as a white zucchini.  There was a remnant of drool on my chin, probably just wiped away by Mom before she took the shot.  The girl glanced at the photo, but pointedly did not touch it.

I waited for some kind of verbal response. It was not forthcoming.  From previous victims of this ruse I knew her reaction might be anything.  Some folks surprised me. A lady pastor at a funeral once turned away from me and began a conversation with the corpse.  But most often I’d get a laugh, or a quick darting of the eyes my way as if to ask if I was serious.  Not often there were hollow words of admiration and fawning smiles worthy of an acting award.  In any case, the ice would be broken and I might find a new conversation partner with a sense of humor.  Or not.

 This girl had done no more than glance my way with raised eyebrows suggesting I was crazy.  I stayed quiet and bided my time, occasionally looking up from my reading to secretly admire her hair, her nose, whatever.  Finally she tilted her head up at me and asked if I knew what time it was.  She made no attempt to hide her wrist watch,

“You know,” I said, ignoring her attempt to take me off my path, “I always wondered who took the photo.”

“Why?” she said.  “Did you want to get even with them?”

“I had thought,” I said, “my father was the only person in our house who knew how to use a camera in 1943.  But my Dad thought of himself as an artistic photographer and shot everything at weird cockeyed angles.  This picture was just a straight snap shot.”

The girl looked up at me again.  I could see the beginning of a smile.  Only the beginning.

“So,” she said, “your mother didn’t want the photo any worse than it had to be and shot the picture herself.”

“Yes,” I said.  “But when I asked her why she took the photo, she said she knew I’d grow up very handsome and this would prove a person could start anywhere.”

She brought the photo closer to her with one finger and stared down at it with a furrowed brow.  Then she looked up at me, a sparkle in her blue eyes.

“When do you plan to start?” she said.

When I look back to my younger days, I often wonder why I thought I was funny.  In business I found few people who thought my jokes humorous and most believed I was just being silly.  Probably a few had the insight to see my attempts at humor as no more than a plea for anyone to notice me.

There’s always something going on when we look deeper.  We often use humor to hide something or hide ourselves.    

The joke may be a veiled revelation of feelings we want to express in a straightforward manner but for some reason cannot.  In the library that afternoon, I wanted to say, “Let me take you home to my nest and we’ll stay there forever.” But of course I couldn’t.  My humor covered up a desire on my part that would have been inappropriate to express in our first meeting

Humor can sometimes hide a plea for help, but probably more often we’re asking for approval.

Perhaps most pressing as a young man was my concern over what others thought of me.  Now that I’m older, I care far less.  Whether I’m worthy of anyone’s praise is for other people to worry about.  I don’t need to know what people think of me unless they are carrying a weapon. 

Because I wanted to be likeable in my youth, I often gilded the hard things that needed to be said with humor, thus diluting the truth.  It was not easy to tell someone they were making a mistake, for example, when I was too interested in whether they liked me. If I told you what you wanted to hear, because I cared more about what you thought of me than my desire to help you, then I became a caretaker for your issues. Your dilemma had been yours, but when I sugar-coated it, I became a kind of co-conspirator for a problem neither of us needed.

Had I persisted in the use of humor to help us put off a direct approach to disputes, for example, I would not have maintained very many honest relationships.  I would not have said to my siblings things that needed to be said.  Or corrected a co-worker in the few instances over a lifetime of employment when it was honestly necessary and did some good.  Or admitted a fault or an offense for which my spouse rightfully held me accountable.  Or neglected to tell any of those people I loved them.

I have found it better to spend more time worrying about the welfare of others rather than engage in a guessing game about what they think of me.  And what they may think of me is, in the final analysis, of no consequence to me at this point.

I eventually grew some hair.  Not a lot, but enough to keep my brains warm and thinking.  However, I never trust a decision I’ve made in January.  I depend upon the girl from the library to lend some sanity to my life.

To be honest, Mom never entered me in a Beautiful Baby Contest.  You probably guessed that, or thought her less than sensible.  But years ago as a joke I posed as a proud mother and sent my baby pictures in to a few contests.  Only one person ever responded.  He was from a local business association and we were acquainted.  Robert’s letter said he’d been given my application and my baby’s photo for extra-special handling.

“What a striking baby you had!” he wrote.  “You must have been terrifically grateful.  That it didn’t bite you.  Did you keep it?”

    

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 copyright 2016 by David Griffin