Storyworth 2023

Tell me about a song that brings back an interesting memory from your youth.

The song is “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago. That’s the quick answer, but I must layer in some context here before I explain why. First, music, largely pop music was a powerful presence throughout my childhood commencing from about age 7. There were no streaming services (or Internet), portable storage devices, or CDs. Rather, one listened to the radio (WIXY 1260 am, WMMS fm in Cleveland) and kept hard copies of analog music on records. As a boy I had a phonograph or record player which was basically a wooden box that was hinged to open up to a turn table that accommodated either 45 rpm or 331/3 rpm records and an arm which had a tiny needle that physically tracked the irregularity in the grooves encoding sound. I thought it was the greatest thing, quite remarkable, if not miraculous that you could get sounds and music from a disk of black vinyl like this. Hence began my interest, some might call it a descent, in electronica.

But back to the song; “25 or 6 to 4” was the first record I bought. It was about $2 .00 and 45 rpm, the smaller size which had one song on each side. I liked the song because of its fast, syncopated beat, although the lyrics were indecipherable to me. It didn’t matter as the song was so compelling I played it over and over until eventually it became scratchy and then developed a breach of the integrity of the grooves such that when played the opening lyric, “Waiting for the break of day...” repeated over and over. I would then gently bump the side of the box and the singer would move on, “Searching for some thing to say...”.`

From this experience I think I learned how to listen with intent and focus-a kind of auditory mindfulness that had implications for appreciating the nuances of the spoken word and the lyricism in common conversation or everyday speech. Imagine all that from a hunk of vinyl, a tiny needle and some electricity.

What were your grandparents like?

Well, first of all, I had four grandparents. Aside from being a tautological statement, what I mean to say is I was lucky enough to know all my grandparents. In addition, it makes me think about not only my grandparents but the generations beyond them far back into the past, 16 great grandparents 32 great great grandparents 64 great great great grandparents. So when I think of my grandparents I think of their grandparents and all the people who contributed DNA, labor, and love to me, each of us not knowing one another but being connected by consanguinity at the least. Of course, if one goes back far enough we’re all connected, all related, all one. We receive gifts unaware and give gifts unaware. Although I am aware of my grandparents however because they were all alive and present for some part of my life.

On my mother’s side, her father was named George, a tall man with steel blue eyes who worked most of his life in the post office as a mail sorter in downtown Yonkers, New York. He lived with his wife Elisabeth, a homemaker with whom he raised three children, my mother being the middle child, younger sister to Albert and older sister to Betty. We called my grandmother Momom, sort of like mom’s mom. She was very sweet, I remember her really taking an interest in my brothers and sister and myself. We would go to the old house in Yonkers a lot, traveling over the Tappan Zee Bridge in my mom’s station wagon. We didn’t have seatbelts in those feckless days so we would lie in back in the space created when the backseat folded down. I would just look out the window from my vantage point and watch the beautiful, searingly white clouds roll and tumult against the backdrop of an equally impossible blue sky, …. and just feel happy.

We loved staying in my grandmother’s house because we bunked in the attic, wide open and finished to some extent with many kid’s beds. On a few nights in the summer it would be so hot all the windows were wide open to try to corral any existing passing breeze through the space to cool it down. One such night I was wakened by a siren outside, a passing police car perhaps. I sprang from my bed and stuck my head out the window. Unfortunately, the window was closed. I went right through the glass breaking the pane into 12-15 pieces. Amazingly I was unhurt, not even cut. But I took a pause next time, and the next hundred times, that when I looked out the window to make sure it was open.

My grandmother developed colon cancer which metastasized to the liver, passing away when I was about eight or nine years old. It was the first death I had experienced. I felt very sad and vacant. My grandfather eventually came to live with us in Ohio where he had a separate bedroom space in which he enjoyed smoking cigars and listening on the radio to the Cleveland Indians games. He would complain about how bad the umpires were when they made a call against his team. The fact that he did not see the play because he was listening on the radio did not seem to temper his enthusiasm for criticism. After he passed away I claimed that radio, a kind of a momento to the time I spent with him listening. I still have that radio.

On my father’s side my grandparents were a little more remote because they were down in Baltimore and we would see them about once every year. I remember one fantastic year we went down, arriving the day after Christmas and found their Christmas tree sitting in the midst of many presents for us. It was double Christmas! My grandfather was a gentleman, a portly, pleasant man, who smelled of mothballs and cigars. He seemed very old, not in a frail weak way, but just old. He was born in 1890 and owned a hardware store until the Great Depression wiped him out. He was married twice. His first wife passed away I believe in the flu epidemic. He married his second, my grandmother Lillian, not long after. I remember her as always being a little anxious, maybe frantic, with a real penchant for parakeets as skittish a she. They were always named ”Pete”. She would make this great cinnamon coffee cake from scratch which my brothers and I would fight over.

Lillian ultimately developed Alzheimer’s disease and my father brought them up together to a nursing facility in suburban Cleveland. They were in that facility just a short time before my grandfather passed, then my grandmother about a month later. It’s not unusual for a couples to die in close temporal proximity to one another. I think about my grandparents every so often when I say something or feel something or respond to something in a way that that they may have done. It’s kind of nice, like a little piece of them still lives in me. Who knows, it might even be passed on to any next number of generations. I guess this is what serves as our immortality, an anonymous, shared immortality. In the end we are a spiritual mélange, a soulful mutt.

What things did you find surprising when you started your first job?

It seems like I’ve always worked, starting from age 10 or so, delivering newspapers, babysitting my brothers, caddying at the golf course, cutting lawns, odd jobs around the house, I suppose my first real job was working as a busboy at a Perkins pancake house in Lyndhurst OH. I was excited about the job and remember going to the busboy training. The manager was a harsh, asthenic woman in her forties who struck me as someone her took her job a little too seriously.

She taught us how to wipe down tables, “always go with the grain of the wood”, she exhorted. I watched her demonstrate the principle and felt a little bit confused. All the tabletops in the restaurant had a faux wood pattern covered with a clear plastic material that had no grain. I was impolitic enough to mention this to her and in doing so became a persona non grata in her eyes. This became manifest the next day. I was working the lunch shift and everything was going well. Then about 11:30 people came streaming in, dozens of people such that it seemed in an instant the place was full; screaming kids, exasperated mothers, and old folks, annoyed by the noisy children as they tried to convince their waitress they should be permitted to order the senior breakfast special that ran from 9 to 11 AM when it was already noon time. In the midst of this chaos one little boy suddenly vomited his lunch. The restaurant manager seemed delighted to inform me that I needed to clean up the mess. What had to be done had to be done. After my shift I went home, smelling of grease and onions, newly enlightened to the meaning of the phrase, “going against the grain”.