I think of Deb every time I see one of these articles about the increasing use of cameras to monitor traffic and neighborhoods and in school buses and public bathrooms and the changing rooms at Walmart and such. I'm just kidding about the public bathrooms and the changing rooms - I think. The authorities monitor behavior in public bathrooms with undercover cops, and Walmart probably monitors its changing rooms with geezers too frail to put up front where they might be trampelled in a shopper stampede. But they might be using cameras and we don't know about it because they haven't been caught yet.
I think this camera thing is a good idea; but it doesn't go far enough. Imagine how much more efficient government offices and school classrooms would be if the bureaucrats and teachers knew they were being watched and recorded full time. But we would have to be careful not to hurt the economy. The fall-off of donut sales near police stations would be dramatic and might put Dunkin Donuts out of business; and the sudden rise in demand for gas might drive up prices if all the ghost employees at the various national and state bureaucracies actually started having to show up for work. Also, imagine the stress on the supervisors at the Department of Labor and the Department of Education if they suddenly had to start showing up and also had to find make-work for all the sons and daughters and nephews and mistresses of the various Congresscritters so they would look busy on the videotapes. Claims for disability might skyrocket.
On the other hand, imagine the positive effects on the economy. The feed from a webcam trained on Michelle Obama's new vegetable garden behind the White House, for instance, would probably become an instant hit and generate lots of advertising dollars to help support the government. Imagine the sudden rise in the sales of seeds as everybody rushed out to get what they need to plant what Michelle is planting as she flexes those fine toned arms of hers that the press has been all in a tizzy about.
The public would also learn lots of important information as well if there was a camera focussed on Michelle's garden. For instance, does Michelle use a stoop hoe or a long handled hoe; or does she use those little ergonomic stainless steel trowels and rakes and dibbles that they sell at Smith & Hawken; you know, the kind of tools that look like they were designed by Buckminster Fuller and cost like $39.95 each? And when she picks her vegetables later in the year; will Michelle use one of the baskets that you get when somebody gives you a Harry & David Christmas assortment, the way I do; or will she use a faux Hopi or Navajo basket like those they sell at Williams and Sonoma when she picks her arugula? The boost in sales of gardening equipment and supplies could be immense if the public knew these things.
And then there are the questions pertaining to fertilization and soil amendment. Does Michelle use cow manure or does she use horse manure? Does she shovel the manure into a 55 gallon drum and then fill the drum with water so she can feed each heirloom tomato plant with a little cup of tea, the way Grandpop L used to do? Or does she bury a little fish with each corn seed the way the Indians taught Pilgrims to do before the Pilgrims figured they knew enough and drove all the Indians away? Does Michelle have a mulch heap like I do behind the house, or did the President buy her one of those fancy $179.95 rotating drum compost things that claims to make good compost out of kitchen scraps and lawn clippings in 30 days? Imagine the amount of potential mulch that must be generated by the White House kitchen when they throw those big dinners for all the third world dictators who visit.
And then there's pest control. Is Michelle planning to squish those big green worms between her thumb and forefinger if she finds them on her tomato plants? Will she have a tick can half filled with water like Pop used to have to drop the ticks into if she gets one on her while she's gardening, or if the girls find a fat tick on their dog? Or is Michelle going to teach her girls to gently return the tomato worms and the ticks to the wild the way the PETA folks would no doubt prefer?
These are the crucial questions to which the public needs answers every bit as much as the Limerick police need to know whether Deb comes to a full honest to God stop at the stop sign on Ridge Pike when she goes to work in the morning.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123811365190053401.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
Showing posts with label Grandpop L. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grandpop L. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Veterans Day, Armistice Day and horsemeat
It's Veterans Day and also Armistice Day; so naturally my thoughts are on the time Linda and I went to Europe after I finished my four years in the Navy and I ordered a Hamburger Aux Cheval in a Paris restaurant. I had learned enough in two years of French classes during high school to think the name denoted a hamburger riding on a bun. Only when I noticed it tasted just a little funny did I realize that the perfidious French were feeding me horsemeat.
Not that I was breaking new ground in the family by eating horsemeat for Grandpop L had eaten quite a lot of it when he was a young man. That came about because Grandpop L was clever enough to make his way to an American army recruiter in 1917 before he could be drafted into the Italian army. Not a trivial decision; because as a result he became a U.S. citizen and Grandmon L became a citizen in turn when he married her.
One of Mom's favorite stories was of the time she embarrassed an arrogant high school teacher who singled her out in class as a naturalized citizen. "No," Mom said, she wasn't a naturalized citizen. Yes she was, the teacher insisted. And Mom repeated that, no, she wasn't. But you were born in Italy, the teacher said. "Yes," Mom agreed, she was born in Italy. "So, I'm right," the teacher triumphantly announced, you can't be a citizen by birth. At which point Mom informed the teacher that she was indeed born abroad; but she was also a citizen by birth because her parents were American citizens living abroad when she was born. Mom loved that story.
Another benefit of Grandpop L joining the American army is that he thereby probably increased his odds of surviving the war by at least tenfold. The losses suffered in World War I by the Italian army are nearly inconceivable to us at ninety years remove. In that war the U.S. lost 116,708 men killed out of a population of 92 million. Italy, by contrast, lost 651,010 men killed out of a population of 35 million. Italy also suffered 589,000 civilian deaths, while the U.S. suffered 757. Think that through. More than one out of every thirty Italians alive in 1914 died in that war; and, additionally, one out of every thirty people left alive in the country in 1918 was a wounded soldier. Grandpop L made a very good decision indeed when he travelled over to present himself to the Americans who were recruiting Italian peasants for service in artillery units.
If you a want a relatively painless take on that war, in which Italy fought on the side of France, Britain, Russia and the U.S. against Germany and Austria-Hungary, there is an excellent novel by Mark Helprin titled A Soldier of the Great War. Helprin's presentation of Orfeo Quatta, the typewriter hating dwarf who starts the book as a servant to the family of the book's protagonist and ends it as a war department bureaucrat, is one of the greatest comic riffs in literature.
But this was to have been a post about Veterans Day, and I still have to get to horsemeat. Pop never ate horsemeat; and he always said that we, the U.S., had no business getting involved in World War I. To him it was a European business. But he didn't feel that way about World War II even though it cost him his health. It could well have cost him more; because as soon as he was old enough he and a buddy went down to Main Street in Norristown to join up with the Marines. But, as it turned out, the Marine recruiting office was closed when they arrived. So they walked next door and got into a conversation with a Navy recruiter, and the next thing they knew they were on the way to training and then to the South Pacific as Seabees.
Instead of storming ashore with the first wave, or the second wave, of Marines, Pop and the other Seabees went ashore on island after island to build roads and airfields and barracks and hangars after the Japanese were pretty much beaten. From some of his stories about Japanese bodies still littering the beaches and the fields, and about needing to watch where you walked because of occasional sniper fire and artillery it's apparent that sometimes the Japanese hadn't been fully informed that they had been beaten.
Pop survived the war fine, but the trip home on a slow freighter nearly killed him. By the time he got to San Francisco he was coughing pretty good; and then by the time he got home by train he was on his way to pneumonia which lead to tuberculosis, or perhaps it was vice versa. So he was in and out of Veterans hospitals and sanitariums for the next couple of years; and as part of his treatment they collapsed and then removed most of one of his lungs. The blessing in it all was it made him as calm and optimistic a man as you will ever meet. He was told by a Navy doctor in 1946 that he should put his affairs in order because he would probably not survive long. As it turned out he outlived that doctor by about twenty-five years; and he lived virtually every one of the days of those years suprised and glad he had wakened up alive, and intensely interested and involved in the world. He took life as it came and he definitely did not sweat the small stuff.
But I have to cut this off, and I still haven't gotten to the horsemeat. Well, the reason the American army was in Italy recruiting all those Italian peasants like Grandpop L was that artillery units in those days had a lot of horses to pull the cannons and the hundreds of wagons that carried the shells and the powder charges and the other equipment. And some bureaucrat like Orfeo Quatta in the U.S. War Department came up with the idea that Italian peasants would be good to have because they would know how to handle horses. An interesting idea, but sorely wrong, as it turns out, because Italian peasants rarely used horses since fields in Italy were mostly small and broken up, making it more efficient to do most of the farming work by hand.
Grandpop, of course, was smart enough to tell the recruiters what they wanted to hear when they asked about his knowledge of horses; and he was also smart enough to learn what he needed to learn to handle the horses just fine. He and his compatriots in the artillery unit were also smart enough to forget to put a gas mask on one of the weaker horses during a gas attack whenever their diet lacked in meat. And, finally, they were also smart enough to share the resulting bounty with their sargeants and their officer. Grandpop often said that he had never imagined eating as much meat as he ate when he was in the army.
Update: 80 89 89 80 80 87 79 ;<)
Not that I was breaking new ground in the family by eating horsemeat for Grandpop L had eaten quite a lot of it when he was a young man. That came about because Grandpop L was clever enough to make his way to an American army recruiter in 1917 before he could be drafted into the Italian army. Not a trivial decision; because as a result he became a U.S. citizen and Grandmon L became a citizen in turn when he married her.
One of Mom's favorite stories was of the time she embarrassed an arrogant high school teacher who singled her out in class as a naturalized citizen. "No," Mom said, she wasn't a naturalized citizen. Yes she was, the teacher insisted. And Mom repeated that, no, she wasn't. But you were born in Italy, the teacher said. "Yes," Mom agreed, she was born in Italy. "So, I'm right," the teacher triumphantly announced, you can't be a citizen by birth. At which point Mom informed the teacher that she was indeed born abroad; but she was also a citizen by birth because her parents were American citizens living abroad when she was born. Mom loved that story.
Another benefit of Grandpop L joining the American army is that he thereby probably increased his odds of surviving the war by at least tenfold. The losses suffered in World War I by the Italian army are nearly inconceivable to us at ninety years remove. In that war the U.S. lost 116,708 men killed out of a population of 92 million. Italy, by contrast, lost 651,010 men killed out of a population of 35 million. Italy also suffered 589,000 civilian deaths, while the U.S. suffered 757. Think that through. More than one out of every thirty Italians alive in 1914 died in that war; and, additionally, one out of every thirty people left alive in the country in 1918 was a wounded soldier. Grandpop L made a very good decision indeed when he travelled over to present himself to the Americans who were recruiting Italian peasants for service in artillery units.
If you a want a relatively painless take on that war, in which Italy fought on the side of France, Britain, Russia and the U.S. against Germany and Austria-Hungary, there is an excellent novel by Mark Helprin titled A Soldier of the Great War. Helprin's presentation of Orfeo Quatta, the typewriter hating dwarf who starts the book as a servant to the family of the book's protagonist and ends it as a war department bureaucrat, is one of the greatest comic riffs in literature.
But this was to have been a post about Veterans Day, and I still have to get to horsemeat. Pop never ate horsemeat; and he always said that we, the U.S., had no business getting involved in World War I. To him it was a European business. But he didn't feel that way about World War II even though it cost him his health. It could well have cost him more; because as soon as he was old enough he and a buddy went down to Main Street in Norristown to join up with the Marines. But, as it turned out, the Marine recruiting office was closed when they arrived. So they walked next door and got into a conversation with a Navy recruiter, and the next thing they knew they were on the way to training and then to the South Pacific as Seabees.
Instead of storming ashore with the first wave, or the second wave, of Marines, Pop and the other Seabees went ashore on island after island to build roads and airfields and barracks and hangars after the Japanese were pretty much beaten. From some of his stories about Japanese bodies still littering the beaches and the fields, and about needing to watch where you walked because of occasional sniper fire and artillery it's apparent that sometimes the Japanese hadn't been fully informed that they had been beaten.
Pop survived the war fine, but the trip home on a slow freighter nearly killed him. By the time he got to San Francisco he was coughing pretty good; and then by the time he got home by train he was on his way to pneumonia which lead to tuberculosis, or perhaps it was vice versa. So he was in and out of Veterans hospitals and sanitariums for the next couple of years; and as part of his treatment they collapsed and then removed most of one of his lungs. The blessing in it all was it made him as calm and optimistic a man as you will ever meet. He was told by a Navy doctor in 1946 that he should put his affairs in order because he would probably not survive long. As it turned out he outlived that doctor by about twenty-five years; and he lived virtually every one of the days of those years suprised and glad he had wakened up alive, and intensely interested and involved in the world. He took life as it came and he definitely did not sweat the small stuff.
But I have to cut this off, and I still haven't gotten to the horsemeat. Well, the reason the American army was in Italy recruiting all those Italian peasants like Grandpop L was that artillery units in those days had a lot of horses to pull the cannons and the hundreds of wagons that carried the shells and the powder charges and the other equipment. And some bureaucrat like Orfeo Quatta in the U.S. War Department came up with the idea that Italian peasants would be good to have because they would know how to handle horses. An interesting idea, but sorely wrong, as it turns out, because Italian peasants rarely used horses since fields in Italy were mostly small and broken up, making it more efficient to do most of the farming work by hand.
Grandpop, of course, was smart enough to tell the recruiters what they wanted to hear when they asked about his knowledge of horses; and he was also smart enough to learn what he needed to learn to handle the horses just fine. He and his compatriots in the artillery unit were also smart enough to forget to put a gas mask on one of the weaker horses during a gas attack whenever their diet lacked in meat. And, finally, they were also smart enough to share the resulting bounty with their sargeants and their officer. Grandpop often said that he had never imagined eating as much meat as he ate when he was in the army.
Update: 80 89 89 80 80 87 79 ;<)
Saturday, November 8, 2008
This replaces a post under editorial review
Another post was supposed to occupy this space; but that post worked its way around to the subject of race, and I'm not crazy enough to post anything that touches on race without giving my internal editor a couple or three chances to review it.
So you'll have to be satisfied with this safer, politically correct, post about the excursion we took last evening to the geezer warehouse down by Schrack's Corner. We fit right in, or at least I did; because I was hobbling along in full gimp mode from something that suddenly and inexplicably went wrong with my hip the other day. I was lamer and slower than most of the coots. But don't get the idea that I was feeling sorry for myself. I wasn't; I took consolation in the fact that I didn't have dentures to work around in my mouth and click during the play, and my hair isn't blue or orange.
All in all Shannondell seems a pretty nice place, sort of like The Villages only all the houses are stacked on top of one another and compressed into one complex of big buildings with open air balconies instead of Florida rooms. Sam is of the opinion that all the inmates are at least in their high seventies; but I had the distinct impression that there were some younger ones in the gaggle of them I accompanied up in the elevator after the show. Linda took the stairs because the elevators were slow; and there was a crowd waiting. I took an elevator without shame, muscling aside a couple of the codgers who were slower than me with their elbows.
We went to see Oliver, put on by The King of Prussia Players, an amazingly professional performance with a cast of at least fifty or so including a half dozen excellent singers. It always amazes me how much effort and organization people are willing to put into what is, after all, a hobby, so that other people can pay cheap ticket prices that probably just about cover the cost of costumes and scenery.
Also heartening was the fact that there were quite a number of young kids in the audience. I don't mean relative kids like me and Linda; I mean actual kids six and seven and eleven years old, some of them visiting their greatgrandparents and getting to see a play as part of the visit; and some of them just there to see the play surrounded by strangers old enough to be their greatgrandparents. Except for me and Linda again; we're only old enough to be their grandparents.
It was great having kids there; but as I was watching the play I was wondering how well a play like Oliver can speak to young kids today, who have never known the feeling of hunger, and who have moreover never spent much time with anyone who has known the meaning of hunger. Leave aside the fact that the shameful state of education in this country makes it unlikely more than twenty or thirty percent of the audience understood the symbolism of the red dress on the character who played the whore with a heart of gold.
I've never myself been deeply hungry; but I knew Harry M, who ate every meal like a dog hovering over and guarding his plate. I didn't realize it until later when I read the comic book version of Oliver Twist as preparation for a high school book report; but Harry M must have grown up hungry to have guarded his plate like that all the way into middle age when he owned a produce market and, while not rich rich, was well off enough to eat as high on the hog as he wanted.
Pop and Mom both grew up in relatively straightened circumstances; but neither of them, and none of their brothers or sisters or the cousins raised with Mom guarded their plates like Harry. So Grandpop and Grandmon A and Grandpop and Grandmom L must have consistently earned enough or grown enough or scrounged enough to feed their families reasonably well. They ate a lot of beans and macaroni, and a lot of beans and greens, and a lot of polenta, and salads of young Dandelion and Pokes, and greens like Chima d' Rabe and Mustard and old tough Dandelion picked in the fields and by roadsides; but they must have eaten to reasonable fullness.
They were, all of Mom and Pop's generation, except Uncle Pete, a few inches shorter than Grandpop L and all of my generation; so probably none of them got quite enough protein as youngsters. But they all must have eaten to reasonable fullness in their youth in accordance with Grandpop L's old, old peasant wisdom, no doubt shared by Grandpop A, that, "you can't waste what you put in the bellies of your family." Pop translated that saying for me, and his Italian was only fair; so the translation may be a bit rough. But I know what he meant.
Speaking of which, Linda and I just ate to reasonable fullness on the last picking of Sam's Swiss Chard, which I combined with some potatoes and green beans and garlic. Linda had a gourmet lunch up at Jennifer's in Lancaster and then went shopping with Jennifer and Kathy and Liana and Catherine and Linda L; so I was left here alone and too gimpy with this hip business to do anything much except entertain Sam and Jas to coffee and then putter around the house cooking and such.
And, I'm pleased to report that there's good news on the gimpiness front. Either because the hip business is disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared, or else because I took a couple of Ibuprofens in accordance with Jas's advice, I'm walking a bit less like Chester Goode although I wouldn't call myself dance ready as yet.
So you'll have to be satisfied with this safer, politically correct, post about the excursion we took last evening to the geezer warehouse down by Schrack's Corner. We fit right in, or at least I did; because I was hobbling along in full gimp mode from something that suddenly and inexplicably went wrong with my hip the other day. I was lamer and slower than most of the coots. But don't get the idea that I was feeling sorry for myself. I wasn't; I took consolation in the fact that I didn't have dentures to work around in my mouth and click during the play, and my hair isn't blue or orange.
All in all Shannondell seems a pretty nice place, sort of like The Villages only all the houses are stacked on top of one another and compressed into one complex of big buildings with open air balconies instead of Florida rooms. Sam is of the opinion that all the inmates are at least in their high seventies; but I had the distinct impression that there were some younger ones in the gaggle of them I accompanied up in the elevator after the show. Linda took the stairs because the elevators were slow; and there was a crowd waiting. I took an elevator without shame, muscling aside a couple of the codgers who were slower than me with their elbows.
We went to see Oliver, put on by The King of Prussia Players, an amazingly professional performance with a cast of at least fifty or so including a half dozen excellent singers. It always amazes me how much effort and organization people are willing to put into what is, after all, a hobby, so that other people can pay cheap ticket prices that probably just about cover the cost of costumes and scenery.
Also heartening was the fact that there were quite a number of young kids in the audience. I don't mean relative kids like me and Linda; I mean actual kids six and seven and eleven years old, some of them visiting their greatgrandparents and getting to see a play as part of the visit; and some of them just there to see the play surrounded by strangers old enough to be their greatgrandparents. Except for me and Linda again; we're only old enough to be their grandparents.
It was great having kids there; but as I was watching the play I was wondering how well a play like Oliver can speak to young kids today, who have never known the feeling of hunger, and who have moreover never spent much time with anyone who has known the meaning of hunger. Leave aside the fact that the shameful state of education in this country makes it unlikely more than twenty or thirty percent of the audience understood the symbolism of the red dress on the character who played the whore with a heart of gold.
I've never myself been deeply hungry; but I knew Harry M, who ate every meal like a dog hovering over and guarding his plate. I didn't realize it until later when I read the comic book version of Oliver Twist as preparation for a high school book report; but Harry M must have grown up hungry to have guarded his plate like that all the way into middle age when he owned a produce market and, while not rich rich, was well off enough to eat as high on the hog as he wanted.
Pop and Mom both grew up in relatively straightened circumstances; but neither of them, and none of their brothers or sisters or the cousins raised with Mom guarded their plates like Harry. So Grandpop and Grandmon A and Grandpop and Grandmom L must have consistently earned enough or grown enough or scrounged enough to feed their families reasonably well. They ate a lot of beans and macaroni, and a lot of beans and greens, and a lot of polenta, and salads of young Dandelion and Pokes, and greens like Chima d' Rabe and Mustard and old tough Dandelion picked in the fields and by roadsides; but they must have eaten to reasonable fullness.
They were, all of Mom and Pop's generation, except Uncle Pete, a few inches shorter than Grandpop L and all of my generation; so probably none of them got quite enough protein as youngsters. But they all must have eaten to reasonable fullness in their youth in accordance with Grandpop L's old, old peasant wisdom, no doubt shared by Grandpop A, that, "you can't waste what you put in the bellies of your family." Pop translated that saying for me, and his Italian was only fair; so the translation may be a bit rough. But I know what he meant.
Speaking of which, Linda and I just ate to reasonable fullness on the last picking of Sam's Swiss Chard, which I combined with some potatoes and green beans and garlic. Linda had a gourmet lunch up at Jennifer's in Lancaster and then went shopping with Jennifer and Kathy and Liana and Catherine and Linda L; so I was left here alone and too gimpy with this hip business to do anything much except entertain Sam and Jas to coffee and then putter around the house cooking and such.
And, I'm pleased to report that there's good news on the gimpiness front. Either because the hip business is disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared, or else because I took a couple of Ibuprofens in accordance with Jas's advice, I'm walking a bit less like Chester Goode although I wouldn't call myself dance ready as yet.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Mom periodically made a point of reminding. . .
Mom always made a point of reminding me and Pop that Pop went to a Phillies game the night she was at the hospital having me. The funny thing is that I never asked Pop if they won that game. I imagine there is some baseball web site where I could learn if the Phillies won on my birthday in 1948. On the other hand, maybe I don't want to look. Given the kind of revisionism I noted in some of the long standing but ever evolving stories, it's altogether possible that the Phillies were out of town that night and Mom's whole story was an urban legend that she herself had come to believe.
Speaking of the Phillies, Pop used to tell of being invited by a friend to go down to Connie Mack Stadium for a World Series Game in 1950. Apparently the friend decided to scalp his two tickets instead of use them after learning how much they were worth. So he and Pop sat in a bar down in Philly and listened to the game on the radio. I forget the name of Pop's friend, although I'm sure he mentioned that name at least a hundred times when he told that story.
Sam may remember the name. Sam's mind is like a steel trap for such facts, although the other night he said Father Larkin could say Mass in 14 minutes, so he's not infallible. Both Jas and I agree that, on a roll, Father Larkin could do morning mass in 22 minutes, but never 14. We all agreed that he could probably do Mass in 14 minutes if he really needed to, like when shells were coming down over in Europe during the war, but not in Trooper.
Jas claims that he never got behind on his altar boy responses during Father Larkin's masses. I remember getting behind, and I like to think I was pretty fast with the latin responses, if I wasn't daydreaming. Not that having an altar boy get behind ever slowed Father Larkin. He did both parts if you were too slow. Also, he used to sway, forward and back, back and forward, very slowly, seemingly almost to the point of tipping over, when he said early mass. He could practically hypnotize you with that swaying if you hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. And then he'd look hard at you if you forgot to ring the bells or whatever. There was like one or two or three little old ladies in church, all of them probably too deaf to hear the bells; but Father Larkin liked the bells rung on time, and he wanted the wine and the water there promptly when it was time for it - very little water. Not that anybody could get much of a buzz out of that wine. Later, when me and others altar boyed Tuesday night Sodality we got into that wine. Terrible stuff.
Now that I'm sort of on the subject of sports; Pop also used to tell of Grandpop L deciding to fish in a fellow's pond while the fellow was away. By Pop's account Grandpop L fished with a quarter stick of dynamite; and there were a lot of fish to share around the neighborhood. The owner of the pond was said to have been somewhat displeased and to have figured out who done it - but what was he going to say to someone who had dynamited fish near Norristown, and who might have the other three quarters of the stick of dynamite close to hand. I wonder how carefully Angela checked out the basement of her Mom's house before she sold it.
And finally, still sort of on the subject of sports; Don A down in Florida recently, I think, cleared up the question of how Uncle Joe Sky came to be well involved in his sports related business by the time Pop got out of the hospital a couple of years after returning from the war. Don told me that Uncle Joe was the brother-in-law of his aunt - I think I have that straight. Anyway, that means Uncle Joe was already related to the Perino side of the A family before he married Aunt Lucy from our side of the A family. And, being related to the Perino side, he was related to Jamaica, a very snappy dresser among Perino's sons. Jamaica died in the late 1930s or early 1940s; but before that he could very well have been connected with folks who could have set Uncle Joe up in his business. I know Jamaica was a snappy dresser because Don included a picture of him on a disk he sent me a couple of years ago, and I saw other pictures of him at the Perino side reunion a few years ago. One of these days I need to compare that picture of Jamaica to the fellows in the sort of rogues gallery of New York guys that I found in Aunt Lucy's box of pictures that passed down to Anna M.
Speaking of the Phillies, Pop used to tell of being invited by a friend to go down to Connie Mack Stadium for a World Series Game in 1950. Apparently the friend decided to scalp his two tickets instead of use them after learning how much they were worth. So he and Pop sat in a bar down in Philly and listened to the game on the radio. I forget the name of Pop's friend, although I'm sure he mentioned that name at least a hundred times when he told that story.
Sam may remember the name. Sam's mind is like a steel trap for such facts, although the other night he said Father Larkin could say Mass in 14 minutes, so he's not infallible. Both Jas and I agree that, on a roll, Father Larkin could do morning mass in 22 minutes, but never 14. We all agreed that he could probably do Mass in 14 minutes if he really needed to, like when shells were coming down over in Europe during the war, but not in Trooper.
Jas claims that he never got behind on his altar boy responses during Father Larkin's masses. I remember getting behind, and I like to think I was pretty fast with the latin responses, if I wasn't daydreaming. Not that having an altar boy get behind ever slowed Father Larkin. He did both parts if you were too slow. Also, he used to sway, forward and back, back and forward, very slowly, seemingly almost to the point of tipping over, when he said early mass. He could practically hypnotize you with that swaying if you hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. And then he'd look hard at you if you forgot to ring the bells or whatever. There was like one or two or three little old ladies in church, all of them probably too deaf to hear the bells; but Father Larkin liked the bells rung on time, and he wanted the wine and the water there promptly when it was time for it - very little water. Not that anybody could get much of a buzz out of that wine. Later, when me and others altar boyed Tuesday night Sodality we got into that wine. Terrible stuff.
Now that I'm sort of on the subject of sports; Pop also used to tell of Grandpop L deciding to fish in a fellow's pond while the fellow was away. By Pop's account Grandpop L fished with a quarter stick of dynamite; and there were a lot of fish to share around the neighborhood. The owner of the pond was said to have been somewhat displeased and to have figured out who done it - but what was he going to say to someone who had dynamited fish near Norristown, and who might have the other three quarters of the stick of dynamite close to hand. I wonder how carefully Angela checked out the basement of her Mom's house before she sold it.
And finally, still sort of on the subject of sports; Don A down in Florida recently, I think, cleared up the question of how Uncle Joe Sky came to be well involved in his sports related business by the time Pop got out of the hospital a couple of years after returning from the war. Don told me that Uncle Joe was the brother-in-law of his aunt - I think I have that straight. Anyway, that means Uncle Joe was already related to the Perino side of the A family before he married Aunt Lucy from our side of the A family. And, being related to the Perino side, he was related to Jamaica, a very snappy dresser among Perino's sons. Jamaica died in the late 1930s or early 1940s; but before that he could very well have been connected with folks who could have set Uncle Joe up in his business. I know Jamaica was a snappy dresser because Don included a picture of him on a disk he sent me a couple of years ago, and I saw other pictures of him at the Perino side reunion a few years ago. One of these days I need to compare that picture of Jamaica to the fellows in the sort of rogues gallery of New York guys that I found in Aunt Lucy's box of pictures that passed down to Anna M.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Perspective please
Sam called me earlier and we talked about all these economic problems that are in the news. Now. . . first of all I don't think the Washington idiots are going to so mishandle things as to put the country into a real depression. But even if they're a whole lot more stupid than they seem, lets keep a little perspective.
1. This is America. If you find yourself on a streetcorner starving the police will pick you up and take you to a place where folks in white coats will feed you unless you actively resist.
2. Even if things get so bad that they no longer pick up starving people and feed them, Grandpop A mostly fed, clothed and housed a family of eight on the produce he grew and partly sold from about two acres of worked out ground up near Johnson Highway. It's true he had a Model A Ford to use as a huckster vehicle, but we can use my tractor to haul a cart if need be. If we can't build a cart with the parts from the ten or fifteen cars the extended family owns we probably deserve to starve.
3. Among our extended family we own about eight acres of lawn on former farmland that has been patiently accumulating nitrogen in the soil for thirty years. And Dave and Marianne have an old brick bread oven that just needs a bit of assembly. You say, what about fertilizer? I say the kind of long unworked soil we have will produce good crops for several years before someone will have to open the septic tanks and dip out fertilizer to spread on it. Based on Grandpop A's productivity we can feed something like thirty-five or forty on land we own that's lying fallow. And we wouldn't even have to break that ground laboriously with a spade each spring as he did because I have a tractor that can plow all those acres using a couple gallons of diesel fuel. You say diesel fuel may be unavailable? I say Alex can distill usable fuel for that tractor from the wood of the trees we would be cutting to break even more ground for crops. You want meat? Dave probably still has that old black powder blunderbuss, and the deer in the herd around here are utterly impudent, more than willing to walk within range.
4. If the whole world economy goes into a new dark age the US will be in the position of growing enough food and producing enough energy to sustain its current population at something like 1950's living standards for hundreds of years, if not indefinitely. The highly ironic net result of such a catastrophe would be that most of us would live longer and healthier because we would get more exercise and lose some weight. People aren't going to forget how to make penicillin.
So - lighten up. What's the worst that can happen?
And set yourself up to look on the bright side by reflecting on Grandpop L's saying whenever there would be a seemingly dire source of grief - "These problems only trouble the living."
1. This is America. If you find yourself on a streetcorner starving the police will pick you up and take you to a place where folks in white coats will feed you unless you actively resist.
2. Even if things get so bad that they no longer pick up starving people and feed them, Grandpop A mostly fed, clothed and housed a family of eight on the produce he grew and partly sold from about two acres of worked out ground up near Johnson Highway. It's true he had a Model A Ford to use as a huckster vehicle, but we can use my tractor to haul a cart if need be. If we can't build a cart with the parts from the ten or fifteen cars the extended family owns we probably deserve to starve.
3. Among our extended family we own about eight acres of lawn on former farmland that has been patiently accumulating nitrogen in the soil for thirty years. And Dave and Marianne have an old brick bread oven that just needs a bit of assembly. You say, what about fertilizer? I say the kind of long unworked soil we have will produce good crops for several years before someone will have to open the septic tanks and dip out fertilizer to spread on it. Based on Grandpop A's productivity we can feed something like thirty-five or forty on land we own that's lying fallow. And we wouldn't even have to break that ground laboriously with a spade each spring as he did because I have a tractor that can plow all those acres using a couple gallons of diesel fuel. You say diesel fuel may be unavailable? I say Alex can distill usable fuel for that tractor from the wood of the trees we would be cutting to break even more ground for crops. You want meat? Dave probably still has that old black powder blunderbuss, and the deer in the herd around here are utterly impudent, more than willing to walk within range.
4. If the whole world economy goes into a new dark age the US will be in the position of growing enough food and producing enough energy to sustain its current population at something like 1950's living standards for hundreds of years, if not indefinitely. The highly ironic net result of such a catastrophe would be that most of us would live longer and healthier because we would get more exercise and lose some weight. People aren't going to forget how to make penicillin.
So - lighten up. What's the worst that can happen?
And set yourself up to look on the bright side by reflecting on Grandpop L's saying whenever there would be a seemingly dire source of grief - "These problems only trouble the living."
Friday, September 5, 2008
The boring nitty gritty of engineering
This video by a retired General Electric executive patiently takes you through the facts about wind energy. The most interesting thing about it is the insight it gives into the sheer scale of the national economy.
If you know me you know someone who personally knew someone (Grandpop L) who started his life in a world and time when less mechanical power was generated in the entire world than can today be generated by ten, or maybe twenty, of the wind generators this fellow talks about. Grandpop L was born at a time when for 99.9% of the world's population one horsepower was generated by one horse, or else it was generated by four humans busting their asses.
Jules Verne, who died in 1905, was probably the most outrageously visionary thinker alive when Grandpop L was born in the 1890's. Told on his deathbed that within a hundred and three years a rational person would envision the world producing and erecting a thousand, let alone nearly three hundred thousand, windmills of the size this fellow talks about, Jules Verne would have dismissed the idea as a fever dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_W4_bv4c9w
Hat tip to Mario Lewis who linked to this video on National Review's Planet Gore blog.
If you know me you know someone who personally knew someone (Grandpop L) who started his life in a world and time when less mechanical power was generated in the entire world than can today be generated by ten, or maybe twenty, of the wind generators this fellow talks about. Grandpop L was born at a time when for 99.9% of the world's population one horsepower was generated by one horse, or else it was generated by four humans busting their asses.
Jules Verne, who died in 1905, was probably the most outrageously visionary thinker alive when Grandpop L was born in the 1890's. Told on his deathbed that within a hundred and three years a rational person would envision the world producing and erecting a thousand, let alone nearly three hundred thousand, windmills of the size this fellow talks about, Jules Verne would have dismissed the idea as a fever dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_W4_bv4c9w
Hat tip to Mario Lewis who linked to this video on National Review's Planet Gore blog.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Dusty work and translation services
Whew! I just came in from mowing the prairie areas that I've been leaving alone all summer. Dusty work - there was a lot of ground up dried grass and weeds flying around. Even my tractor won't mow twenty-four inch tall growth neatly the first time or the second time through, at least not now, late in the season, when the blades are dull and all dinged up from me using the mower deck like it was a brush hog out in the woods. So I mowed the prairie about ten inches high last week, and then took it down to about six inches high the other day. Today I finally took it down to match the four inch or so height of the grass around the house.
While I was mowing I had my best guess at Mom's old recipe for string bean and little meat ball stew simmering on the stove. I'll give you the recipe for that tomorrow after I see what what it tastes like.
While I was mowing I was also thinking about why I started to mow the grass the way I do. And it came to me that the original reason was the rug Dory and John Hamano had in their living room back in the 1970's. The rug was all they had in the living room that first time when we went over to their house, but what a rug it was. It was a Chinese made oval carpet about ten or twelve feet long, very colorful and very neatly textured. The pattern of the colors and the varying depths of the pile made it fantastic, like a picture in three dimensions.
We lost touch with John and Dory decades ago but I still remember their rug, and I still texture the lawn to be like that rug. Or rather every spring I have a vision of texturing it, cutting it to various depths in patterns, to be like that rug. And then I hate so much to mess up the luxuriant growth of the areas where the grass and the wildflowers are getting tall, that I never cut the high growing areas until I absolutely have to in late summer. Linda, of course, has an opinion or two about all this, so I cut the area within about a hundred feet of the house like a regular lawn. But I let the farther away areas grow tall so the grass can sway in the wind, except for mown paths that lead here and there.
John and Dory were interesting folks. I met Dory at work where she was a salesperson briefly. He was a salesman with IBM. Their living room was bare of furniture because their idea was to fill the house piece by piece with really fine furniture. If that rug was an indicator they must have a house full of some really great furniture by now. Thinking of them I'm reminded that they were somewhat unusual. She was Jewish American, but she spoke Japanese fluently from college and then some time in Japan, teaching English I think on a sort of work study basis. He was Japanese American, but he spoke almost no Japanese. She interpreted when he talked to his grandmother. She could interpret in real time, as though she was a machine and not even involved in the conversation if she wanted to.
Mom used to interpret when I talked to Grandmom L, but she was a terrible translator because she was never not involved in the conversation. It used to make me crazy. I would ask Grandmom a question. And Mom would answer for Grandmom without even interpreting what I asked. Or Grandmom would say something long and obviously interesting and Mom would have a little conversation with her in Italian and then tell me something very short in English. Or I would ask a question and they would have a conversation with lots of grinning, and then Mom would tell me Grandmom said something not funny at all.
It was obvious my access to important information was being restricted. So I would try to talk to Grandmom on the sly, but we could never really communicate across the language barrier. Trying to talk to her as she was cooking or whatever would get you some great treats because she and Aunt Mary R always, always!, had something good either baking or else in the refrigerator, but talking to Grandmom seldom yielded information. And Aunt Mary was as bad as Mom as a translator, although Aunt Mary could tell you some pretty good stories on her own if Mom wasn't there to inhibit her.
With Aunt Mary you could always get a great piece of cake and hear something very interesting about who did what to whom and when. Sometimes even why and where. And with names too. One time a person Aunt Mary had just said was a horse's ass happened to visit, and she offered him a piece of cake, and had a nice smiling little conversation with him. Then, after he left, she said, "See, like I said, a real shtunad; but whataya gonna do, you can't pick your relatives."
But it was Grandmom who I wanted to communicate with. So I would try to get Pop to translate, but he would claim not to be able to speak Italian well enough, even though I knew from observation that he could understand it perfectly well. He very rarely said anything in Italian, but he would get the jokes just as fast as everybody else did when he listened in to Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R and Julia, Mom's Goomah, and Sia Gigette, Pop's aunt from the other side of the family, when they were sitting around the kitchen table talking.
The really old ladies, Mom's Goomah and Sia Gigette, were already like a hundred years old then, at least, and they knew a lot. Mom's Goomah, Julia, was usually pretty quiet, but when Sia Gigette was around she would get rocking and rolling just as well as the others.
Sia Gigette was a special and interesting case. One time when they didn't know I was listening I heard Mom tell Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia that Sia Gigette would never die. "She's too nasty to die," Mom said. And Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia laughed and agreed, even though Sia Gigette was their aunt, just like she was Pop's aunt. "She's a bitch on wheels all right," Aunt Carmella said. And Aunt Tavia said, "You can say that again." And then they laughed about the time Mom asked Sia Gigette, "How's she different from your daughter?" or something like that right in front of Grandmom A after Sia Gigette made some remark about, uh, one of my relatives on Mom's side.
Anyway, when Mom and Aunt Mary and Julia and Sia Gigette were together in the kitchen down on Walnut Street they said the best stuff, stuff that made Mom look around to see who was listening; but they said it all in Italian. They said stuff that sometimes made her and Aunt Mary laugh so hard they would be like they were crying. Sometimes one of them would say something that would even make Mom break briefly from Italian into English.
"No!" She would say, and then "Goomah! Be good," or "Sia Gigette! He did not!" Or she would make that shh gesture and say "Mom! Little pitchers have big ears." Then they all would turn to where me and Matty were looking in the door and they would laugh and laugh. And if they were really loud in there Grandpop would mumble that phrase that Pop later told me meant "chickens in the barnyard," or something like that. Me and Matty would see that Grandpop was shaking his head with a little smile on his face in the living room, and Pop would have a big broad smile.
But Pop would never translate, or he would tell us something that was a little funny, but not something funny enough to have made Aunt Mary scream, "Stop! You're makin' me wet my pants."
While I was mowing I had my best guess at Mom's old recipe for string bean and little meat ball stew simmering on the stove. I'll give you the recipe for that tomorrow after I see what what it tastes like.
While I was mowing I was also thinking about why I started to mow the grass the way I do. And it came to me that the original reason was the rug Dory and John Hamano had in their living room back in the 1970's. The rug was all they had in the living room that first time when we went over to their house, but what a rug it was. It was a Chinese made oval carpet about ten or twelve feet long, very colorful and very neatly textured. The pattern of the colors and the varying depths of the pile made it fantastic, like a picture in three dimensions.
We lost touch with John and Dory decades ago but I still remember their rug, and I still texture the lawn to be like that rug. Or rather every spring I have a vision of texturing it, cutting it to various depths in patterns, to be like that rug. And then I hate so much to mess up the luxuriant growth of the areas where the grass and the wildflowers are getting tall, that I never cut the high growing areas until I absolutely have to in late summer. Linda, of course, has an opinion or two about all this, so I cut the area within about a hundred feet of the house like a regular lawn. But I let the farther away areas grow tall so the grass can sway in the wind, except for mown paths that lead here and there.
John and Dory were interesting folks. I met Dory at work where she was a salesperson briefly. He was a salesman with IBM. Their living room was bare of furniture because their idea was to fill the house piece by piece with really fine furniture. If that rug was an indicator they must have a house full of some really great furniture by now. Thinking of them I'm reminded that they were somewhat unusual. She was Jewish American, but she spoke Japanese fluently from college and then some time in Japan, teaching English I think on a sort of work study basis. He was Japanese American, but he spoke almost no Japanese. She interpreted when he talked to his grandmother. She could interpret in real time, as though she was a machine and not even involved in the conversation if she wanted to.
Mom used to interpret when I talked to Grandmom L, but she was a terrible translator because she was never not involved in the conversation. It used to make me crazy. I would ask Grandmom a question. And Mom would answer for Grandmom without even interpreting what I asked. Or Grandmom would say something long and obviously interesting and Mom would have a little conversation with her in Italian and then tell me something very short in English. Or I would ask a question and they would have a conversation with lots of grinning, and then Mom would tell me Grandmom said something not funny at all.
It was obvious my access to important information was being restricted. So I would try to talk to Grandmom on the sly, but we could never really communicate across the language barrier. Trying to talk to her as she was cooking or whatever would get you some great treats because she and Aunt Mary R always, always!, had something good either baking or else in the refrigerator, but talking to Grandmom seldom yielded information. And Aunt Mary was as bad as Mom as a translator, although Aunt Mary could tell you some pretty good stories on her own if Mom wasn't there to inhibit her.
With Aunt Mary you could always get a great piece of cake and hear something very interesting about who did what to whom and when. Sometimes even why and where. And with names too. One time a person Aunt Mary had just said was a horse's ass happened to visit, and she offered him a piece of cake, and had a nice smiling little conversation with him. Then, after he left, she said, "See, like I said, a real shtunad; but whataya gonna do, you can't pick your relatives."
But it was Grandmom who I wanted to communicate with. So I would try to get Pop to translate, but he would claim not to be able to speak Italian well enough, even though I knew from observation that he could understand it perfectly well. He very rarely said anything in Italian, but he would get the jokes just as fast as everybody else did when he listened in to Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R and Julia, Mom's Goomah, and Sia Gigette, Pop's aunt from the other side of the family, when they were sitting around the kitchen table talking.
The really old ladies, Mom's Goomah and Sia Gigette, were already like a hundred years old then, at least, and they knew a lot. Mom's Goomah, Julia, was usually pretty quiet, but when Sia Gigette was around she would get rocking and rolling just as well as the others.
Sia Gigette was a special and interesting case. One time when they didn't know I was listening I heard Mom tell Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia that Sia Gigette would never die. "She's too nasty to die," Mom said. And Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia laughed and agreed, even though Sia Gigette was their aunt, just like she was Pop's aunt. "She's a bitch on wheels all right," Aunt Carmella said. And Aunt Tavia said, "You can say that again." And then they laughed about the time Mom asked Sia Gigette, "How's she different from your daughter?" or something like that right in front of Grandmom A after Sia Gigette made some remark about, uh, one of my relatives on Mom's side.
Anyway, when Mom and Aunt Mary and Julia and Sia Gigette were together in the kitchen down on Walnut Street they said the best stuff, stuff that made Mom look around to see who was listening; but they said it all in Italian. They said stuff that sometimes made her and Aunt Mary laugh so hard they would be like they were crying. Sometimes one of them would say something that would even make Mom break briefly from Italian into English.
"No!" She would say, and then "Goomah! Be good," or "Sia Gigette! He did not!" Or she would make that shh gesture and say "Mom! Little pitchers have big ears." Then they all would turn to where me and Matty were looking in the door and they would laugh and laugh. And if they were really loud in there Grandpop would mumble that phrase that Pop later told me meant "chickens in the barnyard," or something like that. Me and Matty would see that Grandpop was shaking his head with a little smile on his face in the living room, and Pop would have a big broad smile.
But Pop would never translate, or he would tell us something that was a little funny, but not something funny enough to have made Aunt Mary scream, "Stop! You're makin' me wet my pants."
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Stock up on warm clothes!
In case you didn't notice August was the first month since 1913 without a single sunspot. In general sunspot activity has been significantly low this year. Some scientist types have been talking about the low sunspot activity for a while, but they've been pretty muted about it because real scientists wait for the data rather than promote paranoid fears (like a certain ex Vice-President I could name if this weren't a strictly non-political post).
The link to the article that I've pasted below will give you a hint about why you may need warm clothes soon. If you want to be really terrified about climate change google Maunder Minimum and read all about it. Or, if the Little Ice Age of the Middle Ages is too long timey ago for you young whippersnappers google, "year without a summer." That happened a few years before Grandpop L and Grandpop A were born.
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm
The link to the article that I've pasted below will give you a hint about why you may need warm clothes soon. If you want to be really terrified about climate change google Maunder Minimum and read all about it. Or, if the Little Ice Age of the Middle Ages is too long timey ago for you young whippersnappers google, "year without a summer." That happened a few years before Grandpop L and Grandpop A were born.
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm
Friday, August 29, 2008
The things you remember
It's funny the things you remember. I was just at the bank depositing a check preparatory to paying the last of our ridiculously outrageous real estate tax bills. While I was at the bank I got a couple of hundred dollars in twenties. I'm pretty modern about paying with credit cards for most things but Linda is somewhat less so. We go through an outrageous number of twenty dollar bills around here.
I can remember when a twenty dollar bill represented one-third of my pay for a sixy hour week at Harry's Potato Market. That was before I claimed to have another job opportunity after my first year of high school and Harry raised my pay to $1.20 an hour. Of course that was cash pay, so there were no outrageous taxes taken out of. And the job carried some fringe benefits. I got all the fruit I had any desire to eat, and I could take home all of the spotted fruit Mom had any desire to make into pies and such. And I sometimes got to accompany Harry on his trips with that old truck to deliver boxes of produce to various little stores and restaurants in Norristown and Bridgeport and Trooper and Plymouth Meeting. Harry would talk to the owner and I would carry the box into the back. Sam, or was it John, told me about a time when a box fell off the back of the truck on Airy Street and spread fruit all over the road as they went up a hill. "Don't look back," Harry said, as they roared away.
Whoa! A hawk, a redtail I think, just made a kill down by the bamboo grove where I mowed yesterday. And there he flies away. That garter snake who's been hanging around in the garden must have gotten complacent travelling toward the creek. He forgot there is no high grass now. Well, he won't be wriggling long. It's surprisingly rare that I see a hawk on the ground - maybe ten or fifteen times in the thirty years we've been up here in Collegeville. Nature photographers must be supernaturally patient people.
Anyway, back to Harry. Another fringe benefit of my job at Harry's was watching Harry and the other characters who came and went at the Potato Market during those late grade school and early high school summers. Harry was a Sicilian of a kind they don't make anymore, or, if they still make them, you don't see them in this country any more. Or maybe I don't hang around in the right places anymore.
Several of Pop's friends were Sicilians. Lardy and Chink, I think, were Sicilians. Louis Hop was also a Sicilian, but he was an altogether different kind of Sicilian, and he wasn't really one of Pop's friends, he was a neighbor. Reds and Tommy were also Sicilians, I think, but they weren't Pop's friends either, they were business associates.
Reds was also an albino, a very exotic person in 1950's Norristown. I only saw him a couple of times, and that was when I happened to be with Pop on a trip to town when Pop visited him to drop something off or pick something up. Reds talked about coins sometimes after he and Pop had finished comparing their lists and doing their calculations.
Reds talked about coins as investments, not coins as spending money like the ones in the big bowl Uncle Joe Sky had in the middle of the dining room table as a centerpiece. Uncle Joe would tell me to dip into that bowl and take a few of those coins when I went to his house with Pop. I knew I wasn't allowed to dip into that bowl when I went by myself to visit Aunt Lucy. Aunt Lucy made the best waffles, and she would make those waffles anytime if you just went in and said hi and sat down at the kitchen table and talked with her while she stirred up the batter and heated the waffle iron over the gas. She was funny, Aunt Lucy, and interesting to talk with; but mostly I remember her waffles. She put lots the Caro syrup on top of the waffles on her plate. I liked to put a little pool of syrup on the side of my plate and just dip each bite of waffle in it.
Much later Pop said Reds was one of the smartest guys he knew and he wished he had the money back then to invest in coins the way Reds told him to. Pop had a pretty good coin collection but he just put it together by looking at all the coins he got in change. Sometimes he got a lot of change. When I asked why it was so dark in Reds' apartment Pop told me Reds had to stay inside with the shades drawn because too much light bothered his eyes. He also told me Reds had no hair anywhere on him when I asked why he had a bald head and no eyebrows. Another time Pop told me Reds had no pores, so he couldn't sweat and had to be careful about getting too hot.
Pop's friends, the boys he called them, were a diverse lot. I think the three Jiggses, Frankie, Chollie and Louie, were Neapolitans. Cappy was a Mundelaise, and Worm's people were Bolognese, I think. Butch and Doc's people were Marche's, like our people. The Count's people, I think, were Roman, from Rome that is. None of us thought of ourselves as Roman Romans. We were Italians in those days. Sicilians were Italians too, but they were a different kind of Italian. We went to Holy Saviour church. The Sicilians had their own church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Have I mentioned that I'm a pure Marche' from all four grandparents. That's pronounced Mark with emphasis on the M and the K and a little "eh" on the end. I could have joined the Marche' Club, but I never did because Pop never did. He had a long standing grudge about the Marche' Club from the time he returned from the Navy and they denied him a little disability payment he should have gotten by virtue of Grandpop A's membership. Sam and Jas could have joined the club as well if they wanted, but Marianne couldn't have - no girls allowed. Not that it matters anymore; the club is gone. Our generation is the last to have enough pure Marches to make a local club.
Grandpop L, a club member in good standing, had a little joke he told about Marche's that Mom translated for me. "What's worse than a dead body in the living room?" "A live Marche' at the door." I guess it works better in Italian. The idea is that you're going to get be able to get rid of the dead body a lot easier than you're going to be able to rid of the hardheaded Marche'.
Grandmom L, who was a Marche', used to occasionally refer to Sicilians as "Le Chiboudeys," when she was going strong with Mom and Aunt Mary M at the kitchen table. Or she would call them "Shockeys." But she only talked about them like when her daughter-in-law Aunt Nancy wasn't around. Shockey was just an Americanization of Sciacca, which was the village most of the Norristown Sicilians came from. Pop or his buddies would call one another Shockeys or Napolitans or Mundelaise or Bolognese all the time as in "You Shockeys are all alike" so that wasn't interesting. The fact that Grandmom L might refer to a Sicilian as a Shockey wasn't anything special.
But Chiboudeys was clearly something different, something interesting, especially because it was accompanied with that little hand flip Grandmon L gave when she smiled in that way she only did with Mom and Aunt Mary when she thought us kids weren't watching. It was a broader, purposely transparent version of the smile Mom would have on her face when she would say "This is delicious," about some dish she had taken a couple of little tastes of. I don't think Hillary Clinton ever met Grandmom L or Mom, so she must have learned that smile from someone else.
That hawk is down there again and he has something else. A mouse. It must be good hunting in the newly mown field. I have never seen a hawk on the ground twice in one day.
Mom dodged my questions about Chiboudeys for a long time. And when she finally did tell me what it meant the explanation made no sense. Mom said Chiboudeys meant "onion eaters." That made no sense because Mom had also told me once that they were so poor in the 1930's that Grandmom L would sometimes only have an onion to put in Grandpops lunch box as a substitute for a piece of fruit. So there was a clear case of a pure Marche' biting into a raw onion with his lunch sandwich and yet mom's claiming Grandmom used "onion eaters" as a secret epithet that made them all laugh.
Mom uncomfortably dodged when I presented her with this obvious inconsistency and she would never visit the issue again. It's a terrible world. A world in which a mother will lie to her own son.
And I still don't know what "Chiboudey" meant.
I can remember when a twenty dollar bill represented one-third of my pay for a sixy hour week at Harry's Potato Market. That was before I claimed to have another job opportunity after my first year of high school and Harry raised my pay to $1.20 an hour. Of course that was cash pay, so there were no outrageous taxes taken out of. And the job carried some fringe benefits. I got all the fruit I had any desire to eat, and I could take home all of the spotted fruit Mom had any desire to make into pies and such. And I sometimes got to accompany Harry on his trips with that old truck to deliver boxes of produce to various little stores and restaurants in Norristown and Bridgeport and Trooper and Plymouth Meeting. Harry would talk to the owner and I would carry the box into the back. Sam, or was it John, told me about a time when a box fell off the back of the truck on Airy Street and spread fruit all over the road as they went up a hill. "Don't look back," Harry said, as they roared away.
Whoa! A hawk, a redtail I think, just made a kill down by the bamboo grove where I mowed yesterday. And there he flies away. That garter snake who's been hanging around in the garden must have gotten complacent travelling toward the creek. He forgot there is no high grass now. Well, he won't be wriggling long. It's surprisingly rare that I see a hawk on the ground - maybe ten or fifteen times in the thirty years we've been up here in Collegeville. Nature photographers must be supernaturally patient people.
Anyway, back to Harry. Another fringe benefit of my job at Harry's was watching Harry and the other characters who came and went at the Potato Market during those late grade school and early high school summers. Harry was a Sicilian of a kind they don't make anymore, or, if they still make them, you don't see them in this country any more. Or maybe I don't hang around in the right places anymore.
Several of Pop's friends were Sicilians. Lardy and Chink, I think, were Sicilians. Louis Hop was also a Sicilian, but he was an altogether different kind of Sicilian, and he wasn't really one of Pop's friends, he was a neighbor. Reds and Tommy were also Sicilians, I think, but they weren't Pop's friends either, they were business associates.
Reds was also an albino, a very exotic person in 1950's Norristown. I only saw him a couple of times, and that was when I happened to be with Pop on a trip to town when Pop visited him to drop something off or pick something up. Reds talked about coins sometimes after he and Pop had finished comparing their lists and doing their calculations.
Reds talked about coins as investments, not coins as spending money like the ones in the big bowl Uncle Joe Sky had in the middle of the dining room table as a centerpiece. Uncle Joe would tell me to dip into that bowl and take a few of those coins when I went to his house with Pop. I knew I wasn't allowed to dip into that bowl when I went by myself to visit Aunt Lucy. Aunt Lucy made the best waffles, and she would make those waffles anytime if you just went in and said hi and sat down at the kitchen table and talked with her while she stirred up the batter and heated the waffle iron over the gas. She was funny, Aunt Lucy, and interesting to talk with; but mostly I remember her waffles. She put lots the Caro syrup on top of the waffles on her plate. I liked to put a little pool of syrup on the side of my plate and just dip each bite of waffle in it.
Much later Pop said Reds was one of the smartest guys he knew and he wished he had the money back then to invest in coins the way Reds told him to. Pop had a pretty good coin collection but he just put it together by looking at all the coins he got in change. Sometimes he got a lot of change. When I asked why it was so dark in Reds' apartment Pop told me Reds had to stay inside with the shades drawn because too much light bothered his eyes. He also told me Reds had no hair anywhere on him when I asked why he had a bald head and no eyebrows. Another time Pop told me Reds had no pores, so he couldn't sweat and had to be careful about getting too hot.
Pop's friends, the boys he called them, were a diverse lot. I think the three Jiggses, Frankie, Chollie and Louie, were Neapolitans. Cappy was a Mundelaise, and Worm's people were Bolognese, I think. Butch and Doc's people were Marche's, like our people. The Count's people, I think, were Roman, from Rome that is. None of us thought of ourselves as Roman Romans. We were Italians in those days. Sicilians were Italians too, but they were a different kind of Italian. We went to Holy Saviour church. The Sicilians had their own church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Have I mentioned that I'm a pure Marche' from all four grandparents. That's pronounced Mark with emphasis on the M and the K and a little "eh" on the end. I could have joined the Marche' Club, but I never did because Pop never did. He had a long standing grudge about the Marche' Club from the time he returned from the Navy and they denied him a little disability payment he should have gotten by virtue of Grandpop A's membership. Sam and Jas could have joined the club as well if they wanted, but Marianne couldn't have - no girls allowed. Not that it matters anymore; the club is gone. Our generation is the last to have enough pure Marches to make a local club.
Grandpop L, a club member in good standing, had a little joke he told about Marche's that Mom translated for me. "What's worse than a dead body in the living room?" "A live Marche' at the door." I guess it works better in Italian. The idea is that you're going to get be able to get rid of the dead body a lot easier than you're going to be able to rid of the hardheaded Marche'.
Grandmom L, who was a Marche', used to occasionally refer to Sicilians as "Le Chiboudeys," when she was going strong with Mom and Aunt Mary M at the kitchen table. Or she would call them "Shockeys." But she only talked about them like when her daughter-in-law Aunt Nancy wasn't around. Shockey was just an Americanization of Sciacca, which was the village most of the Norristown Sicilians came from. Pop or his buddies would call one another Shockeys or Napolitans or Mundelaise or Bolognese all the time as in "You Shockeys are all alike" so that wasn't interesting. The fact that Grandmom L might refer to a Sicilian as a Shockey wasn't anything special.
But Chiboudeys was clearly something different, something interesting, especially because it was accompanied with that little hand flip Grandmon L gave when she smiled in that way she only did with Mom and Aunt Mary when she thought us kids weren't watching. It was a broader, purposely transparent version of the smile Mom would have on her face when she would say "This is delicious," about some dish she had taken a couple of little tastes of. I don't think Hillary Clinton ever met Grandmom L or Mom, so she must have learned that smile from someone else.
That hawk is down there again and he has something else. A mouse. It must be good hunting in the newly mown field. I have never seen a hawk on the ground twice in one day.
Mom dodged my questions about Chiboudeys for a long time. And when she finally did tell me what it meant the explanation made no sense. Mom said Chiboudeys meant "onion eaters." That made no sense because Mom had also told me once that they were so poor in the 1930's that Grandmom L would sometimes only have an onion to put in Grandpops lunch box as a substitute for a piece of fruit. So there was a clear case of a pure Marche' biting into a raw onion with his lunch sandwich and yet mom's claiming Grandmom used "onion eaters" as a secret epithet that made them all laugh.
Mom uncomfortably dodged when I presented her with this obvious inconsistency and she would never visit the issue again. It's a terrible world. A world in which a mother will lie to her own son.
And I still don't know what "Chiboudey" meant.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Of sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings
When I started thinking about this post it was going to be about Harold W heartily welcoming me and my dad as new neighbors in 1979 or so. I was going to title it “Guns and Poses” because Harold was carrying a rifle that day even though it wasn’t hunting season. I know it wasn't hunting season because after saying "Hello Neighbors," and shaking hands Harold saw me glance at the rifle and he said he was going down to the woods to see who was shooting down there since it wasn't hunting season. In Norristown and in Trooper where we used to live people didn't carry rifles when they went to talk to people.
Then I got to wondering how Pop could have been with me when I met Mr. W the first time. I remember the meeting taking place up along the swale between Harold’s corn field and our property. But that’s across Doony Brook from Pop’s house, so how could Pop have gotten there?
That got me to thinking about Doony Brook, and the incorrect sign the township politicians put down on Route 29 that labels it "Donny Brook" even though I told them when they were talking about it that it's labelled "Doony Brook on the plat for our property. Years after I first met him Harold said he also told them it was called Doony Brook when I asked him about it. Mr. C, who was old as dirt, also said he told them it was called Dooney Brook but that's no surprise because we bought the property from him so he had seen the plat. For a little while then this post was going to be titled “Doony Brook, Dummies and Donnybrooks,” but then I got to trying to remember how Pop was dressed at that first meeting with Mr. W. My idea was to use my mental image of him as a memory aid to decide whether he was really there. And that got me on the subject of the various images Pop presented in different places at different times.
After thinking about that for a while I decided to title the post “Pop and Hip-Hop,” because it was going to be about the possibility that Pop started an important if regrettable social trend. Pop, you see, was from the hood, and he was always of the hood even after he moved away from it, although you would never guess that if you saw him in a suit at a funeral or a wedding looking more like Johnny Carson than Johnny Carson. But at home in Trooper or Collegeville, or even for a quick trip to the Wawa, when he was in relaxed mode Pop occasionally wore the elastic top of his boxer shorts smartly pulled up way above the waist of his sagging shorts. And he did that long before those rapper gangstas started wearing clothes with that kind of style and flair. Pop was every bit as capable as Mr. W of presenting a memorable image to new neighbors.
Thinking about Pop in his glory got me on a long riff about Pop’s colorful pals. Like Louie Jiggs and Louie Hop. Louie Hop also presented multiple memorable images to different audiences. I remember him as a friendly man in slacks and a loose shirt who would walk us kids down to Babes and buy us an ice cream or a lemonade. And I remember him as a very big and daunting man when he was sitting, scowling, on his stoop in a wifebeater tee shirt while his wife was singing, that’s what Mom told us she was doing, in the house. Sitting on the stoop at such times Louie Hop was a sort of Luca Brasi looking character, scary, with an unfriendly face and a far away look and lots of black hair on his arms and chest - lots of hair.
Uncle Froggy had lots of hair on his back when he had his shirt off at the beach, and he sometimes scowled and acted like he was mean. And he had a gruff and very loud voice, but Uncle Froggy wasn’t scary, at least not to me. He was never gruff and mean acting at the beach. He was just like a big kid playing in the surf with me and Matty and Sonny. I think Sam and Jas were a little scared of him, but they were really little kids then.
When Uncle Froggy was working the counter at Babes and me and Matty went in for lemonade Matty would give him a dollar for two big lemonades and he would give us each two quarters back as change, sometimes even three quarters each. I was pretty good with money even as a little kid and I asked Matty about it one time when we were walking back up to Grandmom L's house on Walnut Street. He told me not to worry about it. And he surely knew about such things because he was older.
Louie Jiggs used to do stuff like that too. Pop would give him a dollar or two for giving me, Sam and Jas haircuts, and he would give each of us a quarter or two quarters. Pop almost never asked us to give him those quarters, so we would go to Babes for lemonade, and if Uncle Froggy was there you would give him a quarter for a lemonade and get three dimes or six nickels back as change, sometimes even some extra pennies as well. Pennies were important in those days. You could buy a little pack of red hots for a penny, or was it two pennies? Sometimes Pop would borrow our quarters if he and Mom had been quietly talking at the kitchen table about money being really tight, but money wasn't often that tight. And even if Pop borrowed our quarters we would still get the lemonade if Uncle Froggy was at the counter at Babes, or we would get a soda if Lou was at the counter at Lou's.
I saw Pop maybe save Louie Hop’s life one day. Mrs. Hop, you see, was chasing Louie around his car in front of their house, two doors down from our house, and she had a little gun in her hand and it was going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Or was it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang? At any rate Pop went out after Mom sort of peeled me away from the screen door, and he took the gun off of Mrs. Hop after saying something like, “Come on Florence, you don’t really want to shoot him.” I think I remember him saying that, but Mom or Pop might have told me what he said to Mrs. Hop. Mom always said to us that "I grabbed you kids" to pull us away from the screen door, so that would mean that Sam must have been there with me. Jas was much too small then to be standing at the screen door. I don't remember Sam being there. But I remember that little gun.
I also remember how funny Louie Hop looked running around that car. But I can't remember what kind of car it was. There's a funny thing about the Hops. I can't remember their real last name. I remember that Florence was Mrs. Hop's real first name but I don't remember her last name because I never knew Louie Hop as anything but Louie. The "Hop" was to distinguish him from Louie Jiggs if Pop and Barber and The Count and Lardy and Cappy and Worm and Doc and Chink were talking about him at the corner.
I seem to remember that I called Mrs. Hop "Mrs" and not Florence. That was odd because I only called a few people "Mr." or "Mrs." back then. Mrs. G was definitely Mrs. G for instance. None of us kids would have dared to call her Florence. But I called Betty P "Betty" even though she was Frankie Jiggs wife, for example. And there is another oddity, because sometimes Pop and the boys called Frankie Jiggs "Barber", but he wasn't a barber, he was a politician, which I know because of the way Pop used to kid him about it. His brothers Louie and Charlie were both barbers, but Frankie wasn't. Come to think of it Frankie and Louie and Chollie had another brother, or did they?
I say Pop may have saved Louie Hop’s life because to this day I don’t rightly know if Mrs. Hop shot five or she shot six before she handed Pop the little gun. I also don't know whether she was really trying to hit Louie. Roy Rogers always hit whoever he was shooting at, and from a lot farther away than Mrs. Hop was from Louie. Another thing I don't know is whether she would actually have killed him if she had hit him. Roy Rogers never killed the people he shot, he just wounded them. Another thing, Louie Hop was a very big man and the gun was very little. It was a revolver that looked smaller than my cap gun, but it wasn't shiny like my cap gun. That I definitely remember, I think. It was probably a twenty-two caliber, but it might have been a thirty-eight. I was only four or five or six years old at the time.
I can’t remember whether I ever heard Mrs. Hop singing after that day. I don’t think I ever did. Much, much later Mom told me that she didn't think Louie ever hit Mrs. Hop after that day. Mom liked that story a lot. She thought Mrs. Hop was trying to hit Louie that day when she shot at him, but Pop always said he didn't think so. She was pretty close to him when she was chasing him around that car, but he was moving pretty quick. She was screaming something at him also, like she was mad or something, now that I think about it, but I can't remember what she was screaming and Mom and Pop never told me. There was lots of stuff I wanted to know that they never told me. I really wanted to know what Grandpop L sort of whispered in Italian that time everybody laughed so loud, but they wouldn't tell me. Pop always told me he would explain it when I was older. And then I forgot to ask him about it when I was older.
Pop also wouldn't tell me what it meant when Harry M yelled that sentence and waggled one finger at that woman when he was really mad. That sentence contained something like "Puttano" and "Du Leeowlo" and some other other Italian that I can't remember anymore. Pop smiled real broad when I repeated that sentence to him, but he never told me what it meant. Pat M also wouldn't tell me what that sentence meant even though for years after that he would waggle his finger and say "Pu. . . Pu" to his dad when Harry was acting cranky. And Harry would say, "Go ahead Patty, just go ahead."
Well, anyway, by this time I was well on the way to the barbershop, excuse me, salon, for my monthly clip. And I had to turn off the Donald Westlake audio book in the CD player because with all of the above rolling around in my head it was impossible to pay proper attention to Westlake’s silly tale about two groups of small time hoods that are both preparing to rob the same corporate malefactor of great wealth. That crime is going to go way wrong, like Westlake’s crimes always do.
I had to turn off the booktape because the thoughts in my head were swimming faster than Michael Phelps as I drove to the salon, but not as straight. They were swimming around as fast as they used to back when I would have occasion to be talked to by Mrs. M, not Harry's Mrs M, John's Mrs. M who owned the luncheonette. Mrs. M was one of the world’s great talkers but her plot lines and time lines interweaved as capriciously as those of V.S. Naipaul, whose autobiographical pastiche I am again trying to read.
Anyway, I got thinking about the time Mom did Mrs. M's laundry when Mrs. M's washer broke down. Mrs. M was so pleased that she talked her way around to believing that she had hired Mom to do her laundry every week, and Mom didn’t realize she had maybe agreed to do Mrs. M’s laundry every week until a little later when her thoughts slowed down and straightened out. And Mom went over and apologized to Mrs. M for a long time because she didn’t have time to do her laundry. Mom was working then at Farm Credit for Mr. K, who limped even though he had that one special shoe with the big thick sole and heel. That was before Mr. K retired and the Egyptian became the boss at Farm Credit. I never saw him. I wonder if he really was an Egyptian. An Egyptian would have been pretty exotic in Trooper in those days although I guess that was in the 1980's so maybe he really was an Egyptian.
Mom was very precise sometimes and not so precise at other times. Some of her stories changed over time and then changed back, and some of her stories contradicted other stories. Mom liked the story about Mrs. M and the laundry a lot because she could never figure out just how she came to agree to do that laundry. When she told the story about the laundry she would always tell about the time that Sam took a big swig from the sweety bottle that was filled with used cooking oil. Sam thought it was soda. The sweety bottle story connected to the laundry because Mom used a sweety bottle to sprinkle her clothes with when she ironed. The sweety bottle also connected to Sam because he was late off the bottle when he was a toddler and mom used to say she ended up giving him his milk in a sweety bottle with a nipple. But that never made sense because the laundry sweety bottle and the used oil sweety bottle were no bigger than the baby bottle that Marianne was sucking from by about that time. Or was that later? Sam is much better than me with ages and years things happened.
Well, anyway, after a while I reached the Great Clips Salon by courtesy of the mysterious autopilot that handles things for me when I'm paying no attention to the road and yet still manage to get somewhere without getting things like bicycles and highway cones and pedestrians stuck onto the front of the car. But the autopilot wasn't working perfectly today because first it took me past the CVS instead of stopping to pick up my prescription and then it took me past the Redners shopping center where the Great Clips is even though the purpose of the whole trip was to get a haircut. So I had to turn around at the Acme and go back. All in all the autopilot was working like crap, but not as badly as the time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd to the empty building where I had my old job when it knew that I had been working in Fort Washington for almost two years. I wasn't too irritated that time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd because I was listening to a really good book tape that day.
Anyway, it was lucky the autopilot got a little turned around because then my whole plan for this post was turned around. I arrived at Great Clips just as one of the stylists was going home and a new stylist was coming back from her break. So I drew the new stylist, who was shaped like Louie Jiggs, but who talked like Mrs. M. Not that I need a stylist. I’m a number three clipper for the sides and a number four clipper for the few stray hairs on top. Anyway this new stylist wasn't a walrus, and she didn't talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings; but she did talk and talk and talk about wonderful things that took me right back to the old days.
She talked about going to Jersey with her father and brothers to buy pick your own tomatoes by the bushel. At first I thought she was talking about long ago but I later realized she meant now. She talked about hair dressing in Naples and in a couple of other cities in Italy. And she talked about her relatives in Rome and in Naples. And she talked about her brothers and her father and her making sauce, she called it sauce, she's from South Philly. She talked about them making enough sauce to put up a full year’s supply for several families. Great big vats of sauce put up in hundreds of jars. And this is now, not way back then. She threw in the names of people in Rome and in Naples and in Philly and how they are related and she even threw in some of that old who did what to whom and when. Just like Mom and Aunt Mary or Aunt Carmella used to when they really got cranked up. She talked about living in Lafayette Hill with her dad, and how he still makes wine and she cranks the grinder that pulps the grapes. Thirty boxes of grapes last year.
Grandpop L used to get a lot of boxes of grapes to pass down through the little window into the cellar. I cranked the grinder for him one time. But I didn’t crank it long. Matty did most of the cranking. Or was it Sonny? Matty and Medio used to go down and drink the wine sometimes because Matty knew where Grandpop hid the key. But they couldn't have drunk much of that wine. Nobody but Grandpop drank much of that wine.
I drank it a couple of times when I went down to the cellar with Grandpop to help him fill up one or two of the bottles with no labels that he had. We filled the bottles from the little brass spigot on the barrel after he unlocked the padlock. I never saw where he got the key because I was always looking at the press with its big gear and those slats on the sides and the heavy iron bottom with the little lip. I helped him one time when he squeezed the grapes with that press and I remember the wine running over that little lip. It tasted really sour to me when he gave me some in a glass he filled right from the little lip of the press. It tasted a little better when it came from the barrel but I still didn't like it.
Anyway I couldn’t think about that very well because the stylist was still talking about wonderful things. She makes sausage at home with the intestine for the skin. She uses a hand grinder. Her wrist hurts after she grinds the sausage. Her brother has a motor on his sausage grinder. He makes a lot of sausage. He likes hot sausage. She likes the sweet. She told me his name, but I can’t remember it. She has been a stylist for thirty years but she just started at this Great Clips. She used to work at another Great Clips a couple of years ago. Her and Dawn, I think it was Dawn. Or was it Cheryl? Her and Dawn or Cheryl started three weeks ago at Great Clips in Collegeville. She doesn’t mind the long commute from Lafayette Hill because it gives her time to think. And sometimes she listens to booktapes! So she must have an autopilot too. But I don't think she told me the names of any books.
And now I can’t remember her name so I’m not sure I will be able to get her to cut my hair and talk at me when I go again to Great Clips in a month or a couple of months.
Then I got to wondering how Pop could have been with me when I met Mr. W the first time. I remember the meeting taking place up along the swale between Harold’s corn field and our property. But that’s across Doony Brook from Pop’s house, so how could Pop have gotten there?
That got me to thinking about Doony Brook, and the incorrect sign the township politicians put down on Route 29 that labels it "Donny Brook" even though I told them when they were talking about it that it's labelled "Doony Brook on the plat for our property. Years after I first met him Harold said he also told them it was called Doony Brook when I asked him about it. Mr. C, who was old as dirt, also said he told them it was called Dooney Brook but that's no surprise because we bought the property from him so he had seen the plat. For a little while then this post was going to be titled “Doony Brook, Dummies and Donnybrooks,” but then I got to trying to remember how Pop was dressed at that first meeting with Mr. W. My idea was to use my mental image of him as a memory aid to decide whether he was really there. And that got me on the subject of the various images Pop presented in different places at different times.
After thinking about that for a while I decided to title the post “Pop and Hip-Hop,” because it was going to be about the possibility that Pop started an important if regrettable social trend. Pop, you see, was from the hood, and he was always of the hood even after he moved away from it, although you would never guess that if you saw him in a suit at a funeral or a wedding looking more like Johnny Carson than Johnny Carson. But at home in Trooper or Collegeville, or even for a quick trip to the Wawa, when he was in relaxed mode Pop occasionally wore the elastic top of his boxer shorts smartly pulled up way above the waist of his sagging shorts. And he did that long before those rapper gangstas started wearing clothes with that kind of style and flair. Pop was every bit as capable as Mr. W of presenting a memorable image to new neighbors.
Thinking about Pop in his glory got me on a long riff about Pop’s colorful pals. Like Louie Jiggs and Louie Hop. Louie Hop also presented multiple memorable images to different audiences. I remember him as a friendly man in slacks and a loose shirt who would walk us kids down to Babes and buy us an ice cream or a lemonade. And I remember him as a very big and daunting man when he was sitting, scowling, on his stoop in a wifebeater tee shirt while his wife was singing, that’s what Mom told us she was doing, in the house. Sitting on the stoop at such times Louie Hop was a sort of Luca Brasi looking character, scary, with an unfriendly face and a far away look and lots of black hair on his arms and chest - lots of hair.
Uncle Froggy had lots of hair on his back when he had his shirt off at the beach, and he sometimes scowled and acted like he was mean. And he had a gruff and very loud voice, but Uncle Froggy wasn’t scary, at least not to me. He was never gruff and mean acting at the beach. He was just like a big kid playing in the surf with me and Matty and Sonny. I think Sam and Jas were a little scared of him, but they were really little kids then.
When Uncle Froggy was working the counter at Babes and me and Matty went in for lemonade Matty would give him a dollar for two big lemonades and he would give us each two quarters back as change, sometimes even three quarters each. I was pretty good with money even as a little kid and I asked Matty about it one time when we were walking back up to Grandmom L's house on Walnut Street. He told me not to worry about it. And he surely knew about such things because he was older.
Louie Jiggs used to do stuff like that too. Pop would give him a dollar or two for giving me, Sam and Jas haircuts, and he would give each of us a quarter or two quarters. Pop almost never asked us to give him those quarters, so we would go to Babes for lemonade, and if Uncle Froggy was there you would give him a quarter for a lemonade and get three dimes or six nickels back as change, sometimes even some extra pennies as well. Pennies were important in those days. You could buy a little pack of red hots for a penny, or was it two pennies? Sometimes Pop would borrow our quarters if he and Mom had been quietly talking at the kitchen table about money being really tight, but money wasn't often that tight. And even if Pop borrowed our quarters we would still get the lemonade if Uncle Froggy was at the counter at Babes, or we would get a soda if Lou was at the counter at Lou's.
I saw Pop maybe save Louie Hop’s life one day. Mrs. Hop, you see, was chasing Louie around his car in front of their house, two doors down from our house, and she had a little gun in her hand and it was going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Or was it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang? At any rate Pop went out after Mom sort of peeled me away from the screen door, and he took the gun off of Mrs. Hop after saying something like, “Come on Florence, you don’t really want to shoot him.” I think I remember him saying that, but Mom or Pop might have told me what he said to Mrs. Hop. Mom always said to us that "I grabbed you kids" to pull us away from the screen door, so that would mean that Sam must have been there with me. Jas was much too small then to be standing at the screen door. I don't remember Sam being there. But I remember that little gun.
I also remember how funny Louie Hop looked running around that car. But I can't remember what kind of car it was. There's a funny thing about the Hops. I can't remember their real last name. I remember that Florence was Mrs. Hop's real first name but I don't remember her last name because I never knew Louie Hop as anything but Louie. The "Hop" was to distinguish him from Louie Jiggs if Pop and Barber and The Count and Lardy and Cappy and Worm and Doc and Chink were talking about him at the corner.
I seem to remember that I called Mrs. Hop "Mrs" and not Florence. That was odd because I only called a few people "Mr." or "Mrs." back then. Mrs. G was definitely Mrs. G for instance. None of us kids would have dared to call her Florence. But I called Betty P "Betty" even though she was Frankie Jiggs wife, for example. And there is another oddity, because sometimes Pop and the boys called Frankie Jiggs "Barber", but he wasn't a barber, he was a politician, which I know because of the way Pop used to kid him about it. His brothers Louie and Charlie were both barbers, but Frankie wasn't. Come to think of it Frankie and Louie and Chollie had another brother, or did they?
I say Pop may have saved Louie Hop’s life because to this day I don’t rightly know if Mrs. Hop shot five or she shot six before she handed Pop the little gun. I also don't know whether she was really trying to hit Louie. Roy Rogers always hit whoever he was shooting at, and from a lot farther away than Mrs. Hop was from Louie. Another thing I don't know is whether she would actually have killed him if she had hit him. Roy Rogers never killed the people he shot, he just wounded them. Another thing, Louie Hop was a very big man and the gun was very little. It was a revolver that looked smaller than my cap gun, but it wasn't shiny like my cap gun. That I definitely remember, I think. It was probably a twenty-two caliber, but it might have been a thirty-eight. I was only four or five or six years old at the time.
I can’t remember whether I ever heard Mrs. Hop singing after that day. I don’t think I ever did. Much, much later Mom told me that she didn't think Louie ever hit Mrs. Hop after that day. Mom liked that story a lot. She thought Mrs. Hop was trying to hit Louie that day when she shot at him, but Pop always said he didn't think so. She was pretty close to him when she was chasing him around that car, but he was moving pretty quick. She was screaming something at him also, like she was mad or something, now that I think about it, but I can't remember what she was screaming and Mom and Pop never told me. There was lots of stuff I wanted to know that they never told me. I really wanted to know what Grandpop L sort of whispered in Italian that time everybody laughed so loud, but they wouldn't tell me. Pop always told me he would explain it when I was older. And then I forgot to ask him about it when I was older.
Pop also wouldn't tell me what it meant when Harry M yelled that sentence and waggled one finger at that woman when he was really mad. That sentence contained something like "Puttano" and "Du Leeowlo" and some other other Italian that I can't remember anymore. Pop smiled real broad when I repeated that sentence to him, but he never told me what it meant. Pat M also wouldn't tell me what that sentence meant even though for years after that he would waggle his finger and say "Pu. . . Pu" to his dad when Harry was acting cranky. And Harry would say, "Go ahead Patty, just go ahead."
Well, anyway, by this time I was well on the way to the barbershop, excuse me, salon, for my monthly clip. And I had to turn off the Donald Westlake audio book in the CD player because with all of the above rolling around in my head it was impossible to pay proper attention to Westlake’s silly tale about two groups of small time hoods that are both preparing to rob the same corporate malefactor of great wealth. That crime is going to go way wrong, like Westlake’s crimes always do.
I had to turn off the booktape because the thoughts in my head were swimming faster than Michael Phelps as I drove to the salon, but not as straight. They were swimming around as fast as they used to back when I would have occasion to be talked to by Mrs. M, not Harry's Mrs M, John's Mrs. M who owned the luncheonette. Mrs. M was one of the world’s great talkers but her plot lines and time lines interweaved as capriciously as those of V.S. Naipaul, whose autobiographical pastiche I am again trying to read.
Anyway, I got thinking about the time Mom did Mrs. M's laundry when Mrs. M's washer broke down. Mrs. M was so pleased that she talked her way around to believing that she had hired Mom to do her laundry every week, and Mom didn’t realize she had maybe agreed to do Mrs. M’s laundry every week until a little later when her thoughts slowed down and straightened out. And Mom went over and apologized to Mrs. M for a long time because she didn’t have time to do her laundry. Mom was working then at Farm Credit for Mr. K, who limped even though he had that one special shoe with the big thick sole and heel. That was before Mr. K retired and the Egyptian became the boss at Farm Credit. I never saw him. I wonder if he really was an Egyptian. An Egyptian would have been pretty exotic in Trooper in those days although I guess that was in the 1980's so maybe he really was an Egyptian.
Mom was very precise sometimes and not so precise at other times. Some of her stories changed over time and then changed back, and some of her stories contradicted other stories. Mom liked the story about Mrs. M and the laundry a lot because she could never figure out just how she came to agree to do that laundry. When she told the story about the laundry she would always tell about the time that Sam took a big swig from the sweety bottle that was filled with used cooking oil. Sam thought it was soda. The sweety bottle story connected to the laundry because Mom used a sweety bottle to sprinkle her clothes with when she ironed. The sweety bottle also connected to Sam because he was late off the bottle when he was a toddler and mom used to say she ended up giving him his milk in a sweety bottle with a nipple. But that never made sense because the laundry sweety bottle and the used oil sweety bottle were no bigger than the baby bottle that Marianne was sucking from by about that time. Or was that later? Sam is much better than me with ages and years things happened.
Well, anyway, after a while I reached the Great Clips Salon by courtesy of the mysterious autopilot that handles things for me when I'm paying no attention to the road and yet still manage to get somewhere without getting things like bicycles and highway cones and pedestrians stuck onto the front of the car. But the autopilot wasn't working perfectly today because first it took me past the CVS instead of stopping to pick up my prescription and then it took me past the Redners shopping center where the Great Clips is even though the purpose of the whole trip was to get a haircut. So I had to turn around at the Acme and go back. All in all the autopilot was working like crap, but not as badly as the time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd to the empty building where I had my old job when it knew that I had been working in Fort Washington for almost two years. I wasn't too irritated that time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd because I was listening to a really good book tape that day.
Anyway, it was lucky the autopilot got a little turned around because then my whole plan for this post was turned around. I arrived at Great Clips just as one of the stylists was going home and a new stylist was coming back from her break. So I drew the new stylist, who was shaped like Louie Jiggs, but who talked like Mrs. M. Not that I need a stylist. I’m a number three clipper for the sides and a number four clipper for the few stray hairs on top. Anyway this new stylist wasn't a walrus, and she didn't talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings; but she did talk and talk and talk about wonderful things that took me right back to the old days.
She talked about going to Jersey with her father and brothers to buy pick your own tomatoes by the bushel. At first I thought she was talking about long ago but I later realized she meant now. She talked about hair dressing in Naples and in a couple of other cities in Italy. And she talked about her relatives in Rome and in Naples. And she talked about her brothers and her father and her making sauce, she called it sauce, she's from South Philly. She talked about them making enough sauce to put up a full year’s supply for several families. Great big vats of sauce put up in hundreds of jars. And this is now, not way back then. She threw in the names of people in Rome and in Naples and in Philly and how they are related and she even threw in some of that old who did what to whom and when. Just like Mom and Aunt Mary or Aunt Carmella used to when they really got cranked up. She talked about living in Lafayette Hill with her dad, and how he still makes wine and she cranks the grinder that pulps the grapes. Thirty boxes of grapes last year.
Grandpop L used to get a lot of boxes of grapes to pass down through the little window into the cellar. I cranked the grinder for him one time. But I didn’t crank it long. Matty did most of the cranking. Or was it Sonny? Matty and Medio used to go down and drink the wine sometimes because Matty knew where Grandpop hid the key. But they couldn't have drunk much of that wine. Nobody but Grandpop drank much of that wine.
I drank it a couple of times when I went down to the cellar with Grandpop to help him fill up one or two of the bottles with no labels that he had. We filled the bottles from the little brass spigot on the barrel after he unlocked the padlock. I never saw where he got the key because I was always looking at the press with its big gear and those slats on the sides and the heavy iron bottom with the little lip. I helped him one time when he squeezed the grapes with that press and I remember the wine running over that little lip. It tasted really sour to me when he gave me some in a glass he filled right from the little lip of the press. It tasted a little better when it came from the barrel but I still didn't like it.
Anyway I couldn’t think about that very well because the stylist was still talking about wonderful things. She makes sausage at home with the intestine for the skin. She uses a hand grinder. Her wrist hurts after she grinds the sausage. Her brother has a motor on his sausage grinder. He makes a lot of sausage. He likes hot sausage. She likes the sweet. She told me his name, but I can’t remember it. She has been a stylist for thirty years but she just started at this Great Clips. She used to work at another Great Clips a couple of years ago. Her and Dawn, I think it was Dawn. Or was it Cheryl? Her and Dawn or Cheryl started three weeks ago at Great Clips in Collegeville. She doesn’t mind the long commute from Lafayette Hill because it gives her time to think. And sometimes she listens to booktapes! So she must have an autopilot too. But I don't think she told me the names of any books.
And now I can’t remember her name so I’m not sure I will be able to get her to cut my hair and talk at me when I go again to Great Clips in a month or a couple of months.
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