A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

Cowboy


“So you wanted to be a cowboy?” she asked, as we stood waiting.

“Well, yes, when I was a little boy.”

“You’re not too old, it’s still possible.”

“Too much work,” I replied. “And then there’s my aversion to cow poop.”

“So … now you no longer yearn for that life,” she said.

“Oh, I suppose I do,” I replied, “but not enough to make it a reality.”

“Reality and yearning aren’t the same, are they?” she said.

“No, they’re not,” I replied. “The price of reality is hard work. Yearning is free.”

I looked up at the mountains sweeping down before us. How wonderful and invigorating it would be to hike the trails among the rocks, up and down the glens and through the tiny streams that creased the steep sides flowing down from craggy peaks. No, it wouldn’t, I realized on second thought. It would be a lot of hard work. My feet would get soaked, and then rub against the inside of my socks and I’d have bleeding blisters by the time I got home.



“But you know by now that anything worthwhile takes an effort to accomplish,” she said. “And you have worked tirelessly on the important things in life.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But we don’t always know what’s important.”

“That’s true,” she said.

“Like the Buick,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She had known me for too long.

- more -

[Dave]

On warm May afternoons in the distant past, I'd stand daydreaming in the back window of our downtown Catholic high school, busy at the pencil sharpener, pointing and re-sharpening enough pencils to last until college, and gazing out across the street to where a neighboring salesman always parked his yellow 1954 Buick Roadmaster convertible. It was such a beautiful car, a giant throbbing land rocket with deep leather seats that made you want to jump in and tear your clothes off … if you were a sixteen year old boy. And I'd yearn to take Mary Immaculata O'Toole for a ride in that dream machine, while we played the radio and listened to Johnny Mathis. I didn't like Johnny Mathis, but I figured Mary Mac would. And in the unlikely event she tore off her clothes, the radio could play The Battle Hymn of The Republic, for all I cared.

Sister Mary Monstrance snapped me out of my reverie with the call of my name. She would endure my grinding away a forest of wood products for only so long. And now, would I please take my seat and attend to academic matters during this last study period of the day.

“How you expect to ever accomplish anything is a mystery to me, young man,” she offered.

“Me, too,” I thought.

“You need to concentrate on what’s important,” said the old nun. I hoped that some day I could.

I returned to my desk, where I sat squirming with eager anticipation for the final bell, like an astronaut waiting for the countdown to reach zero. Then, shot out of my seat to land on the streets of downtown Utica, I would search for Mary Mac. But when I found her, I ignored her. I was too shy to start a conversation. A youthful Casanova stifled by the daunting task of small talk. A price I was evidently unwilling to pay, when I could daydream for free.

[Dave]

“And do you still yearn for her?” asked my wife.

“She was the most gorgeous car I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Beautiful curves, luscious upholstery, and a snappy set of headlights.”

“The girl or the car,” she asked.

“Even after all these years,” I said, “I’m not sure I can separate them.”

“I think you’re trying to provoke me,” she said. “But here comes your horse.”

A wizened old ranch hand … by the looks of him, the veteran of a thousand cattle drives … brought the beast around from the barn and casually handed me the reins as if I knew what to do with them. I had always yearned to ride a horse, and here was the moment I’d been waiting for. I never realized horses were so big. How would I get up there?




“He may need some advice,” my wife said to the man, embarrassing me.

“It’s OK, sir,” said the fellow, “not everyone is a born cowboy.”

“I know,” I replied. “I’m a born dreamer.”

”Me, too,” he said. “I’m a retired stock broker.”

I didn’t do too badly on the trail that day. Old Sam, as he jokingly called himself, decided to ride with me and we discussed our portfolios while our horses stopped often to nibble on the grass. I’m still not terrifically sure what’s important in life. But I’m thinking of buying a Buick.


copyright David Griffin, 2009

[Dave]

Sometimes I wonder how anyone ever learned about the world in their younger days without the benefit of holding an after school or summer job. Turning 16 and joining the labor market for a taste of what our lives would be like in the future was an exciting prospect when we were young. And in many cases it was a jolt to our senses when we learned that responsibility was expected in the working world, as was promptness and honesty. And a lot of other things we'd heard about and always planned to maybe take seriously someday.

Here's one experience from that time after I gave up the paper route and before I graduated from high school.


Mr. Frypan


I worked for a man while in high school who taught me a few things. I admired him because he was a businessman, wore a suit and drove an Oldsmobile convertible. He was also a college graduate. He was all those things that never happened in my family.

A salesman who considered himself a professional, Achilles Freytag was the kind of guy who first chose his life style, went out and purchased the house, the car , the woman, and then tried to figure out how to pay for them. I would never want to live that way, but it doesn’t stop me from appreciating people who push through life chest first.

Mr. Fry, as I called him, ran a small wholesale business in the old part of town with his domineering second or third wife and a part-time accountant. He considered himself a wholesale jeweler because he sold diamonds from time to time, but Donna the accountant ... a college girl only a few years older than myself … told me the profits were all from the electric fry pans he managed to peddle, thus earning the nickname Mr. Frypan among the downtown merchants of the city.




A big man and solidly built, he had been a star quarterback at Syracuse University twenty years before. He had traveled a long and I suspect disappointing road since then. He drove around the valley selling the money-maker fry pans to a variety of small retailers, along with clocks and watches and toasters and Ronson cigarette lighters, often returning to the office in a cheery disposition after a spirited lunch, his face reddened by his successes and a few drinks. After doodling over his paper work for a while, he would wrap up the goods to be mailed out to his customers. I helped with the packing as I listened to the retelling of his exploits. And in the late afternoon I lugged a handcart loaded with packages down to the post office. The work was easy, even for a lazy kid like me.

- more -

[Dave]

Mr. Frypan was a born storyteller, another reason why I liked him. With just a little nudge from me, off he would go into a repertoire of yarns from his college days in Syracuse. This slowed down the pace of our work considerably, which was more than acceptable to me. But his wife, Miz Madeline we all called her, would often hover nearby to spur us back into action, tsk’ing about the lateness of the hour and the items left to be packed for shipment. Mr. Fry always treated her with the utmost respect, and more so the longer he had spent at lunch. It seemed to work. As his courtly speech and manner reached a crescendo, Miz Madeline would back off and finally leave us to our business.

“We don’t use boxes … too expensive,” said Mr. Fry during my half hour of lifetime training for the job. “That’s what this roll of corrugated paper is for,” he said The material looked like what most of us call cardboard, but it was quite flexible and could be wrapped into a pocket-like container.




“I’ll show you how to make an indestructible ‘shipping carton’ with the least materials,” said Mr. Fry.

And he did. A few years later in a college design class, my uncooked egg would survive a 30 foot drop, artfully wrapped in corrugated paper and shaped like a football, folded on the ends to form bumper cushions just as I had learned from the master.

Mr. Fry’s stories always had a moral, I noticed, and most were about the challenges of growing through one’s years as a young man. His tales often began with college freshman frolic … fast cars, beer drinking, football games, pretty girls … and ended with a thinly disguised lesson. Not preachy, he was very good at getting his point across without talking down to me. Had he not been Jewish, he would have made an excellent Methodist campus minister.

[Dave]

I thought Mr. Fry and I worked well together, even though he did most of the work. Somewhere in the middle of a story one afternoon we were interrupted by the sound of Miz Madeline bearing down on us as her high heels clomped along the plywood ramp leading back to our lair. I saw Mr. Fry’s mouth set in a hard line as his wife came up behind him.

“Dear,” she said, “I need David for some chores up front.”

David wasn’t doing much but listening to her husband’s stories, and we all could guess what she wanted me for … to clean the bathroom. That had been one of the many duties I’d agreed to when I took the job, although I had not yet performed it in my three months of employment. I guess Donna was cleaning the toilet up when necessary.




Mr. Fry was a nice guy and a terrible executive. Miz Madeline was a taskmaster. She would have served well as the road boss of a South Carolina chain gang. As far as she was concerned, I had sold myself for the minimum wage and was expected to perform the contract. But Mr. Fry would never ask me to do anything that he would have been embarrassed doing as a teenager.

For example, I didn’t mind hauling the hand cart down the block to the post office at the end of the day, bumping the little wheels down off the curb across the pot-holed street. But I avoided pulling the cart uptown for deliveries to the stores where I might be seen by my friends. So Mr. Fry would often perform that chore before I came into work at three o’clock. This act of kindness in deference to my idiotic social fears at age 15 sent Miz Madeline into a tizzy, according to Donna. “What are we paying that kid for?” she reportedly asked.

- more -

[Dave]

When Mr. Fry did not turn to acknowledge his wife that afternoon, she edged around to his side and peered up at him.

“David is busy here, Madeline,” said my savior.

“That is certainly not the case, dear,” she replied with heat in her voice. “He’s needed up front.”

Mr. Fry’s face now reddened deeper and he replied, “I do not like having to repeat my…”

“Achilles!” his wife said loudly, and this was the first time I heard his name spoken, “send David up front. NOW!”



Miz Madeline whirled around, her flouncing skirt rising like a square dancer’s and she clip-clopped back up the ramp to the office. Mr. Fry stood rigid trying to control himself. Then the retired quarterback turned and with tremendous force hurled the alarm clock he had just wrapped toward the ramp. The package, with its perfectly folded bumper ends, hit the wall like a football and bounced up to the ceiling where it smashed a 4 foot long florescent light tube and bounced down to the adjacent wall, knocking the clock to the floor behind Mr. Fry. As the clock smashed down behind him and shards of glass dropped from the ceiling light, the enraged man threw his arms over his head for protection and stepped backward onto the fallen clock, losing his balance and tumbling farther backward into a large open shipping box of frypans, where he finally came to rest in a seated position.

It was the funniest scene I had ever witnessed, and I started to laugh but then tried to cover it with a cough. Mr. Fry, defeated and embarrassed, was now in a terrifically bad mood.

“What the hell are you laughing at?” he thundered as he extricated himself from the frypans and stood to his full height.

[Dave]

“Look,” I said, “maybe I started to laugh, but …”

“Oh,” he interrupted, “excuses, huh? A man doesn’t offer excuses, he owns up to his behavior.”

I knew he spoke the truth and what he said was not unfamiliar, just difficult. I bit the bullet.

“OK,” I said, “I lied. I did laugh, or start to.”

“Good beginning,” he said.

“But then I covered it with a cough.”

“Why,” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do,” he said.

“You’re my boss,” I said, “and I’m not supposed to laugh at you.”

“Supposed?” he said. “What about plain old respect? For age, for accomplishment.”




Mr. Fry got up and came over to stand directly in front of me.

“I don’t ask for respect,” he said. “You have to decide to give it.”

“Yes, sir,” I responded.

“When deserved,” he added.
I made no comment.

“And Madeline is right,” he continued. “You did agree to clean the bathroom.”

“I know,” I answered.

“So, go do it. Go do it while I sit back here and figure out how to earn my wife’s respect.”



I had never cleaned a bathroom in my life, but I headed for the office, where I could at least flirt with Donna and get her into the tiny bathroom for a lesson.

Mr. Freitag had no children and maybe he needed to offer fatherly advice to someone from time to time. I know he liked me and I remember him often encouraging me to get better grades and to plan for college, advice he may have sensed was not offered to me at home.

While on a trip to see my parents twenty years later, my mother showed me Mr. Freitag’s obituary that she had saved weeks before from the local newspaper. No mention of Miz Madeline was made. I guess he never succeeded in earning her respect. But although I never took the opportunity to tell him, he earned mine.


Copyright 2010, David Griffin

[Dave]

Helpful

We never know when fate can turn a chance encounter into a path to riches and greatness. Or just a life’s work.

At a recent high school reunion, Richard (I'll call him) told me a story about how he found his life's career. The story began when he laughed out loud one day after school long ago at a fellow who was carrying a load of boxes along the sidewalk in the downtown area of Utica, a much busier place in those days. The man was trying to move files and attempted to carry too many at once as he walked along the street in his shirtsleeves on a cold November afternoon. File folders spilled out of the boxes onto the sidewalk. He scurried about on his knees picking them up and then stood and walked away with his arms loaded.

"Since he was leaving," said Richard, "I felt safe in saying loud enough for him to hear, 'What an idiot!' with a heavy accent on the last word as only a teenage snot could make it sound. "

I'll let Richard continue with the story:

The man ignored me, but another gentleman reached out and clamped a firm hand on my shoulder and spun me around to face him.

"You insulted that man," said this large fellow in a black suit under his long grey overcoat.

"He didn't hear me," I offered as an excuse, although we both knew that was untrue.



"Doesn't matter," Mr. Gray Overcoat said as he stared down at me. "You should apologize to him for your words."

"Why?" I asked. "He's already gone."

"Catch up with him,” he bellowed, raising his hand to me, “or I'll land a few good punches on you!”

I could see he meant it. His breath was coming hard, his jaw was set and his face red. His powerful large hand continued to grip my shoulder unrelentingly. I was young enough to not be surprised that someone meant to punch my lights out.

At that moment, the man carrying the boxes turned and came back toward us. I had no idea why he did so. He wasn't looking at me, but as he was about to pass I stepped toward him, looked down at the ground and mumbled, "I'm sorry." I felt a set of knuckles begin to grind into my back, so I reluctantly continued, "For calling you a name ... sir."

"Uh" was Mr. Shirtsleeves only answer and he barely slowed down while passing by. He didn't even look at me, but was now carrying the boxes back in the direction he had come from.

- more -

[Dave]

Richard continued his story.

"That man is earning his living," said Mr. Overcoat. "He probably has a wife and children and he works to support them, as I'm sure someone supports you. You have no right to laugh at him."

"It was funny," I whined, "when he dropped the boxes."

"I'll tell you what's funny," said the man, "you are. You loaf along the street doing nothing useful and think you can insult someone who has grown up and taken responsibility for himself and others. You should have helped him pick up his files and not laughed at him."




The man carrying the box of files now turned again and came back in our direction. I wondered how he came to get lost carrying boxes on the street in cold weather without a coat on. Wouldn't he have known where he was going before stepping out with only a shirt on, boxes piled in his arms?

As he came up to us again with the files, Mr. Overcoat raised his voice and called to him, "Here! Over here, sir." Mr. Overcoat turned and opened the back door of a gray late model Oldsmobile sedan parked next to us. "Put them in here," he said to the fellow.

"Oh, are you Mr. Silkworth?" said Shirtsleeves. "I knew you must be out here somewhere!"

"Right here all the while," said Silkworth.

- more -

[Dave]

Richard tells how the man in shirtsleeves now realizes that Silkworth has been standing there the whole time.

Shirtsleeves' face fell and I could see irritation immediately replace his respectful countenance.

"Then why the hell didn't you help me pick up the files when I dropped them?" he complained.




Silkworth straightened up to his full height.

"I thought it better,” he began, “to spend my time giving a lesson to this young man who laughed at ..."

"Terrific!" said Shirtsleeves, meaning anything but that. "I'm dragging my ass around out here with your files and you can't even help?”

I’ve always felt a kinship with anyone who attempts to mentor me, so maybe that’s why I mounted a defense for Mr. Silkworth.

“This man was kind enough,” I said, “to interrupt his standing around waiting for you to lecture me on being of help!” I managed the little speech with quite an air of authority … for a kid.

Shirtsleeves threw the file boxes in the back of the Oldsmobile and turned to us.

“I don't think I've ever met two more self satisfied and useless people in my entire life,” he said. With that, he turned and left us.

- more -

[Dave]

I laughed, in my mind's eye seeing Richard no doubt left with a very angry Mr. Silkworth, who had only moments before threatened to slug him.

"Richard," I said, "I would have gotten away as fast as I could run!"

"Oh,no." said Richard. "As a teenager nearing the end of a career in the company of other school boys, I was used to being insulted. But I felt bad for Mr. Silkworth, whose face had reddened again as he stood crestfallen in the street next to his Oldsmobile.

“It just goes to show you,” I said to Mr. Silkworth.

“Shows me what?” the man asked.

“Helpful people like us are seldom appreciated,” I said.

The big man remained silent.

“Yes,” I opined, “this has been quite a lesson for me.”

Mr. Silkworth turned and glanced at me with a doubtful look upon his face.

“Are you being sarcastic?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I think it would be appropriate.”

He dug deep into his grey overcoat pocket, pulled out a business card and handed it to me. “Stop by my office when you graduate,” he said.

That was the only job interview I've ever had. I’ve been doing Silkworth and Company’s public relations work now for over forty years.

Richard's cell phone chimed in his jacket pocket and he pulled it out without even trying to appear apologetic. He didn't get up and leave so that his conversation would be private, but instead reached out and put his hand on my arm to indicate we were not finished.

"Thanks, Lloyd," he said into his super-modern widget-infested cell phone that no doubt can do everything, from starting the morning coffee to launching a long range missile. "Have fun. Yes, I'm at the reunion."

He slid the phone back into his pocket and said, "That was Lloyd, the fellow I called Mr. Shirtsleeves in my story. He just called to say he'd landed safely in Florida."

"You still see him?" I said.

"I married his daughter, " said Richard. She was working after school at his accounting business when I dropped in to make a real apology."

"Did Lloyd and Mr. Silkworth ever make up?" I asked.

"Hah!" laughed, Richard. That's what I was going to tell you. They were brothers, just having some fun with me when Harry Silkworth decided teach me a lesson."

copyright 2011, David Griffin

[Dave]

theology

Yes, with a small "t."


I met God one snowy Saturday morning on the upper floor of the electrical supply house where I worked during my senior year of high school. His name was Herb. He worked alone.

It was my first weekend on the job and the boss ordered me up to the third floor to ask God when he planned to have the order for 500 florescent light bulbs ready for the General Electric plant in town. I was a lazy kid, and there being no elevator in the building to carry me up, I asked Gordon why he didn’t just call the guy on the house phone.

“Because he’s God,” said Gordon, “and he doesn’t take phone calls.”



As I turned to leave his little cubicle of an office, Gordon stopped me and said, “God doesn’t like empty hands. Take him this gift.” He handed me a jar of orange marmalade.

“Tell him,” he said, “it’s from Huey, Dewey and Louie.” These were the names Gordon used for his crew, who filled orders as they ran through the building from one bin of electrical devices to another.

So I trudged up three flights of stairs, which was a lot easier for me to do back then compared to now. Arriving only slightly out of breath, I walked in from the stairwell to find God seated at a very large and magnificent mahogany desk. He was slouched on a commodious swivel chair, smoking his pipe and reading the morning newspaper. Surrounding him was an enormous sea of light bulbs … boxes and boxes of incandescents and fluorescents of every size and description that took up the entire top floor of the old building.

[Dave]

“Are you Herb?” I asked. He raised his eyes to give me a stern look.

“I’m God,” he said. I held out the jar. He looked at it and smiled, rising up from behind his beautiful desk, an old executive’s model probably saved from the dump in recent years.




Herb was sixty-something years old with gray hair and a paunch littered with pipe ashes. He was well over six and a half feet tall. He just kept going when he stood up, and I followed him until my neck clicked. Resembling a heavy-set Moses, Herb would have passed for a Charlton Heston, but with less hair.

Looking down from his lofty height and regarding me with condescension, Herb stalked around to the front of his desk and motioned for me to follow him to the florescent light cartons. Here he allowed me the honor of dragging 500 light bulbs in their boxes over to the conveyor belt to prepare them for their trip to the shipping area below. The belt ran at a steep angle down between floors and had to be loaded carefully.

“Cock the boxes a little, like this,” he said, “so they don’t all slide off and crash when you get the belt moving.”

While I worked, he bestowed upon me some of his encyclopedic knowledge of light bulbs, and droned on through their entire history since Edison. Herb loved light bulbs and everything about then. As he talked away, I was getting impatient.

[Dave]

And I was in a hurry, to tell the truth. I wanted to get back down to the office floor to watch blousy Belinda, the girl who answered the warehouse telephone. She had a way of picking up the phone that just set my heart all a-titter. When it rang, she would set her body’s poetry to motion. As she raised the instrument to her ear, shiny bracelets and bangles would slide and clang as she raised her arm and flipped her head and pulled her hair back to swing a four inch long earring out of the way. And just before she said “Hello,” … I swear I didn’t imagine it, even if I was seventeen … a tiny shrug would begin in her shoulders and flow down to her feet. With clinks and jingles, she greeted the no doubt surprised caller. To me, her ritual was frankly erotic and might have been outlawed in an earlier time.

Anyway ….. I was still stuck upstairs and God or Herb was beginning to bore me with his prodigious knowledge of lighting technology and his sermon on lumens and filament tensile strengths. He paced around the floor, stooping to look out the various windows as though awaiting the return of a lost squad of angels. He lectured about power ratings and glass safety and Underwriters Laboratories. He said his biggest vexation was when stuff was left on the belt down on the dock. It backed up his system. ”God can’t deliver if the world isn’t ready to receive,” he said. I hurried through my task without much attention to how I placed the cartons on the belt.

When I could no longer stand his oration, I pronounced the loading task complete and interrupted his monologue.




“So,” I said, “you’re the God of light bulbs?” Turning hard eyes my way, Herb reared up to his full height and looked down on me.

"I am," he said, "the most senior employee in this company. Mr. Lewis (the owner) was in diapers when his father hired me."

"Well, that's very interesting," I said, as only a disinterested teenager can say it.

"And this entire business,” he said, “all the people in it, and now yourself included, appear to have no other purpose in life than to thoroughly piss me off."

"Well..." I began, in defense.

"Except for Belinda," he interrupted. "She's a lovely girl."

"Yes, she's very...."

"I've seen you mooning at her. Make one move toward that girl and I'll break both your legs and send you back down the conveyor belt where you came from."

Oddly, I was more impressed with his concern for Belinda than his bullying of me. I simply nodded and left his presence.