A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

Fast Train


Nothing is like a train. It has a serious presence, not unlike a woman with a purpose. It comes right up to you, stops, breathes on you, seizes you. Like women, some trains keep you waiting. Many are hard to catch, and most are never on time. Some leave before you notice they’re gone. Others may be going too fast to jump off. Each is unique and beguiling in her own way. And it’s not her strengths or failings you remember. Rather, it is the way you were captured.

On a summer evening in upstate New York in 1954, my father brought my older brother and my ten year old self down to Utica’s Union Station to watch the Twentieth Century Limited thunder through the city without stopping. Inaugurated in 1902 (and running daily until 1967), “the Limited” carried fathers and brothers and grandmothers and lovers from Chicago to New York City and back each day, arriving at Grand Central Station in Manhattan well after midnight.

At nine p.m., she exploded through Utica’s station at full throttle, pounding right down the platform at 70 miles per hour to where we stood. I felt my father's hand grab on to the back of my shirt collar, an oddly comfortable feeling. A tornado could not have wrested me away from his strong grip, so tightly did he hold me safe. When the train burst past us a mere ten feet away, the enormous sound and the blast of air were magnificent. A lighted blue eye on the end of the last car quickly sped away from us down the track to wherever trains go. She had taken my breath away and won my heart.

Eleven years later, the redheaded girl meeting me at Grand Central Terminal was quickly winning my heart. Each time her blue eyes rushed at me, they took my breath away. I had asked her to meet me in the center of the main concourse, under the clock, a romanticism from bygone movie scenes. We were going north to my parent’s home for the weekend.

I arrived early so I could watch her as she approached, unaware of my presence. I hoped that viewing the young woman from afar would help explain why she was changing my ideas, my plans and my life. I looked up to see her descending the escalator. Like an angel she scanned the crowds below in search of the boy she’d been sent to make happy, and then I understood that a blessing doesn’t need an explanation.

When she reached the floor and started my way, I hid behind the large round Information Booth, watching her for just a few more seconds. Then I popped out and spoke.

- more -

[Dave]

“Is it the man of your dreams you’re looking for?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “only the man I’m going to marry.”
“And how could you be sure of that?” I said, surprised not by the sarcasm or by her intention, but her voicing it.

She looked me in the eye, and in the most matter of fact way said, “Because it’s you I want with all my heart.”
I swallowed, or tried to.
“Then I won’t be disappointing you,” I said.



On the train, we held hands like teenagers, for we weren’t much beyond those years. The river and the hills seemed to fly past us, but in reality they sat still, like old married couples on a porch, watching two youngsters hurry ahead into life. At my parents’ house that weekend, we were never apart, never even in separate rooms. Except at night, by patriarchal decree.

She went back to work in the city on Sunday evening. I followed a few days later, when I had finished helping to move my parents to the small apartment they wanted in readiness for their later years.

And then I was standing with my father on the rail platform once again, this time waiting for the train to take me back to New York. I told him I was getting married.

“To the redhead, is it?” he said, as if he’d been elsewhere for two days and not seen the girl and I mooning over each other and gamboling about like puppies.
I said yes.

“Is she the one for you, then?” he asked.
I said yes, she is.

The train arrived, pounding fast down the platform, coming to get me. My father put his hand up behind me and grabbed my collar and held on. When the last car stopped before us, he sighed. And this time, he let go.

###

[Dave]

Never again


It’s been more than sixty years, but I remember the first summer morning my mother let me walk by myself down to the corner store on Taylor Ave. I started just after breakfast. The katydids were still asleep in the trees. Cool air had settled overnight on the grass and wrapped the neighborhood in a cloak of moist smells.

The early sun cast my shadow on the sidewalk up ahead, pointing me toward my destination. At age four these were the first important steps of my life. I hadn’t slept the night before, excited to be on my way when the sun came up. I knew the route to the store: straight down the sidewalk until I stood in front of the old gray building that could be seen from our front porch a block away. I had been allowed this far from home only with my mother or older brother. Now, like a novice swimmer paddling farther away from the dock, I felt a nervousness in my gut just short of fright, and I almost turned back to where I knew my mother would surely be waiting. But I looked down at my feet and willed them to keep walking.



When I raised my eyes again, I saw my father deep inside the recessed doorway, waiting for me, watching me. When my courage began to falter, he could tell. He stepped forward out of the shadow to show himself more clearly just when I was about to turn back a second time. My father wore a shirt in style that year with large panes of pastels, blue and pink and yellow and green, colors I associated with safety the rest of my life. He was coming home from his shift at the fire department and knew I'd be on my first journey.

- more -

[Dave]

My father could encourage me, because he knew me well. As a child, I sometimes wondered if he read my mind. Later in life I recognized we had almost identical ways of thinking and brooding, doubting and procrastinating. Mentally, we might have been twins born thirty years apart.

I wasted much of my youth in a manner that would scandalize a modern parent, intent as they are in ensuring their child's efficiency and productivity. When I look back on my high school days, I see misty mornings and lazy afternoons, with time on my hands during the long stretch of summers. The early hours of a day held so much promise, but my young fires burned hot and quick, leaving me drained, spent on myself. There were myriad mornings in July and August when the hours lay before me full of interesting tasks … things to write, to draw, to plan, to accomplish. But as the day warmed and the katydids raised their whining voices in praise of the hot sun, I squandered my time, letting it drift away until I burned with disappointment. And having wasted the morning, I would fritter away the afternoon, first in self pity and later dreaming about the wonderful day coming tomorrow and all the projects I would finish.



My father didn’t push me. I was fifteen before I wondered why he never complained about my lethargy. Perhaps he remembered his own youth and knew I would survive, that inside me a small clock was set to ring at the right time.

- more -

[Dave]

My father's world had been enmeshed in his religion, or so it seemed to his me. He could tell you all the history of his faith and he must have had half of its rules and regulations memorized. I tired of hearing it all, and told him so when I was a teen. During his final year, he lost his footing in the present and began to slide back into the past. Surprisingly, he no longer mentioned religion or morals or rules, which had been so important to him. Toward the end, he spoke mostly of my late mother, the balm of his sometimes troubled life



In time, my father's mind began to live elsewhere. He never told where he went, but he always came back happy. Eventually, he didn’t return and I lost him, though I stood next to his bed, listening to him breathe. I was happy his mind was somewhere pleasant, but I missed him terribly. I just wanted to hear his voice once more. He could have quoted the canons of the Third Lateran Council, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me.

When he died I stood beside his bed as he sighed for the last time. His soul got up and left for I knew not where. I felt as I had years before as a little boy when I sat on our porch in the hot afternoon sun, hearing the mocking katydids as I stared down the block and wished my father would come home from his three day shift at the fire department.

- more -

[Dave]

After Dad’s grave-side service, workmen stood by ready to roll up the fake grass and lower the casket into the earth. I didn’t care if they waited all afternoon, I wanted a few more minutes with my father. I needed to say things to him I had neglected, because he would never be here again. But I had no words. I thought only of that early morning when he watched as I walked to the store, and how he stayed in the shadows until he was sure I couldn’t go on without a little help. Of everything he ever did for me, I remember that as the most caring.



As a cold wind blew through the rows of headstones, I walked up and placed my hand on the casket. To the east, the clouds broke on the horizon and scattered into pinks and warm greens and golds. Inexplicably, I heard my father shout and I swung around to the west where his voice had come from.

In the distance, over the roof of the little chapel and beyond the tall pines that circled the cemetery, I saw Eternity in a sunset emblazoned on a sky of deep indigo blue, and knew my father had gone there ahead of me. A majestic bank of purple clouds rolled up and away from the fiery sun into the blackness of the gathering clouds above me. The harsh, dark colors spoke of danger, power, birth and death. Long overdue, my nativity as a man flooded me in an exhilaration of tingling from head to toe. A strong spirit like a woman beckoned me away from the boyhood skies behind me to an inevitable life ahead under a tumultuous expanse. I could have refused, but my psyche burst from my soul and my head spun with delirium at the possibilities to be lived.

Born in that moment was the day I call my life, a bright morning of promise and an afternoon of achievement, love, loss and times of failure. I often forgot I had the same mind as my father, but with different opportunities. Still, I would make many of his mistakes.

I seldom noticed the slanting sun telling me the time was getting late. The hours rolled on and on and seemed not to be numbered, but they were.

My day has now reached its evening and someday when the purple sunset rolls up to crown my life, thundering upon me as a great cloud of blackness, I will dread it and I will have no words. But I will have to accept it is finished. It will be time to leave and, like my father, I will never be here again.

[Dave]

The End



I'm done. Thanks for reading.
Dave

PS: that's me on the right, thinking about whatever. Probably a plot line.

[Dave]

I guess the time I spent at MVCC can be considered part of my Utica Boyhood. I may have not thought so at the time, but from today's perspective, I'd say I was still a boy back then.

Anyway, a significant interest in those days (and still today) was amateur radio, and the most fun event of the year was Field Day. This is an international event held on a weekend in June when many of us take to the fields or woods or seashore and set up a radio camp with self-generated power. I remember the Utica Amateur Radio Club at that time had an old school bus with a twenty or thirty foot antenna that could be cranked up to it's full height above the top of the bus. It had to have guy wires running down to the ground; otherwise the base plate would have torn free from the roof of the bus in a stiff breeze. With the radios set up inside the bus, we could be ready to begin contacting other amateurs around the world during the contest that lasted from Saturday to Sunday Afternoon. The problem was, metal buses are either too hot or too cold on most days if you don't have the engine running, which for safety and expense reasons didn't happen. Turns out a few of the radio ops used the bus, but most of us set up in large tents in which to sleep, eat and operate the radios.

Here are a few photos from the June 25, 1962 Field Day. You might notice a rather handsome young man in the last photo struggling to put up a mast. As the photographer snapped the picture, the older man in the photo was heard to say, "Hey, you're supposed to be pushing, not pulling." It would be fun to tell you that moments after the shot we dropped the antenna on the tent in the background, but I'd be lying. The older fellow, Ted Czupyrna, got a bit bent out of shape the next day when the younger man (boy) told him he was leaving early because he had a date back in Utica! Ted probably got over it.

Click on the photos to enlarge. The newspaper article is very readable when enlarged. Firefox users click twice.

[Dave]

Actually and come to think of it, if anyone would like to read along while I accomplish a project, I can post pieces here. I've decided to turn this thread into a book.

I'm adding stuff to bridge the gaps and, when I think of it, inserting color and explanation.

It needs a lot of editing and fleshing out and I'm now in the process of doing that. I don't know if I'll ever finish it, but you never know.

I'll post pieces here, if anyone is interested. Or, I suppose, even if anyone is NOT. I don't think it will duplicate any of the writing already posted, but some of the situations may be familiar.

The reason why I post is to simply raise the bar when I know there's an audience. Believe it or not, an audience improves the writing. It's also plain old fun to have an audience, and so I find myself more willing to sit down and write more often. And too, writing on the forum has generated even more ideas for more stories.

Dave

[Dave]

When allowed to take my new bike around the block but not cross any street, I veered off the path of righteousness and took off down the muddy path along side the railroad tracks from Conkling Avenue to Eagle Street.

On this damp and sunny winter day I rode along the dirt path past Hathaway Bakery and I began to feel guilty. I wondered if my Mother had simply run inside to get a cigarette and was now back out on the front porch waiting for me, swinging the butt away from her face with splayed fingers like Veronica Lake in a 1940's movie, as though Cornhill was a film noir rather than a large clump of tightly packed houses.


I didn't spend much time on the path. I passed the hill we used for sledding that dropped down to the Graffenburg Dairy and then I was behind (waht came to be) McGuirls. I got off the bike and pushed it around to point back toward Conkling Avenue. The bike was a little too large for me and I had to stand on a railroad tie to jump over onto the bike's seat. I took off for home at top speed.

Bumping up on to the road surface at Conkling Avenue, the front tire slipped on the pavement and I tumbled off the bike into the wet street. A milk delivery truck was almost upon me when the milkman slammed on the brakes. He jumped out of his truck and ran toward me, but I was immediately up and running, pushing my bike across the remainder of the road and up on to the sidewalk. With the bike alongside me, I ran towards Leah St.

"Hey! Wait a minute!" shouted the milkman. He sounded upset.

Taking a chance while running I hopped up on the seat just like Hopalong Cassidy jumped on the back of his horse in so many movies.

I rounded the corner at Taylor and Leah, zoomed by the front of Walter's Grocery Store and was soon putting the bike in the hallway and running up the stairs. I headed straight for the bathroom and attempted to wipe the mud from my pants using a washcloth. Where was Mom?

"David, can you come in here?" she said from the bedroom at the back of the flat.

Mom sat in the old chair in front of the room's only window. As I approached her, it dawned on me. I'd sat in that window countless times and stared out across the back yard and the field behind it, over to Conkling Avenew, where ten minutes before I'd left the block and headed off down the tracks. She had been looking out the front windows of the house and then the back window to follow my progress around the block.

"I thought I'd have a stroke when you fell in the road," she said.

"I wasn't hurt," I said.

"I know," she said. "I could see that. Now I want you apologize to Mr. Curley. He should be here with the milk any minute."

[Dave]

My grandmother came to live with us on Taylor Ave in 1948. She was a great old girl, but maybe a little stiff. She took up residence in the back bedroom facing the West Wind with nothing to fight it with but loose windows and no storms. Any room near the kitchen in that house had frosted windows all winter long. We kept a spatula near the window in the kitchen to clear off the frost to see the thermometer outside. Knowing the temperature outside was not at all important to us, but the thermometer was a gift from my uncle and we felt pretty special owning one and citing the number of degrees. For what reason, I don't remember.

We had a radio, too, but that was for Mom to listen to Don McNeil's Breakfast Hour as she started her day and got ready for Arthur Godfrey at mid morning, and then the soaps at noon. Mr. Sunshine aired in the afternoon when she re-tuned the radio from WIBX to WRUN. WGAT (later WTLB) offered popular music, but Mom was more in to personalities than music.

The radio stations offered the weather, but who really cared? You could look out the window and see what it was doing, and in Utica it probably would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If it looked like rain, you carried an umbrella. If it felt like it might get colder, you brought a scarf. If it was winter and a storm loomed, you jut got ready to pick your feet up higher as you tramped through the snow. No one except the farmers cared what the weather was going to do. It just did it and you dealt with it.

Grandma and my parents were factory people, not farmers, so what the weather planned to do never worried them. Utica's buses ran in any weather. If the plows didn't keep up with the snowfall during a blizzard the buses might be pulled off the roads when the roads were covered with about a foot of snow. If for some reason the power was lost ... and I don't remember that happening often ... you lost your lights and maybe Jack Benny if you listened to your radio at night. A gravity coal furnace in the basement had no need for electrical power. With candles, you waited around for the power to come back or just called it a night and went to bed.

[Dave]

Dad liked cold weather. He'd been a skier in his younger days, before chair lifts or even before Utica had a rope tows, walking up favorite slopes around and outside the city for a short ski down hill. He had tried Utica's Ski Tow on the Parkway, but like a number of other people felt it was too steep for a leisurely tour down a hill. The old toboggan tow adjacent to the Ski Tow was more to his liking and after it ceased operations for toboggans, he sometimes skied on it. (As kids in the 1950's, the toboggan tow was our favorite sledding hill. If a nice slick snow had been laid down, a good sleigh could make it all the way to the Bandshell.) Had cross country skiing been popular at the time, I'm sure Dad would have much preferred it over downhill. When in later years I told him of my wife and I and the kids cross country skiing out behind our house in the fields and along trails in the woods, he was visibly enthused, but by then his legs would not support such activity.

He also enjoyed getting a nice warm coal fire going in the cellar on the first cold nights of fall. Even when spring came along, my father never tired of tending the fire in the old octopus furnace. Having grown up in a household where they usually ran out of coal before the next paycheck, heat was a luxury in his mind. His family's only source of heat in the ramshackle bungalow on lower Mohawk Street had been the kitchen stove. A large furnace in the cellar with heat pipes or ducts leading to each room in the flat was in his mind a wonderful blessing. Just soaking up the heat while he tended the fire three times each day was a great experience, he told me later in his life

[Dave]

Keeping the Fire Burning

In the fall Dad would order a truck load of slab wood, cut into foot long lengths. The truck backed along the side of the house and dumped the wood through a cellar window into coal bin. On cold mornings or nights in the fall, Dad started a wood fire with newspapers on the furnace grate. When the wood supply got low, he would order a bin full (two tons, if I remember correctly) of furnace coal (3 to 4 inch chunks) and remove the remaining wood from the bin. He stacked the slabs up somewhere near the furnace and saved them for lighting coal fires if the furnace for some reason went out during the winter. We never went anywhere in the winter and I don't remember the fire ever dying. The left over wood was usually burned in the spring as the coal ran out and the temperatures outside went up. We never let the fire go out, because it was work to start another. If the temperatures went up in January for a week, we just opened the windows and kept the furnace damped down to reduce the fire.

Dad got up each morning in the winter and first went to the cellar to tend the overnight fire. First he opened all the dampers to give the fire air. When he could look into the furnace and see the fire licking flames up through the top layer of the fire, he'd throw a few shovels of coal on and let them catch. At that point, he shook the ashes of the fire down with the handle on the furnace that moved the grate from side to side. If he shook the fire down before it got really hot, it could go out. The coal he put on top was added insurance that something was burning before he shook the grate.

It was now time to shovel the day's coal into the furnace. He would let that burn with the dampers wide open until he could no longer smell the gas coming off, then shut the dampers almost all the way. (When all the neighborhood men returned home in the late afternoon and shoveled a load of coal on for the evening fire, the entire city was suffused with the smell of rotten eggs fpr twenty minutes or so.) By now the heat was roaring from the furnace's plenum up the round ducts to our flat ... all by convection. Dad repeated this process when he came home from work, but set the dampers a little farther open for maximum heat during the coldest part of the evening when we were out of bed. Then one last time at night before we retired, when he dampened the fire more to make it last through the night.

I observed the exact same procedure with my kitchen coal stove forty years later.

[Dave]

The school lunch theme gave me an idea ...


Gentleman



Joey and I always sat at what we called the Furnace Table in the high school's lunch room. It sat under the huge pipes coming out through the painted brick wall from the boiler room. In September when we met for the first time we immediately recognized the introverted comic genius in each other. Since no one else did, we gravitated away from the crowd at lunch when we found we were the only two laughing at each other's jokes.

Because of the table's proximity to the noisy old furnace, no one sat there. Many of the kids were sure one day the rumbling old boiler would blow itself to bits, flying out through the bricks to kill half the students in the lunchroom. But at age fifteen, I was indestructible, so I never let it bother me. For Joey and I the table was perfect. It was deserted.

That was the way I felt as I began high school in the tenth grade ... deserted. Kids I had known in the Junior High building were all around me, but except for Joey, they avoided me. I wondered about it, but could not see any great offense I might have committed. I was still the same old me, a wise-ass who could point out your deficiencies, tell your secrets and laugh at your mistakes. I had no idea why such a winning combination of junior high skills no longer worked as we all got older.

"This is a good place for the two of you," said Mr. Czupryna, the lunch room monitor and Business Studies teacher. "All we need are bars to put around you to complete the picture."

"Picture of what?" asked Joey.

"Imbecility," answered Mr. Czupryna. "Late stage," he added.

Joey laughed his silly laugh, but frankly I was embarrassed to be insulted by a teacher, of all people. I took it to mean he assumed we were too stupid to know his behavior was wrong.

The boiler shaking away behind the wall helped muffle the comments we made concerning the sophomore girls in our class and the other high school maidens up through the more buxom senior girls. The lunch room monitor couldn't hear us over the noise, even when he came down to our end of the room. If he had overheard our discussion of female anatomical measurements, we would have landed in detention. Joey and I normally spoke in superlatives and seldom noted our observations in inches, preferring instead to describe a young woman's attributes with reference to one garden vegetable or another. I suppose that would be two garden vegetables. The Produce Stand of our imagination provided an adequate vocabulary to carry on our conversation, and a rich set of gestures allowed us to communicate our adolescent impressions over the noise of the furnace.

An older kid named Ronnie soon began to show up at our table, but he sat 12 feet away at the other end. We tolerated his presence because he was a senior and he good naturedly ignored us. He was therefore a much more acceptable table mate than someone who would have considered us moronic and said so. Ronnie appeared to be what my mother called a gentleman. Each day he brought his unusual lunch and set up at his end of the table.

Coming from the upper classman end of the school, Ronnie always arrived five minutes after we sat down. He had chosen our all but empty table because he needed room to spread out his lunch. A wide place simply wasn't available at the other tables, crowded as they were with the next generation of criminal nitwits.

Ronnie was the kind of kid who would notice you ... he wasn't stuck up ... but he wouldn't engage in conversation unless you spoke to him. And if he didn't like what you were saying, he would politely make sure it ended quickly.

He gave us a nod and sat down while he hefted his shopping bag up on to the table and emptied out the contents. Joey and I interrupted our quantitative girl watching to enjoy the show. Compared to my consistent fare of either warm baloney or peanut butter and something sugary, Ronnie's repast usually came in a square cake pan which held meat or a pasta dish. There was always a saucer of coleslaw or vegetable wrapped in tin foil, a bottle of A&P soda and usually two cupcakes. There were other bits and pieces, such as celery stalks and scallions and maybe a good sized chunk of garlic bread, probably from last night's Italian dinner. The reverent way he handled the dishes and arranged them in a precise pattern held our attention. I am quite sure that had he been allowed, he would have brought a candle and lit it with a long taper.

Equally interesting was the ritual he used to serve himself the food. He did not eat out of the cake pan or the other dishes, but neatly laid out three or four five-inch paper plates designed to hold a piece of party cake. Then he stood and served food out of the containers onto the little plates. Ready at this point to eat, Ronnie sat down, blessed himself and said a quiet prayer of grace. Only then did he begin his meal.

Joey and I returned to our discussion of onions, oranges, grapefruits and cantaloupes while we spoke expectantly of that great day in the future when each of us might frolic in our own garden. Something funny caught our fancy ... something funny probably happened 2 or 3 times each minute in the school lunchroom ... and we roared with laughter. Mr. Czupyrna gave us a dirty look. We laughed even harder, although now behind our forearms, held up in front of our faces. Ronnie was unmoved by any of this. He seemed not to care whether his future garden held cumquats or zucchini and I doubt he ever discussed the topic. He was always aloof and sometimes I imagined he felt superior to us. I was sensitive to what I imagined was his judgment, because Joey was beginning to wear on me with his juvenile antics, but I was not yet ready to search out new friends.

When a red headed girl walked by our table, my comment was a little too loud. She stopped and turned to me and demanded my name. I ignored her.

"Stand up," she said.

I immediately had a bad feeling.

"I said, 'Stand up.'" she said again, this time louder.

I smiled my best I-don't-give-damn-Ma'am smirk and got out of my chair. Her timing was perfect. As I came up from my seat, when my nose was even with the top of her shoulder, she stepped in toward me while her elbows shot out from her side. Her cupped fists shot up under my chin and would have connected with a terrific force had I not caught her wrists just in time. Still, she connected and my tongue was caught between my teeth. I could taste blood in my mouth. Incensed, I began to push her downward by the wrists. She broke free and began to wildly slap me about the head. Stepping back, I stumbled over the chair and went over backwards to the floor.

Grabbing on to chair, I worked my way up to my feet, my head spinning. I didn't want to hit a girl. But this young lady was ready to fight.

She stood with her fists up, ready for me to come at her. I didn’t know what to do or say. So I swore at her and left. On my way out of the lunch room, I found Mr. Czuprna and, blood dribbling off my tongue into the corners of my mouth. I announced there was a girl student out of control who had just tried to injure me. “Grow up,” he said.

When I saw her in the hallway during the week after, I'd turn and walk away, twice making myself late for class. I stopped going to the lunch room each day. Joey just laughed it off and he continued to sit at the Furnace Table alone, except for Ronnie. That’s when we began to drift apart.

Ronnie came up to me at the bus stop one afternoon and peered inquiringly at me while he smirked and rubbed his jaw.

"Man," he said, "that was certainly impressive. She floored you."

"I tripped," I said.

"I notice you haven't been back to the lunch room, though," he said, trying to needle me.

"Got other things to do," I said.

"You're running from her, aren't you?" he said.

"Ronnie," I said, raising my fist, "I'm warning you. Shut up and move along or you'll get some of this."

"No," he said "I don't think so. You're a coward. You've been running from her.”

"Oh," I said, "you think I should beat her up? That doesn't sound like Mister Ronnie Manners"

"Or apologize to her,” he said. "Look, it’s none of my business, but you were wrong. A gentleman would admit it.”

“And you’re the expert, huh?” I said. “With the four square lunch your Mommy makes you? You know all about being a man, I’ll just bet you do.”

The smirk left his face and he looked down at the sidewalk.

“I make it myself at night,” he said. “I live with my older brother. Dad never came back from the war and Mom died in a car accident last year."

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m … a … well …”

"It’s my main meal of the day, " he said, "and I ... pretend they’re with me. My brother won't allow it at home.”

I didn't say anything. He sighed, then looked up at me.

“You should make more of an effort to become a gentleman,” he said. “Especially since your mouth gets you into trouble and you don’t like to fight.”

He walked off before I could punch him. But of course I wouldn’t have punched him. I was indeed a physical coward. He had that right. I didn’t feel bad about it. I’d learned my lessons in grade school and come to accept my reluctance to get my nose busted in a fight.

I walked around for a few days and wondered if I was a gentleman. I reluctantly decided I was not, but I aspired to be one. After all, my father was certainly a gentleman in the way he acted with everyone. He came from a family with a rough style, but he developed his manners by what he learned from others. I had his example and I could have my own experience work for me if I hung out with the right people.

The next afternoon I found the girl sitting on the pipe railing by the sidewalk outside of school. She stood up when I approached her, but didn’t raise her fists. There was a mixture of fear and determination in her eyes, eyes that were really quite pretty. I wondered if she might date me. It couldn't hurt to ask. One never knows, I've heard, when the love of your life will come along.

“I just wanted to apologize,” I said. “For anything you may have heard me say.”

“OK,” she said. No smile, no comment about what a great gentleman I was to apologize. Not a good sign, coming from the woman I might marry some day ... if she promised not to hit me again.

“Well,” I said, “I’m just trying to do the right …

“Get lost,” she said. She sat back down on the railing and opened her book. An unkind comment came to mind, but I resisted the urge to say it. Instead, I got lost.

Nobody said being a gentleman would be easy.


David Griffin copyright 2012