A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

David didn’t always find Walter in the little building each afternoon on his way home from school, although he would often peer in the window, ready to wave and say Hi. Only when the snow slammed down in a howling wind with near blizzard strength did David find the man out in the backyard shed.

On such days Walter left his wife to her radio programs, lit a fire in the stove and settled down in the tiny building to be with his thoughts. He stared out over the field as the snow piled up and the fear continued to grow in his belly. His mind was pulled back to those frozen snowy days in the Ardennes Forest. where he had been one of 81,000 American casualties in the deadliest battle of the War. His mind’s eye again saw the trees explode around his foxhole and the snow and dirt plume up around him as mortar shells landed everywhere. Once again he felt his limbs freezing and the terror mounting. He saw himself lying with dead buddies around him in that awful frozen field, his lips mouthing the mantra, “It’ll Get Better, It’ll Get Better.” But it didn’t. Something tore through his chest and he woke up back in a Belgium field hospital, drowning in a sea of pain. Now sitting in the little shed in the middle of a snow storm, the fear came back to him and he sought to meet it again as he stared out on the field. Walter didn’t know if he wanted to conquer his dread or simply shine a light on the pain. He just didn’t want it to hurt so much.

When David came across the field from school, Walther would lurch from his frightful reverie back to the present. The boy found himself welcomed into what he now thought of as a kind of man’s playhouse, and he would stomp the snow from his boots and walk over to sit near the tiny stove.

There was one particular snowy day when something new began, as David remembered it. Walter had asked casually about school and the boy pulled out his drawing pad and said he was supposed to draw something for homework. It could be anything, but he didn’t know where to begin. The man took the pad, propped it on his knee and drew a great northern moose. The likeness was quite good, and it was apparent that Walter had training. Then he showed David a few techniques for drawing animals, using triangles and circles and ellipses. David realized his own hand could produce nice drawings with this technique. Over the next few months, the boy drew 13 moose, 11 dogs, 5 cats and a cow, the latter on the day his father stopped by the side of the road to let him capture the animal in his sketch book.

[Dave]

Walter was rather surprised at himself, that his skills came back to him so quickly. When he took some wrapping paper down from a shelf and spread it on the workbench, ideas and old talents spilled from him as he began to doodle and draw, shading and edging his work. He wished he had real drawing paper and soft pencils and maybe sticks of charcoal. He missed the paints and pastels he had owned years ago, before being drafted and taken off to war.

David now found Walter in the shed each day when he crossed the field on the way home from school. Snowing or sunshine, on rainy or windy days, Walter’s renewed interest in his art began to blossom in the tiny shed by the side of the field. When David entered the little building, there was always a new sketch or drawing hanging on a wall. Eventually there were paintings of dense bright colors that suggested but didn’t define their subject. David really had no words to describe the paintings, but he sensed their power and violence, and he could feel fear saturating each piece.

After the southern winds blew through the valley in April and the sun began to climb higher in the sky toward the solstice, school ended and David didn’t cross the field again until autumn. He could have walked up Conkling Avenue during the summer and crossed the field to visit Walter, but when he had last stopped by the little shed in June, Walter was painting in a frenzy, as if driven by a demon or the clock. Conversation had been rushed as the man wheezed and coughed, holding his brush with two hands now, laying on the colors from dozens of new tubes of paint.
On the day school began again in September, David crossed the field and came to the shed. The man was not there. Paintings were evident through the window, but not Walter. The boy passed by on two or three more occasions before finally working up the courage to go around to the front of the house and ring the doorbell.

[Dave]

Walter Katowski had died, said his wife, stifling a sob and wiping away the tears. “War wounds,” she said. “He had only one lung, you know. Lost the other at The Bulge,” she continued. “Winters were tough on him. I don’t know why he sat out there in that shed all the time.”

“To paint,” said David “His paintings are still there in the shed.”

She looked at him as though he was crazy, but then walked with him to the little building in the back yard. In a moment they were both inside. Mrs. Katowski looked quite puzzled as she gazed at all the artwork, and she began to cry quietly. Walter’s paintings were arranged in a line around the inside of the shack, as in a crowded gallery.

David noticed something about them. There was an order to their arrangement and he could sense a drama unfold as his eye moved along the line of paintings that began on one side of the door, went down one wall and over the workbench, then under the window that looked out on the field, across the other wall and finally back to the door. The objects in the paintings, whatever they were, never gained any more definition, but the colors toned down and became less garish as the line of paintings progressed. The edges of the objects softened. Imbalances came into balance and the chaos let up. The fear came to rest.

At the end of the line was a painting quite different from all the rest, but David knew it had been painted by Walter. It was somewhat larger than the others, a beautiful painting of the field in summer, as seen through the multiple panes of the shed’s window. It was … and it still is … the most wonderfully executed landscape that David had ever seen. Viewed through Walter’s eyes at last was the world at peace.

copyright 2007 by David Griffin

[Dave]

I love to write stories about snow. Fluffy white flakes falling from the sky on a night lit only by street lamps have always created in my mind magical scenes that evoke memories of treasured presents under Christmas trees, the next day off from school, a pretty girl in front of me on a toboggan. And in Utica we always had snow during the two weeks off from school at Christmas. In high school, life didn't get any better than having a few bucks from my generous spinster aunt to spend on hamburgs and cokes, hanging around the Pin-O-Rama bowling alley on a cold winter night with kids from my class at UCA.


It's all in the eye of the beholder, of course. A kid sees snow as fun. An adult can see both sides. And for me, snow also brings to mind a few not-so-pleasant car trips over snow covered roads, two car accidents and one plane crash. I'll probably get to all of them in due time.

For the moment, I've been thinking of a magical snowy night in January of '61. It often comes to mind when I hear of a school closing due to only an inch or two of snow. We had almost no closings when I was a kid because there were only a few kids bused to classes back then. Most kids I knew lived in the cities and walked to school.
I was a senior in high school and we were living on Brinckerhoff Ave., just below the parkway. It had begun to snow as I walked through Cornhill to meet some classmates at Slim's bar, on the northwest corner of Leah & Miller Street, as Ralph reminded me a few months ago.

[Dave]

A few of us guys and girls were meeting despite the snow. Who cared when the buses ran in any kind of weather? The girl I dated at the time came with her girl friend by bus from North Utica. We chose Slim's at the suggestion of a young married couple everyone knew who lived in the neighborhood and brought along their new baby, but only for an hour. They had been in our class and quit school to begin married life. Before I arrived at Slims, it began to snow like hell and soon cars were barely moving along the streets.

Not many of us were 18, the legal drinking age at the time. But in a neighborhood place, the bartender would serve you one or two without proof. We hadn't a care in the world, and I decided to escort my date back to North Utica after her girlfriend left early by herself to be sure not to miss the necessary two buses over to Herkimer Road. I convinced my date to stay after the couple went home. We had switched to cokes by then. When we did leave, outside a Winter Wonderland had built up. I figured as we walked along we'd meet a James or Eagle bus, or those running on Oneida and Genesee Street streets. We got to the Busy Corner and boarded the first North Utica bus that came along and learned it would be the last on this snowy evening. North Utica buses went out either Riverside Drive or in the opposite direction along Herkimer Road. We didn't catch the bus we needed, so we got off at the North Utica corners and trekked from there to her house, stepping through snow drifts along the edge of the road since the sidewalks were impassable.

The bus driver said to hurry back to the Corners because this was his last run. He'd pick me up on his way back from the turn-around.

[Dave]

I stayed too long on the front porch with the girl and missed the bus. I did that quite often, actually, but seldom with so much snow. So I walked all the way back to Cornhill through what can only be described as blizzard conditions, coming over the railroad bridge into Baggs Square and hoping to find a bus to take me on the last leg home up to Cornhill. No luck, all stopped. Only a plow roamed the streets. I could hear it, somewhere far away.

I will never forget that night. As the wind blew snow up my nose and threatened to knock me down, I walked up the middle of Genesee Street right through the center of the Busy Corner and there was no one there. Not a car or truck or bus. I felt like I was in a movie where everyone disappeared. I was tired, but I was enjoying my walk. I continued up Genesee, over Elizabeth and past No. 2, up John Street to Rutger and on to Cornhill, all in the middle of roads completely owned by just me that very early morning as it neared one o'clock. By the time I climbed Brinckerhoff Ave almost to the Parkway, I was pretty tired. My father waited up for me, but he didn't seem unnecessarily worried.

I was young ... 17. I thought it was one heck of a storm to stop the Utica buses. They had rumbled along the streets until the very last when the snow just got too deep. The plows and the police and fire never stopped as long anything could move through the drifts. Utica was a city that worked and not much brought it to a halt. It was prepared.

I think of that night and remember Utica as a city of people who really wanted to live there, many whose families had been in the valley for years, some for over a hundred. They worked for and were loyal to companies that returned the loyalty … not all, to be sure, but many of them. In my youthful vision of the world, it seemed to me the people had a pact with each other, where each tried to do right by the other person while pursuing his own goals. Maybe it wasn’t true for everyone, but on the night of the blizzard, it seemed to me it was. Uticans put up with the snow, with life’s irritations and with each other, because it was their home. That made a difference.

[Dave]

Earlier in this thread, I posted "Nowhere," which tells the story of our move away from Utica for a few months. Returning to the city, we took up residence in West Utica, Bobbiez's favorite part of town! There I met a character named Jesse. Here is his story.


South Pole


Jesse viewed winter days as boring and lifeless when no snow fell. Without a covering of white, the twelve year old boy saw his mill town in the Mohawk Valley as bleak and ugly. Black columns of smoke dripped upward from West Utica’s factories to smudge the leaden sky and leak away in wet, ugly streaks. If the weather warmed for a day or two, the streets filled with grey slush, slopping up over the curbs and onto the snow banks left by the plows in the last storm. During these brief winter intermissions, Jesse scanned the skies and watched his Boy Scout weather instruments, hoping for the snow to return and relieve the gloom. A storm was a happy event, canceling school and many chores at home. But more important, a good storm allowed Jesse to play The Game, and to play it alone.

[Dave]

From his reading at the school library, Jesse knew enough about the weather to recognize the herald of a heavy snow storm, and its arrival began with a bright blue sky shining through the kitchen window in the morning, illuminating his cornflakes as he sat with his brothers eating breakfast. Cold artic air rushing down from Canada gave the sky a deep blue color and chilled the back porch thermometer into the teens as the boys were leaving for school. By mid-morning, while Jesse read the Baltimore Catechism in unison with his seventh grade classmates, a vast sheet of moisture, sometimes fifty miles wide, rose off Lake Ontario and began to march east across the Tug Hill Plateau. While the boy sat in class and struggled with the question, “Why must my life be for the glory of God?” the warm moist air from the lake charged into the Adirondack Mountains, fell back and toppled down the Marcy slope into the valley, where the warm and cold air masses lie down with each other and spawned a storm of heavy snow. Jesse followed the storm in his mind as he trudged through his school day. Toward noon, he glanced up from his Social Studies text and gazed out the window to see large flakes falling to the ground. The church across the street began to disappear as the snow became heavy. That was Jesse’s favorite thing about snow, how it could hide things.

At Our Lady of The Holy Innocents Elementary School, Jesse was adrift in an ocean of children. Seventh grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 30. Jesse learned his lessons seated at a small desk in the middle of an overheated room. He ate lunch with two hundred other children in the cellar lunch room that doubled as an air raid shelter, squeezed in among a legion of uniformed girls and boys. Afterward, he marched to the bathroom and lined up with other boys at a bank of urinals, together pissing gallons of chocolate milk down the sewer, and sometimes down Jesse’s pant leg from the boy next to him. Although he did not yet have the intellectual power to describe the weight all of this crowding produced, his heart could feel it and his soul took notice.

At home, he endured three generations of family stuffed into a railroad flat. Gram and Gramps had the back bedroom, Mom and Dad the front. In between, Jesse and two brothers occupied a small bedroom stuffed with three beds, dressers, baseball equipment and all the other artifacts of a room filled to the ceiling with the lives of three boys. He was seldom by himself. In the center ring of a circus going on around him, Jesse was unable to get away from the eyes of others. Nor did he escape their opinions. He was the youngest and the most often corrected. He awoke in the morning to the arguments of his brothers and longed to be away somewhere by himself.

[Dave]

All winter he had been reading accounts of explorers in the arctic wastes at each end of the earth. He spent weeks devouring every arctic adventure book he could find. The nun who ran the little library at school suggested he might like to broaden his literary interests. But Jesse ignored the look of concern on her face. He was quite happy to stay on the topic of his choosing and continue to read of solitary men who braved the snow and ice and cold, men who followed no one’s direction but their own.

In his favorite daydream, Jesse was dropped by parachute at the South Pole. Equipment and a tiny house followed him out of the sky from the belly of a transport plane that would return for him the next year. On the southern ice. he would have a place for himself. He could read to his heart’s content and maybe learn to play the guitar and stay up all night to watch the moon rise against a black sky as he sat by his tiny window. Alone with no brothers or grandfather ordering him around, he would be invisible to the rest of the world. Gone to where no one could follow. Where nobody could see him. Where he could do as he pleased.

At the end of March in 1956, Jesse played The Game for the last time. He walked home from school in the final heavy snow of the winter. Sheets of snow slashed furiously across his path and the winds buffeted the boy as he fought his way over sidewalks that were quickly disappearing under a blanket of white. For a twelve year old, it was a perfect day. His mother might worry for his safety until he arrived home, but Jesse hadn’t the slightest thought of any danger. After all, he was on the streets of a small city, and only a block from the local hospital.

When he reached the gate of Murnane Field, an outdated complex of ball diamonds and a cinder running track, Jesse detoured from his route home and stepped through the wrought iron entrance to the field, now almost invisible in a covering of wet, sticky snow.

[Dave]

In summer, he sometimes walked here from home and paid ten cents admission to a men’s’ softball game. He would buy a bag of peanuts for a nickel and climb up to the very top of the decrepit old bleachers, where he sat alone and watched the sun go down, eyeing the game occasionally, though he had no interest in sports. He would gaze over the long expanse of green grass and lift his eyes above the dreary neighborhood to the far off clouds on the horizon, golden clouds against the pale blue sky, a sight that could hold one’s heart forever. It was so beautiful over there, he thought, and he wondered why a person couldn’t live in a sunset like one could live at the South Pole.

But today, at the end of winter, a deep snow lay on the ground, and more was falling from the sky. As he entered the field, Jesse was immediately enveloped in a swirl of icy wet crystals beating against his face and piling up on the front of his coat. Blinded by the snow, he stood there, absorbing the beauty of nothing but white. Today would be excellent.

The first part of The Game was to walk as straight as possible and not miss the field house up ahead. He could see nothing, but he knew there were 74 steps to the building. At step 65 he put his hand straight out in front, ready to touch the front wall of the field house. Now his feet began to slide carefully forward through the snow, to avoid tripping on the front door steps, in the unlikely event he arrived at the exact center of the building. Touching the brick wall at 78 steps from the gate, Jesse felt his way around the building. When he reached the rear corner, he walked 40 steps across the back to stand in the exact middle of the building. He put his back against the wall and faced outward. He was now oriented to the entire field, but in the driving snow he could see none of it.

[Dave]

Off to his right, Jesse could barely hear a few cars making their way through the snow on Burrstone Road. Across that street lay the small Faxton Hospital. To his left was a dead end street of mostly two-family homes, and behind the field house he was leaning against was a Firehouse, staffed full time by bored men who sat out on benches in the summer and spoke of nothing but their families or new cars from Detroit. In front of him, straight ahead in the middle of Murnane Field was Jesse’s substitute South Pole.

He stepped away from the back wall of the Field House and walked forward 205 steps, the distance to the exact center of the field, as he had measured it on a sunny day last fall. As he reached his destination, Jesse was elated to feel the snow coming down even harder. For a moment he simply stood there, absorbing the wonderful feeling of being completely alone. Hidden by the blizzard, he was cut off from the world. No one from his family watched him, no fellow students crowded him, no nuns with stern looks stood by to correct him. Jesse was not just alone, he was invisible.

As the wind and snow drove into his body, Jesse reached up under his coat, loosened his belt and dropped his pants and under shorts to his ankles, leaving himself naked from the waist down. After loosening his coat and shirt buttons at the neck and wrists, he reached back over his head and with both hands grabbed the collars of his coat, shirt and undershirt. In one fluid motion, he bent forward and pulled them all over his head and threw the clothes behind him. He spread his arms and stood in the middle of Murnane Field, completely naked except for the pants around his ankles. He took a deep breath and screamed, a shout of exultation and complete release. As he cried out a second time, a sharp intake of breath hiccupped from his mouth and a violent shiver overtook him. He was terribly cold, but Jesse was now the king of this frozen world. To celebrate, he pissed in the snow, spraying what he laughingly called “jet fuel” into the west wind, much of the urine coming back to spatter up his front as the wind tried to blow him down. Jesse stood his ground. He had not come this far to be beaten by the wind. He waved his hips left and right and up and down, hoping to make large yellow circles he could not see. When he finished, Jesse reached around behind for his clothes. They were gone.

[Dave]

Jesse yanked up his pants, turned and took a step back toward the field house. He could see nothing. He plopped down on his knees, feeling ahead in the snow. He reached left and right and then he bounded forward a few feet, bending over and feeling in the snow for his coat and shirt. He moved left again, and then right, and in the process lost his sense of direction. He touched something, and pulled his scarf back to him. He was now shivering uncontrollably. Remembering from his books that the head lost a great deal of heat, he wrapped the scarf around his ears and tied it under his chin. In a few minutes, he knew he wasn’t going to find his shirt or coat. He believed he could make a beeline in any direction and quickly be on one of the streets, where he could bang on a door and get warm. But he hesitated, thinking how embarrassing it would be to show up half naked on someone’s front porch.

Jesse had played The Game before, but never completely disrobed, only dropped his pants and relieved himself in the snow, never taken off his shirt and coat. He saw the afternoon was darkening and, now thoroughly frightened, he ran toward a sound he heard, the whine of slipping tires on a nearby street. He hoped in that direction he would find Burrstone Road, the street closest to his home.

The next time he heard whining tires they were behind him. The sound could be coming from another street, but it seemed more likely he was moving in a circle. He now was running, with his freezing hands jammed up into his armpits. He heard a car horn from one direction, and then a siren from another. He twisted and turned and ran toward each sound.

Jesse was becoming exhausted. The cold and exertion and feverish state of his mind were taking their toll on his energy. He wanted so much to sit down and rest, but all of his reading had warned against doing so. He was staggering now. He fell, then got up. He ran a few steps and fell again. Forcing himself up on his feet, Jesse looked up into the sky and screamed in anguish. Then he sat down in the snow.

[Dave]

Jesse wondered if it was true that when freezing to death a person passed from shivering and frostbite into a state of sleepiness and comfort. He brushed the thought from his mind. He didn’t want to die. He was only twelve years old. But he couldn’t go on. He was too exhausted. Jesse started to cry, finally, the frustration howling inside his head. That’s when he saw the colors.

Years later, Jesse would think of the irony of dieing a freezing death within sight of the hospital. It had been the last snow of the season that year. The next day, as sometimes happens in late winter, spring came overnight, the temperature zooming up into the sixties by mid morning. His family and the police would have searched all over the city, never thinking to look in the summer sports field. As the sun shone bright and the snow melted, Jesse would have lain there dead, half naked and probably still frozen, like a visitor from a icy planet, or a veteran from the South Pole. On a nearby sidewalk, nurses and doctors and kids and dogs would be walking and playing, oblivious to the presence of his corpse only a hundred feet away.

But a vision had saved him, whether it was real or not. The cold had made him delirious, he knew, and logic said he could not have seen it. But a flash of light occurred to his right. He turned his head and glimpsed a break in the curtain of snow, and through it a momentary flash of clouds on the horizon, pink and green and turning gold against a pale blue sky. He jumped up and ran toward it, and soon bounced into the fence that surrounded the field. Stumbling along it, he came to an opening. He saw headlights then, all in a row, cars slowly moving along the snow covered Burrstone Road, carrying men and women home from a day of work. Jesse bolted into the road, his eyes blearily fixed on the lights of the hospital. A driver slammed on his brakes …

[Dave]

Jesse bolted into the road, his eyes blearily fixed on the lights of the hospital. A driver slammed on his brakes and was rear-ended by the car behind, both cars sliding off to the side of the street and into a snow bank. The boy kept going, half naked with the scarf wrapped around his head and patches of snow and ice clinging to his bare skin. A new surge of energy coursed through his body, but he knew it would soon end and he must get inside to warm up. By the time he reached the back stairs of the building, he was beginning to falter. On his way up the steps, he slipped twice and fell, praying each time he got up that the entrance would not be locked. It wasn’t. He crashed through the door. When the warm air seared his frozen skin, every nerve ending writhed in pain. He sprinted down the hallway with no destination in mind. Spotting the Gift Shop, Jesse flew through the open doorway and collapsed into a display of cut flowers, his arms thrusting out to grab the warm colors of yellow and green and pink, as he greedily hugged them to his chest.

The doctors said that only a twelve year old could have survived such an ordeal. Jesse left the hospital a week later, and was back to school within days of his discharge. His mother took him in the family car each day for the next week and picked him up after classes. The nuns banned him from the school library for the rest of the year. Instead, they sent books to the classroom for him, with titles such as “The Life of Saint Ignatius Loyola” and “Hobbies For Teens.”

Although memories of that fearful afternoon would always remain, Jesse grew up to be as normal as most young men. Despite the experience, his love of snow was not lost completely, although heavy storms made him uncomfortable. Certainly, he was never again tempted to stand naked in a blizzard. And as far as anyone knows, to this day his mother believes a mighty wind blew his clothing off while Jesse crossed Murnane Field during the last major snow storm of the winter of 1956.

From the book, "Heaven," copyright 2009, David Griffin

[Dave]

I'm pretty sure when I ran off on my monastery gig last time I likely told Mrs. Dave I'd be spending some time with the Poet Laureate of North Carolina, but I may have forgotten to mention she is the lovely Ms. Cathy Smith Bowers. Cathy has been with my class for two of the weeks spent at the Carmelite monastery in Niagara

Falls, Ontario. Her mission is to help us appreciate poetry as a part of our spiritual walk. And a central theme she uses is that of the "abiding image." She asks us to recall such images and write about them, to turn them into verse. Sounds simple. It is, and it works. But from a craft point of view,I was also fascinated by the care she takes with each word, even each word ending, even in free verse. If I wrote prose like that, it would take forever to finish a story. When I told her that, she replied that it takes forever to write a poem, that it's never done. I can relate to that. I constantly go back and tweak my writing.

I mention this because A Utica Boyhood consists of those abiding ... or memorable ... images. A snowstorm, a pretty face, a day at the beach ... they're all part of my memory. And memories are something we usually wrap words around. The words seldom describe the image adequately. Or they don't quite wrap all the way around with the ends tied up. So we add a little here, balance out a little there, make up stuff to bridge the facts. It's what I call the storytelling version of memoir writing. I've said this before, but I suppose it bears repeating. I'm a story teller, not an historian.

That said, I'm not about to say something is true if it isn't. Nor do I try to portray myself in a better light than I deserve.

You should absolutely believe every word of the next piece, Remember Me, which contains a few abiding images. The one following, Balloon, I can't vouch for all the facts. In fact, I can't vouch for any of them. Hahahaha!