What old man?

     My father often told stories to make a point. Rather than ask me to behave in a certain way, for example, he would tell me how he or someone he knew acted in a similar circumstance, setting down an oral example for me to follow. Sometimes I would wonder if there were any truth to his stories, or were they parables created for the present need.

     But, when we were all younger, I was able to verify many of Dad’s stories through relatives who knew him when. So I have doubts about my doubts. Besides, Dad behaved  in ways that reflected the morals he was wrapping up in his stories. He lived his strongly held values out in his daily life. So I pass on this story with every confidence it happened as he related it. If not, it still is a good tale with a telling example of respect  we would be well served to emulate today. And  I’ll ask what you think – a parable, a pointed lesson, a subtle instruction on how I should behave? Or just a story about the kind of boy he was, if implicitly suggesting I do the same?

     The scene: The small dairy farm where Dad was raised. The time: Around 1920, when Dad would have been 12 years old. The action: Dad walking across the farmyard on a warm summer’s day.

     I was walking to the house (Dad told me) when a salesman came driving down the lane. He got out of his car and looked around the yard, at the barn and the house. There was no one around but me.

     “Hey, kid,” the salesman said. “Is your old man at home?”

     “Nope,” I told him.

     “Will your old man be back pretty soon?” he asked.

     “Nope,” I said.

     “Can you tell your old man I was around?” He said.

     “Nope,” I said.

     The salesman stood and looked at me (Dad told me). He shook his head and was getting into his car when my father came out of the barn and walked toward the house.

     “Hey. I thought you said your old man wasn’t home!” the salesman said.

     “That isn’t my old man,” (Dad explained.)

     “That’s my father.”

 

Yes, I remember too

     It's a cliche of journalism -- the "man-in-the-street" interview, a compilation of popular reactions to some news event of note. But as trite as it may seem, this journalistic convention has an underlying validity: What do people think about what affects them? Upon such considerations are decisions made ... and history recorded.

     Newspapers and the airwaves are full today of the recollections of those who remember the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

      Where were you, what were you doing, what did you think when you heard the news? You all have a story. Please share it.

     Here's mine.

     I was in my junior year at Providence College in Providence, R.I. A half-dozen of us were taking a creative writing class just after lunch, in a small classroom where the second-floor hall and a stairway to the upper residence floor for priests met. An isolated nook, appropriate to the moment. We were standing outside the locked door, waiting for our teacher to arrive, exchanging the usual student banter.

     The teacher was an often-surly, middle-aged priest named Father "Dixie" Walker. A conservative man, he disliked the Kennedys and the president in particular. He was a southern sympathizer -- hence  the nickname Dixie --- and disliked what the president had been saying about southern racial ways.
     Near class time, he came brusquely along the hall, nodded curtly, opened the door and led us inside. He walked to his desk at the font of the room, faced the crucifix on the front wall and started to make the sign of the cross to say the prayer that always began our classes.

     But he paused, and turned to face us.

     "You ought to know," he said, almost as an afterthought, "The president has been shot. They don't know if he will survive. Please think of him in your prayer."

     Then he turned back to the crucifix, recited the Lord's Prayer, and turned back to sit at the desk facing us, opened his book, and said something about the day's lesson ... what, I don't know. Later, when telling this story, none of us could remember what he said.

     Fr. Walker probably had asked a question, for when he looked up from his book, he seemed to expect some reply. What he saw was a group of students sitting in stunned silence, unable to say a word, let alone answer a question to start the day's discussion.

     He scowled, bringing those dark eyebrows together into a forbidding hedge of irritation.      He shut the lesson book and slammed it on the desk. "Oh for ..." he sputtered. After a pause, "I don't suppose there's any use trying to hold class like this. Go ahead; go. Class dismissed!"

     And he stalked out of the classroom and ... well, I don't know where.

     I know where we went. As did many of the students, we went to the cafeteria-student union, where we sat or stood, many sipping coffee but hardly tasting it, and listened to the radio news broadcast over the speaker system. Walter Cronkite finally, after a pause in the news chatter, told us what we most feared: the President is dead.

     The rest of that day is a blur. I had to work that night -- I clerked in the camera department of a discount store -- and couldn't stay on campus long. We talked, we mourned, we got angry, furious, at the shooter and bewailed what had been taken from us. Even those who least liked Kennedy were shocked and dismayed at this brutal act. And for many of us, those feelings, though dimmed by time, are with us yet.

     As for "Dixie" Walker, so called for his southern sympathies, he never mentioned the assassination in the subsequent classes we had with him, or, for all I know, anywhere or anytime else.

     I have but one good thing to say about Dixie. Toward the end of my senior year, he called me aside and advised me, if I wanted to write, to take a job at a newspaper. "That way," he said, perceptively, "you'll be certain to write. Otherwise, I don't know ..."

     So, thank you, Dixie. You gave me good advice, and a good story to tell.

          A little background: My mother's father, my Pepere Duval, liked to fish. And he liked to share his catch with family and friends. I remember him coming to visit bringing a pail brimming with eels he and my uncle Leo (or was it Emil?) had caught from a bridge over the Acushnet River (for locals, the Coggeshall Streert Bridge).
         We had eaten many Friday fish dinners off his generosity and skill. So when I came in from playing on a beautiful, warm spring day, I was all excited when my mother told me Pepere had come by with some great,  big fish. "We wanted to keep them alive so they'd be fresh for supper," Mom explained. "They're upstairs in the bathtub."
         Excited? You bet I was. That's the sort of thing that can really turn on a young boy, the thought of seeing live big fish up close. And in our own bathtub!
         I ran upstairs as fast as I could. I may even have stumbled a bit, I don't remember.
         And there, in the bathtub, was ... nothing.
         And there, in the kitchen, was my mother, laughing as she said: "April Fool!"
         I spent years trying to retaliate. She was always one step ahead of me, and I never did.
         But with years comes sense, sometimes, and so over time, we've had many pleasant chuckles over her successful prank and my childish credulousness ( I prefer to think of it as filial trust, naturally).
         But, for the record, I tried to pull that one on my kids many years ago, and they never fell for it. Not once, not at any age.
         Is this something I should be worried about?

In my most recent post, I referred to a type of shovel I used to shovel snow as a kid. I wrote it was a coal shovel, used to stoke our coal furnace in those good, old smokestack days of the late ‘40s.

Well, I was wrong. (Mark the date; it’s not that I’m seldom wrong; I just seldom admit it.)

The long-handled, straight-nosed shovel I referred to was actually used -- in my family, anyway -- for a more homely chore: shoveling manure.

My siblings and I were not raised on a farm, but with a farm. My Dad had grown up on this farm, in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It had been in our family since 1903. He actually tried moving our little family there shortly after I was born, but it didn’t work out. Back to the city we went. So I wasn’t raised on a farm.

But that farm was a part of our lives. Every Sunday, at least, we were there, for an old-fashioned farmhouse dinner -- roast chicken (almost always) with mashed potatoes and giblet gravy. But there was price to be paid: Dad put in more than enough time helping out to earn those dinners. Because Dad would often fill in for our ailing uncle -- the flu, usually -- for a week or so at a time.

Now part of helping out on a small dairy farm is tending to the cows and their basic needs. And one of those needs is … well, cleaning up after them.

That’s where the shovel came in. You wanted a long-handled, wide, square-nosed shovel to scoop the manure from the gutters behind the stalls where the cows stood. If you’ve never been in a cow barn, there were two rows of stanchions which held the cows. The cows stood on a platform that was just long enough for comfort, but short enough for their hind ends to hang over the gutters, down into which plopped their poop whenever the urge came upon them.

The shovel’s long handle was desirable for two reasons: 1. You didn’t have to get down too close to the product of the cows’ digestive processes, and 2. You could more easily swing the shovel-load up into the manure carrier that ran on ceiling tracks down the middle of the aisle between the two gutters.

Oh, Dad and my uncle didn’t miss often; an occasional splatter, maybe. But when I got big enough to help, and was given a shot at heaving the manure (or slinging the sh … you know what I mean), that was another story. Let’s say there was a fair amount of cleaning up afterwards until I got the hang of it.

You could get a fair amount of … whatever … you were shoveling into that scoop and the handle gave good leverage. And Dad was used to it. So that’s why Dad got the long-handled shovel I used to clear the snow from our walks and driveway in the city.

As for the coal pile in the basement -- yes, we had one, until we converted to oil sometime around 1947 or so -- it was flat-nosed, but had a short handle. In retrospect, that was the one I should have used to shovel snow. But it was in the basement, the long-handled one was in the garage and I just assumed it was the snow-shoveling one because Dad used it that way himself.

And you know what “assume” does, don‘t you?

     When heavy snow hits, can a shovel be far behind?

     The news has focused on New England’s own snow globe, snow measured in feet and, in some cases, yards, not inches. Pretty, yes … if you don’t have to get our of your house, free up your car, drive to work or school or do any of the multiple tasks  that make up our daily existence.

     We were fortunate in Pennsylvania. The two weather systems that married up to produce such a horrific offspring hadn’t gotten together until they’d passed our area, so we got a mere four or five inches. Still, it had to be shoveled. A nuisance, really, compared to the burden for our neighbors in the Northeast.

     But the effort still reminded me of snowstorms past. I remember one that taught me a lesson in responsibility and priorities.

     Along the Southeastern Massachusetts coast, we don’t get many snowstorms. But what does fall is heavy, the flakes weighted down by the moisture content contributed by our location near the sea. It makes for heavy lifting – and remember, those were the pre-snowblower days.

     We woke to the snow still falling that day. No school! So out to play. By the time the snow had stopped, a neighbor asked me and my pal Art if we would shovel out her walk. Sure.

     Now remember, no snowblowers. And, for that matter, no snow shovels. As with most households, we had regular shovels, the kind you used to heave coal into the furnace, for that was what we used to heat our homes back then. (Can’t you still hear the roar of coal tumbling down the steel chute into the cellar coal bin?) Those shovels were wide pans of steel with five-foot handles. A handful for a man, they were awkward and difficult for a boy, and nothing ergonomically sophisticated about them.

     Still, that’s what we had and what we used. The alternative, a garden spade, was useless in the snow.

     We cleared my neighbor’s walk, and she gave us 50 cents each. Wow! In that era – oh, maybe 1947 or ’48 – that was good money!

     So off we went looking for other neighbors who had more money than desire to shovel their walks. We found a few, and as we knocked on doors, we wended our way farther and farther from home. At last, as it was getting dark, Art suggested we do his aunt’s walk. She lived about four blocks away – long blocks, so it was about a half-mile down towards the river. It was a good move; for her walk and driveway, she gave us a dollar each!

     By the time we finished, it was dark. So to home. I dropped Art off on the way and got home about five-thirty or six. And waiting for me was Dad.

     Boy, was he mad! I mean, really teed off.

     You see, while I was busy shoveling walks all around the neighborhood, I had left ours untouched.

     And Dad didn’t like coming home to a snow-laden walk and driveway.

     But, I said, look at how much money I made – about five dollars, if memory serves – certain that he would be proud of my initiative and entrepreneurship.

     No such luck. That’s all well and good, he said, but you always take care of your own first. You understand?

     And to ensure that I did, supper – already on the table – had to wait for me, while I shoveled our walk and driveway.

     Lesson learned.