Monday, August 31, 2009

Pulp Fiction

Dad smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes without filters, allowing the ash to collect until it was quite long, finally falling off due to gravity onto the floor of wherever Dad happened to be standing. Dad was always standing, when he wasn’t prone on the couch “watching” TV with his eyes closed. “Lin – da,” Dad would shout from the living room couch, and Linda would come running to find out what Dad needed. Often it was to change the TV channel – no remote controls in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.


Sometimes it was to fix him a cup of coffee, which meant pouring a cup from the stovetop percolator into a saucepan and heating it up, then adding cream and sugar. Linda liked everything about making coffee, including helping Mom to grind the coffee in the noisy red store grinder mounted on the wall opposite the check-out stands of the grocery store. At night, when Linda turned on the kitchen light to reheat the coffee, cockroaches would scramble from the sink into the crevices behind the kitchen counter into the walls. If she was quick, she would manage to squish a few before they all escaped. Cockroaches were just a fact of life in the apartment flats that Linda’s family occupied first on the west side, then on the east side of the Midwestern midsized city where they lived. As the oldest child, Linda couldn’t be squeamish about things like cockroaches, since she was entrusted with tasks like fixing Dad’s coffee.


Once a week Dad had a half-day off from his job as a cook in an all-night restaurant. In the early years, his shift started at 4:00 in the afternoon and ran until 4:00 in the morning, and Linda only got to see her dad for a quick half-hour before it was time to leave for school in the mornings. Later, Dad worked the day shift, starting at 10:00 in the morning and returning home just before midnight six days a week and working the dinner shift until closing on his half-day off. Since Mom also worked six days a week in a laundry pressing shirts and pants, Linda grew up thinking that it was normal to work hard all the time, because that’s what responsible grown-ups like Mom and Dad did. Her friends’ fathers and mothers who worked five days a week had union jobs in factories or office jobs that required secretarial skills.


The best times spent with Dad were those spent talking about what Dad was reading. Usually it was pulp fiction – paperback books by Louis L’Amour about the Wild West and frontier life, stories about hardnosed detectives like Mike Hammer by Mickey Spillane, and the occasional Ernest Heminway, Jack London and John Steinbeck book. Dad always had his nose in the newspaper or a book, and Linda adopted that habit at a young age, sitting beside her dad at the formica kitchen table with a book in her hand. Dad would often start off with “Linda, did you know . . . ,” and of course, Linda didn’t know and would listen raptly to what Dad told her. Interestingly, her brothers didn’t participate in this ritual with Dad, because at one and three years younger than Linda, and being that boys matured more slowly, Gus and Tim just didn’t have the attention span in those early years to be interested in Dad and his books. Later, they didn’t have the habit.


When the James Bond movies came out each year over the Thanksgiving weekend, Dad would take the family to see them. Dad had read the novels, and later, Linda would also read the novels, even if she had seen the film first. The extreme quirkiness of the bad guys in the Bond films coupled with the exotic locales of James Bond’s heroics grabbed Linda’s imagination. Dad didn’t have the time or money to travel or to take the family on vacations, and the Bond films were like a travelogue to Linda. Instead of identifying with the beautiful women in the Bond films, who wore exquisite gowns, tiny bikinis and cat-like eye makeup, it was Bond himself that Linda fantasized about. Oh, to be a world traveler, who knew hand-to-hand combat and how to use a gun, who stayed in luxurious hotels and wore elegant clothing , doing deeds of derring-do without a thought to keeping his clothes clean!


Little did Linda know that in her adult life she would become a world traveler who stayed in five star hotels and wear designer clothing, but that’s another story to be told at a later time.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Department Store Fun

During her high school years, Linda took two buses, an hour’s ride each way, to and from the magnet school located just outside of city center. It was an honor to be invited to attend the magnet school in ninth grade, entering high school a whole year earlier than the kids who went to the local high school. Linda was excited by the idea of the larger high school, which attracted kids from all over the city. She was told that only the top two percent of eighth grade students received such an invitation.


Linda liked the idea of being in a bigger environment. Although she liked her friends in junior high, she was also quite bored with the idea of being in school with the same students for another four years. Linda was no longer satisfied with receiving her stimuli only from books. Her pre-teen hormones were raising her interests in new relationships and challenges. When she finally began to attend the magnet high school, Linda was not disappointed with her experience.


One of the best parts of attending the new high school was the chance to hang out downtown when she changed buses after school each day. If Linda timed it right, she could sometimes cruise the big eight-story department store downtown for about 45 minutes before having to complete her bus transfer without paying another bus fare. The big department store had a third floor ladies’ restroom that featured lines of vanity stations with lighted mirrors and seating, separate from the toilets, sinks and lounge. It’s really too bad that there are no restrooms like that in any department stores today.


Linda and her girlfriends would spend the entire 45 minutes in that restroom trying on new make-up looks and fixing their hair into exotic hairdos. Sometimes the girls would even make a date to spend Saturday downtown exploring all eight floors of the department store, meeting in the third floor restroom as each girl bused in from the west side and the east side of town. It wasn’t unusual for the girls to be late for their dates by an hour or more, but they would wait for the other girls to get there before beginning their explorations. Their second favorite spot was the mezzanine magazine, book and greeting card departments, where the girls liked to linger over the movie magazines and extra special greeting cards with lace, cellophane and glitter that cost over a dollar each.


Once a year the store had a sewing fair that took over the entire third floor where the sewing machines, fabric, patterns and yarn departments were located. Vendors representing all types of merchandise sold to seamstresses and knitters would demonstrate their products, and a lot of free samples were given away. Linda and her girlfriends loved to collect all the free samples and admire the ribbon and lace, examples of party dresses sewn from patterns by Vogue and Butterick, and the intricate sweaters knitted from the fanciest yarns.


One fall Linda used her parents’ charge account at the department store to buy the most extravagant red suede purse that she’d ever seen. It had a front flap over two pockets and a wide shoulder strap. The purse was in the glass showcase of the purse department on the first floor of the store and cost $40, which was a lot of money, because people earned much less than $1 an hour in those days. Linda loved that purse, even though the red suede got dirty quickly and didn’t stay new looking for very long. Another time Linda bought high heeled leather boots that had lamb’s wool fur all around the ankle, which meant that she had to wear those impractical boots all winter long. Instead of walking firmly in the snow and ice, Linda often tiptoed to the bus stop, hoping she wouldn’t trip on those spiky high heels.


Linda had become a shopper, who would continue to make shopping mistakes over many years into her mature adulthood before learning how to make good shopping choices. But those are stories from Linda’s future to be told at a later time.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

A Nickel's Worth

The walk to the junior high school was more than a mile, and the cost to ride the public bus was ten cents for students. Linda still had to walk over two city blocks to get to the nearest bus stop, and she would transfer to a second bus on that route. It was almost half way to walk to the other bus line that didn’t involve transferring buses. On cold winter days, girls wore leggings, thick padded pants worn over tights that they took off and hung in their lockers when they arrived at school. The school rules at that time required the girls to wear dresses or skirts. The gym uniform for girls was white blouses with Peter Pan collars and navy blue shorts with your name embroidered on the inside.


On nice days, which were most days, and certainly on the way home each day, Linda would walk both ways with her girlfriend, Marcy, and save the ten cents each way, which was then theirs to spend. Sometimes Marcy, who played French horn, would stay after school for band practice, and then the walk would seem to take forever as Linda walked alone all the way home.


The year was 1962, and Woolworth’s Five and Dime still existed in neighborhoods all over the United States. On the major cross street near the junior high, a wide street with three lanes in each direction, there was a Woolworth’s where all the students would stop almost daily after school. At the soda fountain and lunch counter of the Woolworth’s, where they served Campbell’s cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Linda would get a Coca Cola in a cone shaped paper cup standing inside a silvery cup holder for a nickel.


For another nickel Linda would buy a little white paper sack of salty tasting chocolate covered peanuts or the chocolate nonpareils that are still sold in movie theater candy counters. The chocolates in the candy counter’s glass cases sold for 39 cents a pound, and Linda would sometimes ask for “a nickel’s worth” and other times for “an eighth of a pound” or “two ounces” of candy from the female clerks. All the five and dime clerks were females, while most men Linda knew worked in factories, tool and die shops, and restaurants as cooks and waiters, or as salesmen.


On rare occasions Linda would save her bag of chocolates to eat later at night, in bed, where she would sit up with her textbooks to study, often with a 16-ounce glass bottle of Pepsi propped between her legs. Mom would sometimes find Linda asleep in that position in the middle of the night and have to put the candy, soda pop and books away and turn off the lights. Linda was the lucky one, being the only girl in the family besides Mom, because she got a bedroom all to herself, while her brothers Tim and Gus slept in bunk beds in the dining room with Mom’s brothers, Sam and Bill, and Mom and Dad had the second bedroom.


One of Linda’s favorite activities was to pretend that her bedroom was a library. She would make her brothers sign out books from her collection of hardcover books that she had received as birthday gifts from her aunts who lived in the big city. She had a collection of Andrew Lang’s “colored” fairy books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels, and a big illustrated volume of the complete Shakespeare’s plays. Linda had not yet seen any of Shakespeare’s plays performed, but she had read every one of them from beginning to end. Gus and Tim seldom wanted to play library with Linda and didn’t have much interest in reading Shakespeare or fairy tales.


A special set of books that Linda never leant out was the five volume pig-skin bound foreign language dictionaries in miniature size that Aunt Meredith, who worked as a travel agent, brought back from Europe. Their thin pages were as fine as the pages in Linda’s red leather bound King James Bible with the gold leaf pages that her sponsors had given to her when she was confirmed at age twelve. The church that Linda attended with her mother and two brothers was a beautiful gothic church near downtown, standing next door to a huge brewery. Its stone building was similar in architecture to the public library down the street where Linda spent her after school hours and summers surrounded by books that brought the world closer to a girl everyone else called serious.


Why everyone thought Linda was serious is a story for another time.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Madame and Storm King

Mom loved to read, but didn’t have the same opportunities to read often like Dad. She didn’t read English, and the books in her language were expensive and difficult to obtain. So, instead, Mom told stories to the little Gang of Three, Linda, Gus and Tim, on cold wintry days when it was too dark and cold to play outside. The story blanket Mom wove wrapped around the three little siblings like magical warp and woof of truth and fantasy.


Mom told stories that she heard as she was growing up in her old country. Other stories were current history, things that were happening in real life that future school children would study. One such story was about Madame President’s Wife, who, unlike Linda, was a youngest sister. Mom admired Madame, because like Mom, Madame came from a Christian family that taught their girl children to read and write, just like the boys were taught. Linda thought it was very strange that girls would not know how to read and write, because she already loved books even though she couldn’t read very well yet.


Madame was a scholar who spoke several languages and translated her husband’s speeches and papers into the languages of world leaders. Linda asked Mom if Madame ever put her own thoughts and words into the speeches and papers of her husband, the President, and Mom agreed that “Yes, it is possible, but scandalous, that the proper Madame might have snuck her own words in.” Linda thought it was delicious that the dignified Madame who dressed in long white gloves and floor-length gowns to dine and dance at state dinners with kings and queens would do something so sneaky. “Dignified” was Mom’s favorite description of anyone she admired.


Gus and Tim were a whole lot less interested in the stories about Madame than the ones Mom told about Storm King, mighty warrior king, who leaped over whole provinces with one push-off from his muscular legs. Storm King had white fur instead of hair on his head and where his beard would have grown. He carried a thick staff made from the stalks of bamboo trees that were still alive, bundled together and squeezed tightly in the middle where the Storm King’s hand grasped it. What trouble the poor Storm King had when his staff would grow without warning as he was using it to fight an enemy soldier or to dig for grubs to eat while on military campaigns far from home. It was even worse when the staff was strapped to Storm King’s back as he galloped across the countryside on horseback, and the staff began to stretch out its length from both ends at the same time! No wonder Storm King had attendants who carried sharp swords and stayed nearby so that they could help him trim his staff when it began to grow.


Because Mom had no books from which to read stories of Storm King, the children had to imagine what he looked like and how he moved and fought. Linda never shared her images of Storm King, keeping them secret inside herself, and Gus and Tim didn’t talk much, preferring to poke each other when Mom was telling stories and breaking down into giggles while jumping from the family bed to the baby crib in the one bedroom of their tenement house apartment. When Linda played with their green molded plastic soldiers and tan plastic cowboys, she would imagine stories about Storm King and his heroic journeys across the old country, looking for trouble to sort out and poor people to help.


Sometimes Linda would imagine that she was a grown up lady just like Madame President’s Wife, educated in medicine and science and knowing how to dance in elegant ballgowns, able to speak in any language of the world to important people about important things. Linda would ask Mom how Madame learned to do all the things she knew how to do and promised herself that when she grew up, she would learn to do those things, too. Even at a young age, Linda knew what was real and what was fantasy. It just turned out as Linda got older that she sometimes couldn’t separate the two, but that is a story for another telling.