An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (5 page)

Would I get a new spider bike? A new air hockey game? A new electric football game with a vibrating field?

As the records played — as the luminaria in the street slowly burned out and the glow of the Christmas tree lights from downstairs softly filtered their way up into my room — I'd try to quell my thoughts and get to sleep.

Eventually, the last album in the stack, Bing Crosby's Christmas album, would play. I'd finally nod off to his smooth baritone as he sang White Christmas:

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all —

"If you buy this house," said my real estate agent, tapping me on the shoulder, "you will take possession of everything in it.”

His words propelled me 35 years into the present, back to that icy, cold day in 2006.

***

It took me a moment to readjust to the present. Then his words began to sink in.

"These records would be mine?" I said.

"All of them," said the real estate agent.

"The stereo console, too?"

"Let me double-check," he said. "I'll call the listing agent to be sure."

He was a fine salesman. He must have sensed I wanted the records and the stereo console more than I wanted the house — and the renovation challenges it would bring.

I began giddily sorting through more of the hundreds of albums. I was eager to find some John Philip Sousa and Herb Albert, maybe even some Mitch Miller and Bing Crosby.

I no longer felt sad about the childless old couple. They had created their own little piece of heaven in their back room. I envisioned them enjoying many wonderful evenings in their olive-green chairs, feet on the ottomans, lights low, a few candles lit.

They surely sipped wine as their old turntable brought Frank and Dino and so many other wonderful performers right into their home — as their old console "produced sound with so much clarity, they were able to close their eyes and be there!"

The agent hung up his cell phone.

"I've got some bad news," he said. "An offer was accepted on this house just this morning. It is no longer for sale."

I visited my mother and father that day and asked them what had happened to our old stereo console. They didn't remember. Nobody remembers exactly when we'd gotten rid of it or how.

As solid-state circuitry made stereos smaller and much less expensive, we'd get another system — one with an 8-track player! — for our family room. My mother and father got it for all of us for Christmas in 1975 — and even gave us a Pablo Cruise 8-track, to boot.

My mother still would listen to the old stereo console, though — she still would whistle along with it day and night, while the dishwasher hummed and splashed.

But as my sisters and I got older and headed off to college, it was no longer central to our lives. At some point — probably in the mid-80s, years after we'd gotten it — my father hauled the old stereo console to the curb one night.

Early the next morning, covered with dew, a couple of trash collectors likely picked it up and tossed it in the back of their truck. They may have paused for a moment to watch the hydraulic plates crush and splinter the polished wood in a spectacular manner.

It is possible somebody picked it up before the trash collectors did — scavengers often drove through our neighborhood the night we set our garbage out — and that is my great hope.

I hope that somewhere, somehow, our old console survived — that it's polished and cherished by someone who, like me, smiles as he remembers the joy the old stereo consoles brought into our childhood home.

The Window Fans
 

Even on the hottest nights of the summer, my father knew how to make our house ice cold.
We lived in a modest two-story home typical of the '60s and '70s — red brick on the bottom, white aluminum siding on the top. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a master bedroom downstairs (my parent's room, which we added onto the back of our house in 1972).
Only one house in our neighborhood had air conditioning back then. It was locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
Most houses were wide open all summer. This allowed the outside sounds to come in and the inside sounds to go out.
I woke every morning to the sound of birds chirping, a dewy chill in the air. I'd hear sausage sizzling in a neighbor's kitchen. A screen door slamming, a car starting, a father lumbering off to work.
The afternoons were quiet — the older kids went on bike hikes or swimming at the community pool — but as evening arrived, the sounds came alive again. At dinner time, kids were called home through a variety of shouts, chants, bells and horns. Pork and chicken sizzled on grills. Families ate and talked on back porches.
As darkness fell, a range of new sounds echoed throughout the neighborhood: a dog barking; a motorcycle downshifting on some faraway hill; Bob Prince and Nellie King broadcasting Pirates games on the radio; a baby crying; a couple squabbling…
And window fans humming.
My father was a master at driving the hot, stale air from our house. He installed an industrial fan in the attic that sucked the hot air upwards and pumped it through a roof vent. Then he put a window fan in the downstairs bedroom to pull cool air inside.
It took him years to perfect his method, but by closing some windows and doors and adjusting others to varying degrees of openness, he tuned our house like a fine violin. He could drive down the temperature 15 degrees or more in a matter of minutes.
I remember coming home on summer nights when I was in college. I'd open the front door and be greeted by a burst of cool air. Sometimes my father would be in the kitchen, leaning on the countertop with his elbows as he ate his favorite snack — peanut butter crackers and ice-cold milk.
He'd hand me the peanut-butter-smeared knife and I'd smatter a couple of crackers. As we chomped away, we'd mumble through a conversation about college or the Pirates or a variety of other conversations sons had with their dads in the kitchen such nights.
Other times, my father and mother would be lying in bed in the back room, the lights off, the television light flickering as Johnny Carson delivered his monologue, the window fan humming. We'd chat for a spell before I headed up to bed.
I went to the hardware store to buy a window fan recently. I put it in my bedroom window and have been trying different adjustments to maximize the coolness in my place. Its sound transports me to a time and a place that I've been longing for lately.
It reminds me of the constant presence of my father, who spent years tweaking and perfecting the world to make things better for his kids. He was an old-school dad. He lacked skill at articulating his love, so he dedicated himself to showing it.
I know now how profound his presence was. It established order where chaos and emptiness would have been. It permeated every nook and cranny of our home and our lives. It is in me still — it guides me still.
That's why I shut off the air conditioning most summer nights and run the window fan instead. Its wobbling hum fills me with peacefulness and calm — and reminds me how blessed I was to have such a dad.

The Photo Box

One cold February Sunday evening a few winters back, I stopped by my parents’ house for a visit.

I love to cook. I made them a pot of my chili and we enjoyed a hearty meal.

After dinner, as a toasty fire crackled in the family room, we did something we don’t do often enough.

We got the old photo box out of the hall closet — a box that holds more power over me with every passing year.

***

Our photo box is a cardboard Pabst Blue Ribbon beer case that is 35 years old or more. It contains a lifetime of family snapshots, newspaper clippings and mementos of every kind.
It was a tremendous source of amusement to my sisters and me when we were kids.
We would break the box out every now and then — usually on a Sunday evening, our bellies full of pot roast, mashed potatoes, gravy and pineapple upside-down cake — always amazed by the gems inside.
It contained a wide mix of items: letters, artwork we’d produced at school, grade-school tablets, hand-made holiday cards, a Pittsburgh Press cover story that featured the Apollo moon landing in 1969, and lots and lots of photos.
The box included pictures of many people we had never met — family members who had died before we were born. My mother tried to interest us in these people, but we were young and had little interest in them. We didn’t yet understand their value and importance — and we wouldn’t for many years.
My mother often pulled out the only photo she had of her father — a small black-and-white head shot taken when he was in his 40s. His hair was thick, though beginning to recede. He had intelligent, penetrating eyes — eyes passed on to my mother.
She tried to tell us his story. How good a man he was. How he taught her to be proud and demand respect, particularly from males. How he died at 48, one month before her wedding. She was only 19.
She said a neighbor had brought over a baby rabbit to show him one night. The rabbit scratched his skin and he came down with a horrible fever. Whatever the cause, he had contracted meningitis. He would die three days later.
There was a black-and-white photo of my father’s father, too. It was taken in the 1920s at Lake Geneva on the Erie, PA shore. My grandfather stood next to my grandmother, wearing striped trunks and a matching T-top; we marveled that in the old days, men at the beach had to wear shirts.
My father’s father would not live a long life, either. He came down with strep in 1937 at the age of 34. There was no penicillin yet to provide an easy cure. The virus slowly weakened his body. He would die six months later, when my father was only 3.
There were lots of photos like that — great grandparents and aunts and uncles and other distant relatives we never knew. We kids flipped past such photos as though they were wrapping paper, though they fascinate me now.
But, boy, were we delighted by old photos of people we did know.
We loved looking through our parents’ wedding album. My father was trim and handsome — still with a full head of hair — and my mother was stunning in her dress. He was 23.
Their wedding had taken place in 1958, and, as we looked through their album some 15 years later, it seemed to us that our parents — then in their 30s — were ancient.
We found one photo of my father’s mother when she was 13. It was taken in 1917.
She wore what appeared to be an expensive dress. She was beaming, with a big, happy smile — something we didn’t often see. Her hair was black as coal. As a 13-year-old girl, she surely dreamed of a hopeful future — she had every reason to, I know now.
Her father had three tailor shops and provided well for his 12 children. He built them a big house on Brownsville Road in Carrick, a few miles south of Pittsburgh’s South Side, in what was then an upscale area.
In the summers, a local farmer would drive up the dirt road in front of their home and deliver cantaloupe, watermelon, peaches, apples and vegetables of every kind. She was in the middle of the family.
She had no awareness then, of course, that she’d marry one month before the stock market crash in 1929. Her husband would die from strep six years later when both were only 34. He’d leave her with a daughter and son to raise on her own. Her hair would go white within a year. She’d work and struggle the rest of her life until a stroke would take her in 1972, when she was 69.
As kids, the photos we enjoyed most were the photos of ourselves — the yellow-tinted Polaroids taken when we were “little.” There I was, at the age of 10, looking back to the “old days”: my baby photo with the three chins, my first day of kindergarten, the day when I was 3 and we had a foot of snow and my mother bundled up my two older sisters and me to take us outside and photograph us sitting on a sleigh.
We were far too young to understand the power, truth and beauty these photos hold and the sadness they can evoke. It would take many years for that to occur.

***
 

My mother continued to add to the photo box as the years passed.
There were new siblings, holiday events, Girl Scout activities, school performances, baptisms, Holy Communion, Christmas morning, Little League and on and on. We soon began filling a second cardboard beer box, then a third.
The business of growing up was all-consuming and, as my sisters and I got older, there wasn’t much interest in the old photos.
Pretty soon, my older sisters were teenagers — they wanted little to do with me or the rest of the family — and had no interest in pulling out the old box.
Perhaps my younger sisters pulled it out now and then — perhaps they were enjoying the photos as my older sisters had when we were younger — but by then, I was absorbed in my own “important” activities.
My high school years were tremendous fun — I had a dozen good friends I played sports with, got into school plays with and spent every spare moment with — and those years came and went.
College, too, came and went. Suddenly, I was 23 and out in the work world. I soon had a new car and my first real girlfriend. I worked hard at my job, worked out at the gym for hours every week and, when that first real relationship ended, I began dating like a madman.
I had no interest in the past. I was completely consumed by my present.
My mid-20s roared by — during the 1980s, a period of tremendous economic prosperity — and everything was coming easily to me. I had a sense of invincibility — I took for granted that everyone in my life and family would always be there.
I was full of arrogance — and ignorance — when I took a new job that I thought would make me “rich.” I’d wanted to get into technology sales to make the big money, and I did — and knew right away I’d made a monumental error.
My mother’s mother then began having a series of strokes. She was unable to take care of herself. Her decline was swift. She had to be moved from her home to a god-awful nursing center. As I visited her there, I felt a tremendous sense of foreboding and worry. It was painful to watch her wither away.
Soon after, my uncle Mike — the dearest, sweetest man any of us would ever know — became very ill. He’d had leukemia, but it had been in remission for many years. One day I was at my parents' house when he came to the door, disoriented and slurring his words.
His decline was swift, too. Soon, he was suffering strokes and was shipped off to a god-awful nursing home. When I visited him, he smiled at me — his brain functioned fine — but he was unable to talk and he’d become so frustrated, he’d cry.
I was 28 then. The only person close to me I’d ever lost was my father’s mother, who’d died when I was 10. I was an ignorant, arrogant young man — I’d been blessed beyond belief for so many years but my arrogance prevented me from understanding that.
And as I lost my uncle Mike and my mother’s mother — as I began jumping from job to job and struggled to pay my bills — I found solace in the old photos.
I went through them with my mother then and was more inquisitive than I could have been when I was young. She showed me the picture of her father and told me his story and I began to understand. I became saddened that I never got to know him — that he was taken so early and that my grandmother had to struggle so hard.
We went through many of the photos and my mother filled in details I had never cared to know when I was a child — but at 28, I couldn’t drink them in fast enough.