Category: Memories

Belgian waffles

There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all
© Lennon-McCartney
T-shirts are scrapbooks for people of a certain vintage. This concert or that festival. Water parks. Theme parks. Central parks in cities in every latitude and longitude. Charity walks or runs. Three for $10 airport specials.
 
Successfully eating a XXL pizza in Neptune City NJ.
 
Pieces of my life in cotton or cotton-poly lurk in my basement. Many, too many of them, yet I can’t bring myself to ditch them or donate them. It’s as if they have stories yet to tell.
 
Even tougher to cull are the tchotchkes.
 
Physical souvenirs are great for stirring memories, jogging memories, sometimes rousing memories that may be better left dormant. Songs, too, can have those effects.
 
Ah, reveries.
 
What’s fascinating, though, is pausing to ask where — from whom — did we get certain habits, certain tics, certain inflections or quirky pronunciations, even certain recipes or food-prep techniques.
 
Those are a whole nuther class of souvenir, and those are woven deep into our lives.
 
Sue taught me how to fold fitted sheets, and how to cook my french toast: crisp, with vanilla and little or no cinnamon. She lost her battle 15 years ago, but she lives every time I get out the frying pan.
 
For some odd reason, playing computer solitaire — Klondike by threes — resurrects Renee, gone four years. I can’t recall ever having a pack of cards or a PC screen alongside her, yet there she is.
 
Though I’ve learned to crack eggs one-handedly, I mostly do this half-shell-in-each-hand up-down action that mimics a railroad handcar. I know exactly from whom I learned that.
 
More often than not, mowing the lawn gets a mental serenade of  “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Hmm: weekend squire? TV in every room?
 
I traveled for business extensively a few years ago, and the survival technique I employed while bunking at this Hampton Inn or that for weeks at a time was to establish a routine straight away. I learned the daily breakfast cycle — what days the blechh omelet foldovers were served, what days the funky but tasty maple sausage came out. What days were oatmeals and eggs, what days deserved a trip to the flip-over waffle maker.
 
In “Forrest Gump,” as Jenny listens to Forrest’s stories about his cross-country run, she tells him, “I wish I could have been there.” “You were,” he replies.
 
In living every day, at home, away from home, the rhythms of our relationships sustain us.
 
Familiarity gets a bum rap. Home is where the habits are, and habits come from places in the heart.

Bruncle, part two

The oldest sibling in a family where the first four boys were born close together gets no authority via birth order. Prophet in his home village and all that.

Add to the mix the unique distinctiveness of each of what eventually became the six of us, and there’s little chance that Son No. 1 could rule, or even supervise.

But add someone who splits the difference, age-wise, between yourself and your parents, and you have an ally.

Uncle Richard was the 180-opposite of the old saw about grandparents and children being so fond of each other because they have a common set of enemies. Richard got parental guidance from the same Bill and Julie that we did, but he seemed to absorb the sharper edges of the discipline and kept us on the straight and narrow without the cat-o-nine-tails my dad always swore he had in the garage.

Mostly, Richard’s gift was alternative activities.  We explored some of the simplest sites throughout Monmouth County, rain, shine or snow; long before “Sesame Street,” he sneaked learning into the fun.

He also had a sense that families should have traditions, even if they had to be manufactured. When he moved to the Shore from the steel mill town Dad had totally disavowed, Richard’s life hit a reset.

Our split-level development house was continually under construction. The downstairs rec room — a mini-hangar, really — at first was carved into two pieces to give Richard a place of his own. Then that wall came down and the fireplace went in; adios, picture windows. And this being the early and mid-1960s, the ceiling needed faux beams.

All of this inspired RAZ the playwright, director and producer. Who needs a barn? We’d start a tradition with a Thanksgiving pageant, and this was the perfect place for it.

From the beams, he hung bedsheets with thumbtacks. We had a stage.

He condensed the whole Plymouth story into a Ken Burns-ian script. A fire in the hearth added atmosphere.

Cardboard Pilgrim hats, white turtlenecks, black pants on the actors. As narrator, I got to wear my gold V-neck sweater with the black mock-turtle dickie sewn in. Quite snazzy.

Before we ate Thanksgiving dinner, we performed for Mom and Dad. I forget if there were others in the audience; maybe a younger brother not ready for prime time. A small crowd, regardless. Somewhere in the vast archives of family heirlooms, there’s a Super-8 reel of One Night Only on Riverbrook.

To this day, I can see our playwright-director’s beaming face: love, pride, accomplishment.

I don’t think we ever had a holiday play again, but that pre-dinner extravaganza was the foundation of many traditions my brothers and I did come to share, and which we’ve adapted and continued in our own families.

… to be continued

Moon dances

Fairy tales are filled with nocturnal characters. A goodly chunk of them are servants or guardians of some sort: They shine shoes and fill them with chocolates. They craft ball gowns for orphaned princesses. That sort of thing.

The real world at night, it has servants and guardians, too.

Police, other first responders, watchmen and -women have to take a more cynical attitude because (a) there are fewer of them and (b) malevolent forces hide in the dark.

Not everyone on the street at night is a threat, but night people have their quirks. Some start that way; some evolve.

Though I’m mildly nyctophobic, I worked on night shifts for almost three decades. I’m a news editor and designer; at night is when my work got done. I chose the profession. The schedule chose me.

Before online banking or convenience banking, I chafed at the 10-to-3 bankers hours that were the norm. Stores, businesses, professionals open 9 to 5 or 8 to 4? Yeah, I was no fan of those, either. 

But the all-night Pathmark supermarket? That was a blessing.

RIP, Pathmark.

At 2 a.m. back then, you saw workers stocking the shelves with items the ad circular had promised 18 hours before but the store failed to display on time. This crew had a tight-knit camaraderie, and yet as individuals they presented as lone wolves.

Quirky.

Customers mostly grabbed the stray product or two they’d need for the kids’ breakfasts in four hours, or pre-sliced cold cuts for their own lunches, to be eaten around 9 p.m. Fellow night-shifters. You could tell the schedule had chosen them, as it did me.

The PJs people … young parents grabbing diapers or milk, older folks buying light bulbs.

Then there were the hard-core vampires.

Oh, these were not goth-looking folks, usually; more often than not they were in surgical scrubs or other uniforms. Tired, a bit worn and dirty, and clearly living their days upside-down.

These folks, you see, had full shopping carts, with a week or more’s worth of everything from apples to zinc supplements.

These folks … I’ve always admired them. Some clearly are working multiple jobs for the betterment of their families. Some are working a schedule opposite a partner so there’s an adult around the house always. 

It’s not a fairy tale for them, but they make it as close to a happily ever after for their families as they can.

Sine sinews

It’s been said there are two kinds of people in America, those who shower before going to work and those who shower afterward.

Though the sentiment could be considered classist, it reminds us of the dignity of work, all work, when it’s done with pride and honesty.

In June 1973, 45 years ago, I was a high school graduate for barely 12 hours when I grabbed a short-handle square-point shovel and waded into a pile of hot asphalt dumped at the end of a driveway that had to be repaired before Itaska Drive in Oceanport, NJ, could be repaved.

New jeans and workboots from Sears, a white T-shirt. Not quite a ditchdigger’s ditchdigger, but I wanted to look and feel like a real man on this summer job.

I danced around in the blacktop, doing more damage with my feet than making any progress with the shovel. In a matter of minutes, my jeans were nearly off my sweaty backside and my Tee was transparent, soaked through.

The foreman grabbed my belt and yanked me away from the driveway. I barked at him, “What’s the matter with you, man? I’m working my ass off here.”

He looked at me, shook his head, and said, “You may be workin’, but you ain’t producin’. Until you produce, you’re off my crew.”

When my first payday came around, he made me turn around, put my hand behind me, and back up to my check — a sign that, in his mind, I hadn’t earned it.

I vowed that would never happen again. Not on the road crew; not on any job.

It wasn’t easy to get past that, not at first. I was 5-11 and 125 pounds. The laborers called me “Muscles” because I had none. These were guys who routinely carried a cast-iron manhole ring under one arm and the manhole cover under the other.

No way I’d ever achieve that, even if it had been a goal.

But producin’. That was a different consideration.

Hard labor demands that you turn off your brain. Dig. Scrape dirt off curbs. Smash concrete with a jackhammer. Slice old asphalt with a cutter. No time for what-ifs or what-I’d-rather-be-doings. Thinking gets you hurt or, worse yet, injures somebody else.

Turning off my brain, though, was harder than hauling concrete.

Producin’. Hmm. How about helping with the daily report? The materials tickets? These guys were summa cum laude from the College of Hard Work and Harder Knocks, so the college kid was perfect for paperwork they detested, including the orders for coffee and buttered rolls.

I soon found the sweet spot between work and work, and after a while Ol’ Muscles actually had some.

Producin’ is everything. It takes hard work and the right skills, used to their fullest. It requires identifying what you’re good at, best at, and throwing your entire self into it. (No “percent” clichés here.)

I spent five summers, four winters and one autumn on that foreman’s crew. For nearly three-quarters of my life, what he taught me has guided my career.

Bruncle, part one

Innumerable articles have detailed the effect of birth order on persons’ trajectories and personalities, and in most, firstborns and middles seem to get the most attention.

As a firstborn, and as a “Jr.,” I have some skin in the game.

Often, firstborns are their parents’ experiment, the product of this chapter of Benjamin Spock or that episode of Fred Rogers. Either many mistakes are made or none, and if more children come along, the parents adapt, tighten up, loosen up.

Sons and daughters designated Junior or II or Chip or Deuce can be expected to follow in parental footsteps, especially if a parent is notable and/or if the child shows many of the same innate talents and skills as the parent. A double- or triple-whammy.

But what if the firstborn gets an older brother?

When asked about our family, Dad always answered, “I have six sons but seven boys” (later, eight, then nine, as other young men came under his tutelage).

His brother, Richard, 14 years younger than Dad to the day, came to live with us in 1960, to finish high school, college, grad school … and to drive my brothers and me to the Asbury Park boardwalk and Palace Amusements in a VW Beetle.

He’s the only person I’ve ever seen successfully grab the brass ring — often — on a carousel. Metaphor? Prognostication? Perhaps.

Creative, loving and hard-working, our brother-uncle changed the birth-order dynamic slightly yet dramatically. 

… to be continued