Resigned

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRPDO63rI1E

In the opening sequence of the brilliant 60's TV series "The Prisoner" Patrick McGoohan walks into the bowels of some government office and slams down his ID and resigns. We're not quite sure at first what he's resigning from, ostensibly from the secret service agency where he has worked. A few seconds later, after he has left, the camera shows his file, clasped to a pulley of some kind,  and then moving to a cabinet drawer which open and shuts, and the camera closes on word "Resigned." 

My brief and early career as a safety patrol boy in the 6th grade also ended in resignation. Before resigning I'd made every attempt to persuade the authorities (Number Twos) to help me and not indirectly coerce me to resign. But of course I'd been given no choice. Politics were in play.

Here is what happened....

I was the last of a dozen safeties to be chosen for the noble calling, and my assigned post was, of all posts, the farthest away from my house, the most remote of posts, an "outpost," and apparently a post that no one else had wanted. I may not have the times exactly right, but lunch period for the entire elementary school was about 40 or 45 minutes, and because kids left school for lunch, all safeties were required to be at their posts before the beginning and end of lunch period, as well as before and after school. And because of the walking distance from the frontier outpost to my house (5 blocks) and back again I was left with approximately 10-12 minutes for lunch each day. I would cram a sandwich in my mouth and gulp it down in two bites before heading back to my frontier outpost. If I lingered too long at home, chatting with Mum and Nan, I would then have to run to make up the time.

The safety patrol boy situation was clearly untenable and further exacerbated by my knowledge of Marla Stoppard. Marla had a very cushy post, practically a safety patrol sinecure, that was less than a block from where she lived. Marla could get home in a mere half minute without the slightest increase in her gait. Once, when Marla was out sick for a couple days, I was assigned to her post and a fifth-grader substitute was assigned to mine. What a difference those few blocks made! I no longer felt situated on the frontier, crossing kids I barely recognized. Marla's post felt familiar and right, and the real benefit was I had an extra ten minutes for lunch. How glorious! I could eat like a normal kid.

But when Marla returned I was reassigned to Timbuktu or Tiera del Fuego, to the Antipodes, and my anguish was understandably more acute now, because I had tasted the possibilities, had known the rapture and quiet ecstasy of a non-stressful saftety post. If I could hang on to this switch for a few months well then I could even be part of that traditional trip to Washington D.C. that the safeties made in late May or early June of each year. 

So began my lobbying effort with the school authorities (Number Twos). My case was based on sound empirical evidence: if Marla had my post it would not be a great hindrance for her, adding about eight minutes on her walk to and from post, and it would still take her less time than it would take me if I had her post, but our lunch times would then be roughly equal, not wildly disparate as they were in the present arrangement. It seemed fair, and I think that Marla and I had even switched posts one day without notifying anyone (she was intelligent and agreeable, mature beyond her 11 years). 

But the school authorities (Number Twos) rejected my appeal and I don't recall the specious argument that had gone into their decision, not to mention that they'd somehow discovered the clandestine post switch and weren't too pleased. Yes, there had always been problems with me---I was a refusenik, a troublemaker, a rebellious discipline problem (but not your averagen run-of-the-mill punk or bad kid), an incendiary subversive force who questioned the rules (not unlike The Prisoner), and in their secret weekly conclave (teachers room, coffee and pastry) the school authorities (Number Twos) must have rued their decision to have taken a chance on me in the first place. After all, Marla was a better student, she had better grades, and she was a girl and more reliable. I would simply have to suck it up. I believe parents had maybe called the principal's office and there'd been "words." I think the way the authorities (Number Twos) decision was finally phrased or parentally interpreted for me was that, if my being on safety patrol really meant something, then I would more than gladly make the sacrifice and live with the inconvenience of my frontier outpost.

I knew it would take a bit of courage, but I was not a number, I was a "Free Man" (Ok---Free Boy?) and on a Friday afternoon following a particularly challenging week, I walked into the school office, and tossed my belt and badge on to the authorities (Number Twos) desk. I told them I was through with being a safety, and then I walked out of their office.... 

I resigned.....

You Must be Kidney

The following yarn would no longer be possible in the age of cell phones and GPS.

I arrived in Philadelphia, in the early-to-mid-80s, newly married, and with no immediate job prospects. I had given up some things by relocating from North Jersey/NYC, and work I believed I had lined up in the publishing field in Philadelphia had not panned out. So while looking for a new job, I found temporary work with a courier service. I visited the "office" a couple times which was little more than a room in someone's apt. somewhere in South Philly with reams of paper, and carbons, and invoices, and all kinds of .... well.... paper scattered and piled up everywhere. Occasionally you would have to pick up a delivery at the office, but the majority of the pick ups were at the airport and delivered usually to Center City, sometimes the Northeast, or other parts of Philadelphia, rarely to Montgomery County and New Jersey.

I spent my days sitting in our apartment on 3rd and Pine, waiting for a call from the dispatcher. I often read to pass the time. There wasn't an answering machine on the phone, so I was more or less a prisoner. I wound up receiving one or two calls a day because I was at the end of a stable of other couriers who came from Philadelphia and knew their way around Philadelphia and neighboring counties. I'd only been in Philadelphia a few months, and the dispatcher and owner knew as much so they only used me as a courier of last resort.

As mentioned, most of my pickups were at the airport and I liked driving to the airport, observing all the comings and goings of air travelelrs without having to get on or off a plane myself. I absorbed the collective business activity that took place at the airport, if only vicariously, and I felt important in some vague way when I would sign for a package.

The weekday calls had begun to thin out, and I was becoming more depressed and ready to bag the courier gig to focus more earnestly on getting a real job. But early one Saturday morning in the fall, I picked up the phone thinking it was friend or family, and instead heard the dispatcher's voice. There was no one else available and they had an emergency delivery, so would I mind picking up a package at the airport and delivering to the hospital? I'd just gotten out of bed, I was kind of through with this courier service anyway, and began to decline because it was a beautiful fall Saturday morning. The dispatcher pleaded with me, and I needed the money, however paltry my hourly rate and mileage reimbursement. I agreed to pick up the package.

And because it was a beautiful Saturday morning in fall (early November, I believe), my newly-wedded wife offered to accompany me on the courier errand. We would make a minor date of it, stopping to buy some coffee or maybe heading to the diner afterwards. After all, like many newlyweds or couples in burgeoning relationships, we were often finding ways to be together. Even a delivery might be fun, and traffic on Saturday morning was not too bad. We drove to the airport (which by now I had the loaction of down pat) and I picked up the package---a one-foot square, fairly plain cardboard box, but with sensitive medical warnings labeled on it. I had no idea what was inside...

It was about 10:00 and we were running late to the hospital. We had gotten lost driving from the airport back to University City. I did not know my way to the hospital from Philadelphia, and though Vanna had grown up in Delaware County and lived in Center City, she'd never gotten a driver's license and therefore never had to pay close attention to directions or locations. I drove to University of Pennslvania Hospital because it was the only hospital I knew of in Philadelphia, and it was the largest, but I wasn't 100% sure if it was the right hospital. I though the dispatcher may have mentioned the word "Jefferson" but I was half asleep and on my first cup of coffee.

I remember a delivery entrance, glass doors and an intercom. I pressed the buzzer on the intercom.

"We're not expecting any delivery," a tinny voice told me. "What is the address?" I read him the address out loud.

"That's Jefferson. Do you know how to get there?"

"No."

"Hold on...."

A minute later the voice came back on.

"They're waiting for you in surgery."

"Really? What am I delivering? What's in the box?"

"A kidney."

"A kidney?"

"Yes."

I was quickly given directions.

"Is the kidney okay," I asked. "I mean, will it keep?"

"Yes, yes, it's on ice, but hurry, the doctors are waiting, surgery is being held up."

A kidney on ice . . . how nice . . .

I drove to Jefferson and a surgeon actually came out to greet me (he'd been expecting me after the call from Penn). I handed the doctor the box with the kidney on ice, which he neeeded for his patient. I told him I was sorry for being late, but he was very thankful and relieved and didn't seem particularly annoyed that the surgery had been held up because of my mistake. As I said, it was a beautiful fall Saturday morning, but with the kidney now in his hands (or the box with the kidney on ice in his hands) the doctor did not linger outside to chat with me about the weather. He had work to do.

Tonsil Town and Death of an Anesthesiologist

http://wiki.medpedia.com/What_Everyone_Should_Know_About_Tonsillectomy

 

I was six years old and in the 1st grade when my tonsils were removed. At the time (beginning of 1959) tonsilectomies were something of a factory procedure. It seemed that any stray adenoidal microbe or strep bacillus would immediately raise the red flag for immediate tonsil removal. A number of kids in my 1st grade class had gotten or were getting their tonsils out. We felt like we belonged to a club, the: "We're Allowed to Eat All the Ice Cream We Want" Club.

But this post isn't about tonsils, which are kind of unsightly and boring; it's about my first encounter with adults outside of family and school. . . .

The entire hospital experience is one I recall of dim greys and poorly lit rooms, almost a black-and-white TV version of how a hospital would appear back then. I don't remember the surgeon; I didn't meet him on the operating table (ha-ha), but I did meet the anesthesiologist beforehand. His name was Doctor Gilbert and we were practically neighbors. Doctor Gilbert lived just two blocks away from me, and his sons and I attended the same school but we were in different grades and didn't play together. Doctor Gilbert seemed friendly enough but a little large and intimidating. He said in a kindly though deep authoritarian voice that he would be giving me something called "ether." I had some type of rubber mask held over my nose and mouth. Dr. Gilbert then had me count a flight of stairs, the ones from my hallway to the basement. I actually saw a spiral and a grey depth of field, an encompassing thickness like falling into a vat of mud. The lights became increasingly haloed and blurred. Could not count.... spiral... voices fading...

The next thing I remember I'd been moved to a nursery following the surgery. There were other children. I couldn't sleep that night after having my tonsils removed. I recall a darkened nursery room with several cribs and the hazy globes of light suspended above the nurse's station. The nurse would make her rounds and I watched an Asian boy next to me cry when the nurse thrust a thermometer up his rectum. (This would also be done to me). I felt hopelessly frightened and alone. My throat ached and I couldn't fall asleep so I would stand up in the crib and whine and the nurse would come and force me back down. I could feel frustration in her body but didn't understand why the frustration was being directed at me. She would stick the thermometer up my ass, which didn't hurt enough for me to cry but was still uncomfortably painful.

I was experiencing adult cruelty for the first time. The nurse was gruff and somewhat physically cruel, but in a professional way that I'm sure was perfectly acceptable back then. I guess my first-grade teacher was also cruel, but her cruelty was more of a tyrannical mental cruelty with the intention of instilling fear and therefore a mistaken idea of respect from her students.  I was in a strange place, a hospital, and where were my parents? Why couldn't I go home? Why couldn't I sleep in my own bed? I'm sure all of that had been explained to me, but I didn't really understand, only being six.

My parents came to take me home the following afternoon and I spent a week in my pajamas recovering with the aid of ice cream. I did get homework sent to me so I wouldn't fall too far behind, and my first grade class all sent me get well cards that came with the homework. The cards were a treat, but had only included about two-thirds of my class; the other third were either in the hospital getting their tonsils removed, or home recovering like me. A few might have been out sick.

A couple of weeks after the surgery I received the news that Doctor Gilbert, the Anesthesiologist, had died of a heart attack. He was only 39 years old. Who really knows what happened or what had triggered his death---the state of his health, stress, depression, diet, heredity, alcoholism, whatever. All I was told was that he'd died of a heart attack, and men dropping dead that young wasn't particularly uncommon. I immediately thought of his kids (I believe there were five) losing their father.

And I felt weird and confused. In my six-year-old mind I conflated Doctor Gilbert dying of a heart attack with having given me ether and putting me under. My mother insisted there'd been no connection between these two events, but a child has a limited temporal cognition and doesn't form boundaries or clear linear spaces between two events, and because anethesia was a new and mildly scary experience in itself, linked to death and unconsciousness, a little mock death, it wasn't surprising that I would think the anesthesiologist had also died, had entered permanent unconsciousness because of ether, an occupational hazard so to speak. We'd had something of a pact in our study of unconsciouness, but Doctor Gilbert wouldn't be coming back from his and I sadly sensed the loss. I probably would not have seen him again, but a doctor-patient intimacy had been established. I trusted him (I'd had little choice), I saw us as partners in this strange experience, and to some degree I must have reminded him of his own children. Did he have any foreknowledge or hint of his own mortality at that point? 

The pain of losing tonsils took less than a week but my early experience of these two adults took longer. With a dim knowledge of them, I filed the nurse and Doctor Gilbert away with having been in a deep aleep, with the moving spiral, with the ether.

Car Ride and Sick Joke

On a windy March afternoon 50 years ago the 10-year-old boy plays with his friends in the park. They play football and wrestle, and eventually they stop and gather around another kid who is flying a kite. The kite is a cheap conventional kite that you might buy at a candy store or soda fountain. The boys watch it flutter and riffle and snap in the wind, a ragged and hesitant ascent. The boys make suggestions and ask to take turns holding the line, but soon the wind dies slightly, and the kite twirls in demented dervish loops, hitting the ground.

The boy and his friends then disperse and head home for supper.  As he passes the elementary school there is a line of cars parked in front and the boy recognizes his parents’ car among them. Tonight is PTA night, a Thursday, and his mother must be dropping off a snack for the meeting, usually chocolate chip cookies or brownies of which she always saves a batch for him to eat later . . . after supper.

On impulse, the boy tries his parents’ car door and finds it unlocked. In that moment he decides he’ll play a practical joke, and climbs into the car and lies down on the floor by the back seat, figuring his mother will see him when she leaves the school to drive home. Besides, it will save him walking, though he has no more than a five-minute walk. 

But his mother doesn’t see him.

The car is moving and the boy realizes that the movement and direction of the car is unfamiliar. His mother is not driving back to the house. From the floor looking upward through the car window, he sees the attenuated points of bare grey tree tops sliding past, and the power lines, like unbroken elastic strings, rising and dipping with the changing surface of the road. This isn't part of his plan, and he has an urge to sit up in the back seat while the car is moving, but then thinks better of it. He briefly fantasizes that he is being kidnapped, and would need to sharpen all his senses so he’d know where the kidnappers might be taking him. His mother is driving downtown. She stops the car in front of the grocery store and enters.

By now the boy knows that he’s done something seriously wrong, and while his mother is shopping in the grocery store, he imagines ways to get out of his predicament. For instance, he could leave the car and head into the store to meet his mother, act surprised, greet her with the story that he’d been walking along  Splendid Avenue, coming from the candy store, and saw her car. This scenario had in fact happened a couple times before and seemed plausible, but it would ruin his joke, though the joke was becoming less of a joke by now. Instead, he could sit up in the back seat and wait until his mother comes out, using the same lie about finding her car downtown. Or he could simply get out of the car and walk the five or six blocks back home (a longer walk than from the school) and forget the joke had ever happened . . . but the boy does none of these things and remains on the floor in the back seat of the car, reasoning that when his mother returns, she will  ave to load groceries in the back of the car and certainly find him. His mother will be shocked of course, but not the heart-stopping screaming fear she would experience if he’d suddenly sat up while she was driving. And he’d lie to mitigate the evil of his prank, explaining that he’d only discovered and snuck into her car a few minutes earlier, omitting having really snuck in a half hour ago, back at the school, and then hiding the entire time she’d driven downtown.

But the plan fails again . . . His mother only carries one bag of groceries out of the store, and she gets into the car on the driver’s side and places the bag on the passenger’s seat. The boy could quickly sit up now before his mother has a chance to start the car and pull out of the parking space, but he doesn’t. He’s still stuck because he’s indecisive, because he’s been thinking too much about what he’s done, and he decides to wait it out on the floor of the backseat until they’re finally home. 

The car has been parked in the driveway and the boy’s mother has gotten out and is coming around to the passenger’s side to get the bag of groceries. She sees him and is jolted backwards, her face rigid with confusion and fear.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’ve been hiding in the backseat of the car.”

“What?!”

“Since the school,” I tell her, proud of my clever ability to stay concealed for such a long time.”

My mother is clearly angry and disturbed by my Damien Thorn-like behavior.

“Do you realize how dangerous that is? What if I’d seen you, or heard you while I was driving? I could have had a terrible accident and you would have been in the car too.”

I know she’s right but I try to defend the prank.

“You wouldn’t have seen me. I hid well, and I wouldn’t have sat up in the car or said anything while you were driving,” and I realize with shame that the thought had once crossed my mind during that weird drive.

“I didn’t have to see you,” my mother says, stunned in disbelief that her oldest son has done something so profoundly scary and idiotic.  “What if I had heard you move, or heard your breathing? Do you have any idea how terrifying that would have been for me?”

“Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize . . .”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t, please don’t tell Dad.”

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you . . . I will never do it again.”

And in that moment it became quite clear to me that I didn’t need my mother’s verbal admonition or reprimand. The look on her face alone---not the comical spooked-and-then-relieved look I’d anticipated from my prank, but a shock far more serious and hurt that had unexpectedly scared me---the look on her face had been warning and punishment enough.

 

The Secular and The Religious

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
 
In my early childhood days the Christmas Eve parties had been in someone's apartment with quite a lot of drinking and dancing. The men in their white shirts with skinny ties; the women in heels they slipped off before jitterbugging. They were young after all, in their 20s---brothers, wives, cousins, friends, work buddies. They played the stereo: "Mack the Knife" "Blueberry Hill" "Rock Around the Clock" It felt like wild and crazy times, which probably had more to do with everyone's age and capacity for alcohol than with it being the end of the Eisenhower era. And Christmas parties weren't about the children, our time was Christmas morning. I remember being tired one Christmas Eve at an uncle's apartment and falling asleep on a pile of coats that everyone had tossed on the bed, kind of the way in which a cat or dog will fall asleep on your clothes. It's almost impossible to describe that feeling of warmth and comfort.


My parents bought a house before I turned five. Most but not all of the family Christmas parties from that time forward took place there, a stretch of about 25 years from the late 50s to the early 80s. By my late teens the Night Before Christmas had become more of a happy lark and the WPIX Yule Log set the mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMjTD7c6TCo&feature=related

The adults took the televised yule log more seriously but my generation found humor and absurdity in the yule log and yet still enjoyed it, perhaps even more so. The Christmas Eve parties were still mainly for the adults and "the kids" needed to create our own entertainment. A few of my cousins, my brother and I, and maybe a couple friends would leave the house early in the evening, and we would drive around or walk around to look at Christmas lights and smoke a joint or two, so that by the time we returned to an adult party in full swing, we'd sit together in the combined den and dining area and fire up the Yule Log on WPIX. By now we were all in a peaceful, bonhomie, holiday mood, meditating on The Yule Log, laughing for no apparent reason which puzzled some of our parents, drinking a little wine, or a beer, or maybe a cup of tea as a buffet table was being prepared with turkey and ham and cold-cuts and potato salad and pies, and cakes and Christmas cookies. My mother and her mother knew how to create a spread. The guests varied over the years but mainly comprised my father and his brothers, their wives and kids, my grandmothers, and great aunts, but also neighbors and friends of my parents, and as we got older, friends of mine and my brother's and our girlfriends, and maybe the friends' girlfriends.

Some years, when I wasn't stoned and sitting in front of the TV mesmerized by the Yule Log, I attended Midnight Mass at the Episcopal church a few blocks away. By my late 20s I became more ambitious, and with a couple of friends would head over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral or Saint Thomas's for Midnight Mass.

And there were always people left at the house when we returned, folks to sit with and enjoy a turkey sandwich and meatballs and a little pie and coffee, and a glass of wine or brandy. It was a feeling not unlike falling asleep on that pile of coats many years before.

Have chores to do before the big day, and tomorrow I'm going to pay a visit to "The Two of Us" blog and maybe enjoy a little spice wine.

Kathleen Shaw and The Great Leap Backward and Forward

At one point (or the first of several points) where my life had crashed and burned, I found myself living once again in the town where I had grown up, reluctantly back home after having managed to escape for seven years.

Not only was it a down period in my life, it didn't seem to be a particularly auspicious epoch in the collective life as well. In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the U.S. and John Lennon was assassinated. I  walked through a huge shopping mall, Christmas shopping with my father the day after Lennon was murdered, and the usual manifest depression of the season, and the end of the Carter years, coupled with this tragedy, was palpable. The malaise washed over you in soul-numbing waves. It was the end of an era and no one seemed to have any idea of where things were headed. Instead of the usual holiday tunes, the muzak speakers were cranking out "Imagine" and "Instant Karma" and "A Day in the Life" and "In My Life" and "Revolution" and "Mind games" and "Across the Universe"and (Goddamn) "So this is Christmas", and it felt bloody awful amid all the glitter and merchandising and material craving of the holiday season. It felt like the end of the world.

One day in this lost season, I had gone to the local Channels or Lumberama which, along with Rickels, were the "Big" hardware stores in the decades preceding Home Depot and Lowes. I bought some widget and headed to the register to check out . . . and there she was . . . Kathleen Shaw . . . I was 28 and it was nearly half a lifetime since I'd seen her. She had been my girlfriend---the only girlfriend I'd gone out with and broken up with twice---first at age 14 and then again at age 15. She may have been the only girlfriend from those early adolescent years that I'd actually loved, although I didn't know it back then. Kathleen recognized me with my long hair and beard. She'd always been shy. She rung up my purchase and we made small talk. I may have mentioned that I was back in the area for awhile, the Prodigal Son returned. I don't recall if she had worn an engagement or wedding ring, and it didn't seem important. I had no desire to rekindle anything with her. I could easily see Kathleen Shaw and I were worlds apart.

Later I mentally traveled back with Kathleen to the Spring of '67, to a Sunday in late March when the ground was starting to thaw, and there were a few blossoms and a thin wrapper of early warmth around our winter jackets. We were pressed against the brick wall of a public building, kissing, making out, smiling into each others eyes.

 Kathleen:
      "What does your father do?"
Me:
     "He works in a paper mill."

      "A paper mill?"
      "Yeah, where they make paper. Boxboard. What does your father do?"
      "He's a bus driver."
      "Like Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners?"
      "Yeah, like Jackie Gleason . . . Sooooo?
      "Nothing . . . You're sister still lives at home. What does she do?"
      "She has a job at the bank . . . We have to stop kissing. My lips are chapped."
      "So let's get some chap-stick at the drugstore. I wanna buy some licorice."
      "I'm not going to kiss you if you eat licorice and the drugstore is far away."
      "You said you were gonna stop kissing me anyway, and we can make it to the drugstore. It's a five-minute walk."
       "Ten . . ."
      "Okay, 'ten.'"
      "By the time we get back I'll have to be home for Sunday dinner."
      "So we're just gonna stand here and not kiss? Maybe I should start walking you home now. We can walk slow."
      "You're rude . . . We can talk."
      "But we're already talking!"
      "You call this talking?"
      "One more kiss?"
      "Well, alright . . ."

I said goodbye to Kathleen Shaw and left the Channels or Lumberama and started walking across the mall parking lot, which was only two blocks from my parents house where I was living. Kathleen had been one of several people I'd run into that apocalyptic Fall of 1980 whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was suffering from a sense of dislocation. Things really had changed in Wayward the past seven years, and though I'd returned every now and then for Christmas or the 4th of July, I really hadn't noticed the scope of the change until I'd planted myself for a time. So it wasn't just a strange time ("strange days indeed" as John Lennon had sung) it was a strange place too, because as even a mediocre or novice student of physics knows, time and space are interchangeable, or not interchangeable---they're the same. Time is an illusion.

A cinder block wall roughly 7-foot high ran the perimeter of the mall parking lot along one of the avenues. The wall had been there since I was a kid (when "the mall" hadn't been an enclosed mall) and the wall had a hole in it, and on the side was the street that I'd often traveled to get home. The hole was made from a missing half of a cinder block roughly three-and-a-half feet from the ground, and it had come in handy starting around age 9 or 10, because without having to go around the wall by a hundred yards or more and walk along busy Wayward Avenue, you could instead scale the wall by securing your foot in the hole---quite convenient. Later, in my early teens, the hole was sometimes used as a place to stash cigarettes or other contraband.

I was 28 and wayward in Wayward, but the hole in the wall drew me toward it like an astronomical black hole. Already ignoring the civilized and adult path across the parking lot that would have led me around the wall, I instead reached the hole, maybe wishing for a minute or two that I could somehow shrink myself and disappear inside. But I jumped up, clutched the cinder block with my arms, leveraged my ascent by placing one foot in the still correct place, and leaped over.

Going Up

In the summer of 1965 my grandmother who lived with us took a six-week summer trip to Washington State. It had been her longest and most ambitious trip to date. Normally she took one or two trips a year with her older sister, Jess. They would vacation in western Massachusetts if it was summer and Florida in the winter, where they would stay with their only surviving sibling, an older brother. They were a sight---a pair of 5-foot, 1-inch elderly ladies with their Bingo night hats and valises boarding the Greyhound for Pittsfield, or on this trip, an airplane to Seattle, where they had a second cousin (or was it a first cousin once-removed?) living in Everett.

There had been a resurgence of World's Fairs or Expos in the '60s. The previous summer, my family, along with millions of others, had visited the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The Montreal Expo '67 was on the horizon. The Seattle Expo had taken place in 1962, and of course one of the largest and enduring attractions had been the Space Needle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle

My grandmother and great aunt were excited about visiting Seattle and The Cascades and Puget Sound, and of course the Space Needle. They had both come from Brooklyn, and for a time had been raised by Catholic nuns, because they'd lost their mother at a very early age. Jess never left Brooklyn where she was the matriarch of a large family. My grandmother had married in 1928 and emigrated from Brooklyn to North Jersey, and her descendants were smaller in number.


Here is an interesting site about Worlds Fairs and their history.

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/

My grandmother lived on the second floor of our house. You could hardly call her living space an upstairs "apartment"; it was more of a semi-finished half floor, or attic, with stacked up cardboard boxes and random junk, with an overwhelming odor of mildew and must. There was a plain bedroom, a practically unusable bathroom, and a central room with torn red linoleum flooring, an old sofa, TV, a mahogany coffee table and end table with lamp. That was it. My grandmother lived downstairs with the rest us during the day, but spent her evenings on the second floor. It was an enchanting but usually off-limits place for me. Sometimes I would  sneak upstairs at night and sit with her for awhile. A crucifix hung above the TV and another one over her bed. Nan (as we called her) would not smoke her beloved Kent cigarettes upstairs, but would instead eat hard candy as she watched Lawrence Welk or some other variety show of the era. She would always give me candy, and she also pressed dollar bills into my hand with the stern warning not to tell my mother, as if I were a spy and the money was some secret code or plan I needed to carry with me behind enemy lines . . .

While my grandmother was away my mother often took the opportunity to clean out the years of detritus that had accumulated over a few family moves and the blending of stuff from her mother's house with her own. Occasionally I dared to venture upstairs myself. I had never been in the bedroom before. I remember a rosary on her bureau, and  an old photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, possibly in her teens. She looked quite pretty in that portrait. The ceilings sloped, the wallpaper was corrugated and yellowed from dampness, the bed was a twin. My grandmother, now in her mid-60s, had been a a widow for over 10 years and had only one child who'd been stricken with polio at the age of 12, and then the child later married at age 18, already pregnant . . . this room was a lonely place to be.

But unlike most of my friends, I had never lived on a second floor, and I was always mystified at the way in which more of the world was revealed to me from the two small windows in her bedroom and two more throughout the floor. I would watch the cars and buses---altered and scaled down---as they passed below on the street. I could see a greater number of houses and yards, and people going about their daily routines, and I felt more omniscient and privileged gazing down from this second-story, almost dizzying, height . . . I must have been seven or eight years old when I'd first come up here, a time in my life rich in epic dreams. There were storage cubbyholes below the sloped eaves, and you could enter them through a weirdly-angled door, like a door in a play house, a little skewed and unreal, and the space in there was dark and dusty, and you could not see too much. Soon after discovering the cubbyhole, I had a recurring dream of entering these tight spaces, but the spaces would expand into long passageways that I would follow and eventually emerge onto a higher floor, and then reenter the passageway and come out on an even higher floor. On the third floor all the furniture was draped in long veils of light blue silk, and on the fourth floor there appeared enormous beds and sofas and ottomans of fine linen with green and gold embroidery---white, open and airy rooms---and by the sixth, or maybe seventh floor, I would emerge from the passageway into a realm of mostly formless and heavenly illumination.

When my grandmother returned from Washington State (and the Space Needle), I remembered asking her about her trip.


"It was such beautiful country out there," she'd said, elated, her life changed, her horizons broadened, "and every place you go the people treat you so nice."

She lived to the age of 94.