Driving Down Memory Lane

I used to work in a record store on Sundays.



I made a little extra money, and to be truthful, it got me out of the house and allowed me to hone my interpersonal skills. When I was of such a mind, the occasional socialization with attractive women was another motivation.



I have exhibited hermit-like behavior in the past. When you don’t really have any money or anyplace to go, hermatism ensues. Part of me felt sorry for myself and another non-sorry part sort of exhibited my midlle finger to the rest of the human race: didn’t suffer fools gladly. Bastards! I was deflecting the slim possibility that if I put myself out there in society, I’d be rejected. Wow. Self-discovery.



I have always considered myself a non-conformist. The old home town was pretty conformy: everyone is a republican and a church goer. They are all slim and coiffed and rich. I was never any of those things. Never wanted to be. But being the opposite of all those things made me stick out like a democratic, heathen, chubby, disheveled, welfare recipient sore thumb.
So without veering off into some sort of epic, PhD in Psychology thesis, let me just point out that





I have mellowed a bit. But still…



The clientele at the record store would typically walk in the door and immediately ask me or an associate what was selling the most. This was information we had on hand. Whatever people were buying, they’d buy. If it was a recording of vomiting, and it was in the top 10, out came the gold AMEX card.



This flock mentality had always bothered me. It still bothers me.



When I was younger, back in the late 70s when my liver still had a chance and my muscles were visible through the flab and none of my joints ached, I made some observations. Everyone in my home town had one of two cars: a Volvo Station Wagon or a BMW 2002. Some families had the former for Mom and the latter for Dad, but I am not generalizing. If you walk down the main shopping street of my old home town that’s what you would see parked at the curb. Volvo Volvo BMW BMW Volvo.



The men of my age wore Lacoste Alligator shirts and the women had disco hair. They went to bars at night met up and followed each other’s Beemers and Volvos off up onto the ridges for pre-aids sexual adventure. I’m not bitter.



For a while, after the 2002 rotted out, 325s were parked in the town spaces. Then there was a brief minivan epoch.



I am not going to fill this space with a complete vehicular timeline except to fast forward to today where the entire town (and most of the rest of my fellow countrymen) drive SUVs.



It’s stunning, shocking and embarrassing. Huge gas guzzling behemoths where the humbler, smaller cars of my youth once parked. They block the view and the rays of the sun.



No one rives a car older than 10 years anymore. Except me I think.




Anyway, I was tooling down the road in my 1987 Volvo Station wagon when an odd vehicle pulled onto the highway in front of me. It was tiny, dwarfed by the Suburbans, Land Rovers and Expeditions that sped by in both directions. As I crept up behing the tiny car, which was holding it own in the velocity sweepstakes, I suddenly realized it was a BMW 2002. Wow! It survived the rust plague! Some guy had fixed it up nice. So I took a picture and here it is. By the way, I plan on buying a Ford Flex as soon as I can.

Negativity

Pop a cork and light up a Churchill! We’ve been on Rusty Hinge Road for 10 years! In the early months of our residency, as the sawdust levels began to subside and the patina of the previous tenants faded away, I began to collect ephemera related to my new home town. Just post cards at first. In those early days, when EBAY was just a little more than an idea, I could win auctions without much competition: two dollars here, five dollars there, before long I had quite a collection. Then it was on to pottery and books, anything even vaguely related to my zip code was fair game. I would seek it out, bid on it, and for a while, there was a fairly steady stream of envelopes, padded bags and boxes arriving at my door.

Once I figured out how to do it, I set up my EBAY account to run automatic searches specific to my desires. Borselino hats is one of my favorites, as are Volvo parts and antique banjos. The one I get every day centers on items related to my home town.


Not too long ago, I received an EBAY notification offering old photographic negatives that were alleged to have been snapped by a renowned local WPA muralist. It promised images of street scenes (I like those), old cars (sign me up) and people (I’m into people).



I won the lot for $3.95 plus postage and a week later I was running 4X5 negatives through my scanner. As anticipated, my computer screen delivered photos of old houses and cars and old-fashioned people in a 1930s back yards, sipping lemonade and pretty much doing what we modern folks do on a summer’s day (without the technological gizmos).




One of the things I began to do with my postcard collection was to get in the Toyota and drive to the various locations pictured in my 80-year-old images, with the idea of replicating the exact image as it looks today. I had some success with this, but it often required some research, since occasionally streets are renamed and in some cases entire neighborhoods have been paved over in favor of a commercial enterprise. My newly acquired negatives sparked a renewal of this interest, especially since I had the name of the photographer and some possible landmarks I could use to identify the scenes I now had on my hard drive.

I googled the artist with limited success, save for a whole lot of images of his fine murals which are still on display in many local government buildings. My next step was to go to the local library to search the town directories.

After finding a “Jim Rockford” parking spot in front of the library, I walked in the door and practically knocked over Gilbert, the unofficial town historian. I had spent many hours in various places listening to Gilbert rattle off his boundless knowledge of local lore and on this particular day, I merely mentioned the name of the muralist I was researching and Gilbert was rattling off reams of valuable information that was priceless for my research. He gave me so much data that I decided not to pursue the reference desk for the old directories and set out to photograph modern digital versions of the vintage images that I now owned.



In what I thought was a delightfully karmic twist, the address Gilbert sent me to happened to be right around the corner from my property at Rusty Hinge Road. The house was one with which I was quite familiar. Gilbert’s description of how the artist’s family used the property all made sense, but I instinctively felt that it was not the one depicted in my photos.




I won another EBAY auction of negatives of identical description and while I was waiting for them to arrive, I returned to the library to do more research on the photographer. I found three different addresses from three different decades. My subject had moved several times. From the driver’s seat of the Toyota, I took three new photos, I also discovered that, unfortunately, one of the locations was now a more modern strip mall.

Maybe one of these properties could have been the location of the back yard in my photos. I continued to poke around and email Gilbert while I watched the mail for the new (old) negatives.
In a week, I was scanning the new material. There were a series of interior shots, taken around a Christmas dinner table, and a few others of folks sitting on a back porch and then, hallelujah, one of the properties I had photographed came up, exactly as my modern photograph had captured it.

I get an immense sense of satisfaction I get when I am able to bring the past to the present. When I am able to replicate a shot that had been taken before my father was born and study the two images side by side, every little detail and grain silently tells the story of the passing decades. I posted these images to the internet in a photosharing site where I have found neighbors with similar interests. I explained what I was doing and revealed my sources. There was some response and I was given some useful suggestions.

More negatives came up on EBAY the next day, and some of the images look like they might contain a few shots of the house around the corner.

I put in my bid and rubbed my hands together in anticipation. Lo and behold, at the last minute, I was outbid! Drat! Now someone out there has “my” negatives!

I know where you live!

Halloweener

I'll do anything to avoid doing what I have to do.

I bought 26 dollars worth of candy and parked in the living room and waited for the parade of ingrates to come to my door for handouts.

I thought I was going to have to eat all the candy myself, but eventually, some kids came through the rain, most of them in actual costumes (for once) and some of them actually enthusastic.

Well sir, they got about half of the bowlful. Normally, I have to keep a ruler handy to whack the little buggers' hands when they over-grab. These trick or treaters where very polite, if surly.

"How many shall I take?" I was asked.

"Take a bunch." I said. And because I am a health care ptofessional I said, "brush your teeth!"

Chilling Out

The house on Rusty Hinge Road came with a fairly new gas furnace. It is connected directly to a municipal gas line that lies beneath the pavement on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Last March, Melissa told me that the heater was on the fritz. This was a new experience. With my old oil furnace, I could go down into the cellar and press the button on the red box. If the Gods are in alignment, the problem was fixed.

This gas unit has no such button and unlike the oil variety of yesteryear, there is no international safety orange sticker on the side of the machine displaying the contact telephone number for service.

I called the gas company and after going through a couple menus, got a human on the line who told me that the gas company doesn’t “do that sort of thing” and I should find myself a reliable plumber who specializes in heater repairs.

So I contacted a contractor friend who recommended a plumber buddy, who I called, and that afternoon his truck was at the curb, and he had his nose inside the fallow furnace.

“You burned out the motor,” he told me in very sketchy English. “I will go to my supply house on Monday and get you a price.”

It should come as no surprise that the heater finked out during an early March cold snap and on a Saturday morning so we could plan on pretty much freezing various nether parts off until midweek.

Melissa, the saver, the collector of things, went to the basement and retrieved a couple of electric oil-filled radiators she had bought when she lived out in far more temperate Oakland, California. These portable units served her well in the short, mild winters of the bay area.

“Don’t be silly,” I chided her, “How will these things help us?” This is a big old house and those tiny things are like pebbles in the ocean.”

Unphased by my chiding, Melissa pluged them in and in a couple of hours, with the aid of some baffling laws of physics, the oil-filled electric radiators had transformed a sizable portion of the chill in the house to a comfortable level.

“I think it’s actually warmer than our furnace,” I remember thinking as my fingers thawed and I was able to type again.

On Monday, I called the plumber. He let me know that his supplier not only did not have the motor BUT they could not get one.

“It’s discontinued.” Discontinued?

He suggested I go online.

I did and after poking around for part numbers, model numbers and serial numbers, I located a brand new, non-returnable part at a warehouse somewhere in Illinois. I had it Fedex-ed out to me at breathtaking expense, and it arrived on my frozen porch by the end of the week.

Deciding that he was kind of flaky, I fired the plumber. Ultimately, I ended up calling the number on the side of a truck, “Demitri Plumbing and (more importantly) Heating.” They were able to fit me into their schedule that day.

A pleasant gentleman with a baseball cap and his name (not Demitri) embroidered on his pocket brought his tools in from the cold and in 10 minutes our house was vibrating and getting warmer.

“I guess I didn’t need that non-returnable motor after all.” I said.

“It was simply a dingus schnobber,” the technician explained, adding numbers up on an invoice. Of course it wasn’t really a “dingus schnobber” that needed tweaking -- it was something equally as unfamiliar to my vocabulary.

“It happens all the time,” the kindly technician explained, “It’s the first thing I always check.” I wrote out a big check and handed it to my new friend.

“Your plumber should have known that much.”

“You know anybody that needs a motor?” I asked, seeing a fairly hefty portion of a weeks pay in an unopened box on the cellar floor.

“I could take it off your hands but it is of no value to us,” he said.

“Skip it,” I told him, graciously leading him out the door.

March became April and we opened the windows and turned off the furnace. The warm blur of summer went by. We tried to put it off as long as we could but a couple days ago, we turned on the heat.

Again the comfortable hum of the motor could be felt throughout the ancient beams and boards. The dust bunnies and cat hair that had collected over the summer was rudely awakened from hibernation and made airborne as the warm air came blasting out of the registers. And then, alas, no heat.

When I returned from work one morning, the oil-filled radiators were back on the job. Before I went to bed, I had an appointment set up with Demitri.

The next afternoon, the house was humming and I was writing a check to Demitri, who assured me that my furnace would be giving me many more years of happy service.

I need a new roof and the paint is peeling and I would really love to put in a new garage. In spite of Demitri’s attempts at calming my qualms, am I going to need a new furnace? Good thing Melissa saved these oil-filled radiators.

Maybe I just need a new house.

Meanwhile I’ll go online and look for a replacement dingus schnobber.

Flour Power

I am on a diet again. I am really good when I set my mind to it. Problem is that the minute I even start to fit into that pair of pants I have stowed somewhere back in the closet, I celebrate with a never ending conga line of delicious food that I had so diligently resisted for months and months.

So, in truth, I am pretty good at starting a diet, but I stink at staying on a diet. And take a note, kiddies, it gets harder as you get older.

So with my increasing girth, the achy joints, sagging jowls, elevating blood sugar and the specter of mortality staring me in the face, I have dusted off the old diet book that was recommended to me many years ago by my dour doctor and joined the losing team.

The diet book on my shelf is basically a Frenchman’s version of the Atkin’s plan: nix the carbs and loose the pounds. One slight deviation from the late, great Doctor Atkins prescription is whole wheat bread, a carbohydrate, is allowed for breakfast. Not your basic grocery store whole wheat, mind you, my book insists on purely whole wheat flour, with out a speck of enriched white flour. After scouring the ingredient labels in every grocery store in the county, I decided I was going to have to dust off my old bread pans and bake my own.

When I was a kid, I got into making bread. I think that probably one of the neighborhood hippy chicks had made a fresh loaf and I was attracted to the enticing allure of both. My sense memory alarm clangs loudly with the taste of that first oven fresh chunk, slathered with butter in a once familiar, fragrant kitchen. After that first taste, I was hooked. With my soon-to-be lifelong instant-gratification issues blaring loudly, it was just a matter of minutes before the family kitchen was a flurry of flying flour.

My mother, a talented cook, was not especially keen on the wife/mother expectations thrust upon her by the “Mad Men” mores of the time. She gladly relinquished her kitchen to me; in fact she’d have resented the concept of the kitchen being designated as “hers.”

So she was delighted to underwrite my bread-baking phase, and happy to lend her expertise. As much as I loved the idea of making fresh bread, I was completely unaware of the choreography involved in the process. There’s a thing about yeast and its properties and its sensitivities to temperature and ingredients. There are huge periods of waiting for stages of rising and something called “proofing” not to mention the fact that once all of the front end stages are completed, there’s a matter of waiting for the baking piece and once it’s out of the oven, you have to wait a few minutes for the bread to cool down before it can be safely eaten without serious injury. So much for instant gratification.

While my memory seems to look back at what seemed like months of bread-baking experimentation, I suspect it was no longer than a week or two, but I am also sure it was something with which I was obsessed. During the bread making epoch, I made white bread, French bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, raisin bread, pumpernickel, rolls and virtually every recipe the Joy of Cooking offered.

I always came back to plain old white bread because it was the most reactive to the yeast, wherein it dependably rose with gusto, while some of the others seemed to rise with indifference or worse, not at all, leaving me with fragrant inedible bricks. The white bread, God Bless America, was the most popular among my family of tasters.

Somewhere, possibly in a landfill in New Hampshire, there may be remnants of the old family kitchen. Archeologists, many centuries from now, painstaking sifting through that landfill, will scratch their heads, write papers and give lectures about the layers of sturdy wheat-based cement and linoleum circa 1955 uncovered there.

Fast forward three decades, Melissa and I are making whole-wheat bread in the test kitchens of Rusty Hinge Road. I have hit upon a fool proof, all-wheat, batter-style bread found in Fannie Farmer. It works well, smells terrific and tastes pretty good. With the internet at our fingertips and about four feet of cook books on the pantry shelf, there is no visible end to the recipes available for the type of bread required by the French diet book my dour doc gave me. A wheat berry, rye and whole wheat recipe from last week is quite edible but a bit too dense. It toasts well, and it fills the house with an intoxicating aroma that cannot be described accurately except to say it smells like home. Particularly with a hefty dollop of fat-free ricotta cheese and a splash of that Korean hot sauce with the rooster on the bottle.

The diet seems to be working. The most used notch on my belt no longer requires a struggle to reach. I am starving most of the day, but using the Frenchman’s diet, I can choose from a variety of specific snacks to fend off the cravings.

And every morning, I look forward a slice or two of delicious homemade bread for breakfast.
Now, where are those pants?

Funky Dunkin!

This is a variation on a previous post.

One of the things they stressed in nursing school was the importance of good hygiene in the prevention of the spread of germs. Our instructors, after lining us up behind sinks, would watch us soap our fingers and wash them in very specific and clinically effective ways.

If we took short cuts or failed to meticulously scrub each finger to their liking, we’d be sent to the back of the line to do it over or worse: drummed out of the corps.

It’s no secret that nursing instructors are a harsh lot, but their strict standards were not formulated for the purpose of stripping us of our last shreds of dignity, rather the point they were making, and reinforcing and pounding into our otherwise empty heads was: germs are everywhere, often on our filthy hands and ready to spread if we were not hyper-vigilant.

Now that I work nights, I have gotten into the habit of stopping at “Crusty Crullers,” an ubiquitous pastry/coffee chain, for a mammoth coffee on my way into the office. Working while the rest of the world sleeps requires copious amounts of self-discipline and buckets of caffeinated beverages. In spite of the fact that I have discovered that sleep deprivation soundly trumps caffeine, the habit is entrenched. I like coffee: it is warm and soothing (unless it is iced coffee and then it is cool and soothing) and I like the size of the containers available at Crusty Crullers, even if the coffee itself is kind of lousy.

The pink and orange logo is familiar, and the staff seems to spend a whole lot of time training the new people to polish the fixtures and mop the floor. Obviously, there is a corporate policy regarding cleanliness that is strictly enforced, depending on the franchise. At 6:15 p.m., which is my regular arrival time, the employees are invariably hard at work, tending to the overall clutter-free ambience that is typical of Crusty Crullers: cleaning, sweeping and polishing.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit, I’ll have a donut now and then., Prior to recent heavy marketing campaigns pushing their coffee, Crusty Crullers got its start as a purveyor of donuts. In my youth, each branch of this concern had a bakery in the back, rolling out dough and dropping it into roiling vats of hot fat. Nowadays centralized kitchens, serviced by delivery trucks keep the racks donuts, bagels muffins and cookies full.

Anatomy buffs know that the skin is the largest organ in the body. It is a remarkable organ at that, among other things, keeps our insides on the insides. Our skin also serves as a shield, the first line of defense against malevolent microbes that are as ubiquitous as the ubiquitous pastry/coffee chain that has been mentioned repeatedly in this article.
To that end and armed with that knowledge, you see a lot more safety precautions in your day-to-day life. From the dental hygienist to the auto mechanic everyone is wearing gloves. And at Crusty Crullers there are systems in place to ensure that the pleasant baseball-capped food handlers are following what can only be company policy when it comes to food/hand contact and precautionary hygiene.

Like so many other places I go to get food that will kill me in other ways, the person behind the counter has the good habit of donning a fresh pair of disposable gloves prior to preparing whatever cheese laden porcine taste orgy I order. Before touching my filthy money, the gloves are removed, the cash register is operated and fresh gloves are put on prior to serving the next customer in line.

When a donut is ordered at Crusty Crullers, the employee grabs a clean paper bag and pops it open with a flick of the wrist. Then to ensure a barrier between their hands and the pastry (even though they are mandated by signs in two languages to wash their hands after using the facilities), a hermetically folded waxed paper square is employed to pick up the requested pastry / donut which is then deftly dropped in the bag.

As a health care professional, this procedure works for me. I am sure that scientists with Petri dishes could demonstrate that either it makes no difference or it does the job. I believe the best defense against these bugs is routine exposure and the natural development of antibodies. But with a whole new generation of super scary mutations popping up hither and thither, I appreciate the gesture on the part of Crusty Crullers. Tongs are another way of handling it but who knows if the tongs have recently been through a dishwasher?

So, after going to the trouble of carefully using the wax paper to safely move my donut from the rack to the bag, please don’t throw the waxed paper square into the bag. It ruins the effect.

And it makes me sick!

Hats off to Larry

Yes, "Hats Off to Larry," was an old doo-wop hit, or maybe not such a hit or not so much doo-wop, anyway, hats off to Larry, my dear friend who died last Christmas day.

Larry was, like me, a hat fancier and he left plenty nifty toppers in his wake. His wife, Maureen, called me over to have the right of first refusal of his collection which I reluctantly picked through. I have a gigantic, if not empty, head, slightly larger than Larry's, proving nothing about intellect and head size since Larry was smart as all get out and I am at best, just kinda smart.

Today, I wore my boater to Westport to look at 99% bad art. I can't slap a hat on my over sized noggin without thinking about Larry.

I miss you old man and I'd drink to you, but alas - or maybe - thank God - neither one of us drank (anymore). So, hats off to you old friend.