The day started with an e-mail from a lady who he had always thought of as his first love interest. Not named Mom, Aunt Joanne or Grannie, that is. When the two managed to exchange notes over a half century later, she assured him, oh my, no way. No. She was just the best girl football player, she told him. Gently. The old man had apparently been romantically delusional since the age of seven.
The e-mail follows in bold below.
The year was 1955, only sixty-one years ago. [She was always good at math.]
Did you hear the post office is thinking of charging seven cents just to mail a letter? [Of course, this was long before zip codes. The old man’s father had been a mailman. When he retired, his right arm was inches longer from sorting envelopes.]
If they raise the minimum wage to $1.00, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store. [In their little village, stores and families shared names like Nichol’s Hardware or Smalley’s tavern. Simpson’s. Dube’s, pronounced ‘doobie.’ Dad had been captain of Dube’s Duffers, a feared cadre of keglers. You could buy about every different type of blue jean then available in the world, both kinds. The old man had proposed to his first wife in Smalley’s. He was young and the jukebox was playing Dylan’s ‘Lay, Lady, Lay.‘]
When I first started driving, who would have thought gas would someday cost 25 cents a gallon?
Guess we’d be better off leaving the car in the garage. [In 1957, his father had paid $2800 for a four-door two-tone gold-and-white Plymouth Belvedere. Family’s first new car in history. His history. And another thing, when gasoline is four dollars a gallon, it’s Obama’s fault. When it goes down to buck-seventy-five, you hear what… nothing.]
Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $50,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn’t surprise me if some day they’ll be making more than the President. [In the offseason, pro athletes would sell cars or insurance to make ends meet.]
I never thought I’d see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. [His last two wives still rhapsodize about indoor toilets.]
They’re even making electric typewriters now. [The first edition of the greatest running magazine in the history of the English-speaking world – think we can all agree – was published on a mimeograph machine in the biology department of Northern Arizona University.]
It’s too bad things are so tough nowadays. I see where a few married women are having to work to make ends meet.
[The old man’s mother, Big Norma everybody called her, worked until they made her leave. Then she served others selflessly performing thousands of hours of community service. Big Norma wrote her own obit.]
It won’t be long before young couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work. [But, no, wait a minute, they invented television and TV dinners. Job done.]
I’m afraid the Volkswagen car is going to open the door to a whole lot of foreign business. [The old man had told this story before. Like so many stories, don’t pay attention to the young redhead, many of his stories merited rehearing. First time the old man had ever eaten yogurt was actually at the United Nations. Because only foreigners ate yogurt. Couldn’t buy it in our town.
Number of years later, running over one hundred miles weekly at high altitude while sleeping on the floor of The Alpineer and acing the Philosophy of W.C. Fields, post-graduate level at NAU, pronounced “no, really.” The old man grabbed his diploma and within a single twenty-four hours drove that little foreign car to New Jersey where he had some business with his young Italian wife.]
Thank goodness I won’t live to see the day when the Government takes half our income in taxes. [After he sold his magazine to Nike, he was making about the same as a first-year major leaguer. And sometime late winter, early spring, he’d get a raise because his withholding was tapped out.]
I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to government. [The old man had campaigned for Eisenhower. I like Ike. Whistle while you work, Stevenson’s a jerk. Eisenhower has the power, whistle while you work. He was five, then nine. Ike knew the government could be an agent for positive change. Ike, a Republican because they asked, warned us about corporations, “the military-industrial complex.” Saved the free world and he was right.]
The fast food restaurant is convenient for a quick meal, but I seriously doubt they will ever catch on. [The old man’s town had had a drugstore with a lunch counter. Kid didn’t need a car to drive through. Turns out those burger joints put out a better meal than a metal tin of tuna casserole with crunched potato chips on top.]
There is no sense going on short trips any more for a weekend. It costs nearly $2.00 a night to stay in a hotel. [And they really kept the lights on for you. Not for security.]
No one can afford to be sick anymore. At $15.00 a day in the hospital, it’s too rich for my blood. [Too rich for my blood should be the new universal healthcare slogan.]
If they think I’ll pay 30 cents for a haircut, forget it. [The old man remembered military haircuts like drug abuse. Where the hell is he going with this, she wondered. The first one was free. Few months later, the barber was a large-breasted black woman who stuck a boob in your ear and said, that’ll be two-bits. He was eighteen, would’ve paid twice that.]
Elvis actually lived. And back in the day the occasional famous person who possessed an actual talent served the country because it was the right thing to do.
The old man used to joke with young buddies about back before rock ‘n’ roll. How he helped to promote this new music by convincing the bus driver who seemed to drive all over Putnam County trying to find Kent Elementary, convinced him as he drove that oddly quiet crew that Tutti-Fruiti was not a Pat Boone original composition.
Before Ike got the highway system smoothed out, Grandma’s used to be a winding ten-hour trip over Bear Mountain, then ferry at Port Jervis across the Hudson River, up and over and around and down most of Pennsylvania until we arrived at the Groundhog Capital of The World. Punxsutawney. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Luckily, one year, can’t speak for Dad, on a good day, he was like Robert Mitchum on a bad day, who gives a shit, he never hit us, luckily, we managed to listen to one song over and over and over again. One the old man and little brother could agree on. The cherub went out humming The Purple People Eater, I’ll just bet.
Coming back home, Dad always like to tell the little boys about how he was a soldier on leave and racing back to Carmel to get some some nookie and his brakes went out. Coming down the the mountain. He usually said he was going to visit a sick friend and we didn’t know any better until we got older and wiser like thirty. Whatever, he always told that story until Ike single-handly put a four-lane bridge over the bridge and cut the trip to six hours.
But that doesn’t matter, by then we gone.
And so was Grandma.
Oddly enough, today, the old man lived just down the street from the lead singer.
Lalalala.
Please hold my hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_JxwMcIbJc