10 September 2020
Trigger:
So goes another item from my past!
“The time will come to the young also, when they will understand that if the aged repeat themselves, it is because they live in a world of memories, without a present and without a future.” Memoirs of Jacques Casanova
“What’s for ‘zert?”
It was as inevitable as the passing of the day. Any holiday dinner would be celebrated by the family and end with Norm’s story. At first those meals would be at Aunt Maude’s, but then the duty passed to my mother as Maude and Norm began to age and their son and his family moved away. The distance was too far for them to drive and it was in an age when air travel was neither cheap or easy to organize from the small airport in our town. But we were family too.
Maude was my grandfather’s youngest sister. She and Norm moved into the house next to us in 1950 when I was 3 and spent their remaining 40 years of life there. “Aint Maudie”, as everyone called her, was in reality the grandmother we all want to have. Funny, smart, no nonsense and told it like it was. And she gave me all the love I needed. She worked until she was 75 and as soon as she arrived home, I would be there, sitting at her kitchen table while she made dinner for Norm. We would listen on her kitchen radio to Walter Cronkite with the news and then John Cameron Swaze. All the time there would be a running commentary by Maude about he idiots and frauds who ran our country. Her standard comment was, “That old fool dont have the sense god gave a goat.” One can only imagine how she would have felt about the current occupier in chief.
I would help her by pealing potatoes, or snapping green beans while she would put some fat from the tin that sat on the stove, filled continually with the morning’s bacon grease or leftover lard from frying up the potatoes, into iron skillets for that nights dinner. And of course, whatever grease was left from that night’s meal would be poured back into that seemingly bottomless pot.
And we would laugh and giggle at our attempts to draw something and ask the other one what it was. I never could draw but we would make up a story about what it was. Most of all, she wanted to hear the latest jokes that were passed around from my day at grade school. All the rage in those innocent and non politically correct days were little moron jokes.
“Why did the little moron throw his clock out the window. Because he wanted to see time fly.
“Why did the little moron bury his wife under the floor. Because he wanted to be able to sing, “I\m walking the floor over you.” I know, very moronic. But it would make her laugh and she loved to laugh. It was a laugh that started as a throaty giggle then became a “hee, hee, hee”. I loved making her laugh and hearing it.
Then the food would be ready and she would say, “Gerald, are you going to stay for supper?” And i’d say, “I’ll have to go ask Momma.” I would run out her back door and cross the drive we shared to our house and announce to my mom. “Aint Maudie says I have to have dinner with her.’ It didn’t always work but often enough.
And then I would sit at their small table in the corner of the kitchen with Norm taking up a large part of the space. Uncle Norm was a big man,even for those days. He was a proud german american or Pennsylvania Dutch as they called themselves after the first world war. German immigrants came to America during colonial days and then later after the USA was established. Most all settled in the middle colonies with Pennsylvania being the hub. And as the country pushed west, they followed the Ohio River down into the middle of the country, found towns and established farms and communities all along the way. The term Pennsylvania Dutch came from the corruption of the word Deutche for the german language. And Norman’s family had been in the Evansville area for a hundred years or so.
Norman was born just before the turn of the 20th century and was young enough not to be in the first world war and too old to be in the second. And besides, he worked for the Chrysler plant which was the largest employer in town. They made military vehicles during the war so he was also working in a job exempt from the draft. He started there in the 1920s and worked until the plant closed and Chrysler took the jobs to St Louis in 1955.
Norm initially drove a car hauler, the large semi truck that had a dozen cars loaded on and distributed all over the middle of the US. As he got older, he was transferred to driving the employee bus that took the people around the large factory site to where they were needed. So he never really had a trade as such. When the plant closed, he was too old to get a job somewhere else so from that time on was always around the house.
Uncle Norm was a gentle giant. He was extremely patient with me and wanted to teach me practical things. He would put in a vegetable garden each spring, especially planting cherry tomatoes because he knew I loved them and would help myself. Then each morning in the summer after they would begin to come in, he would say as soon as he saw me, “Gerald, someones been stealing your tomatoes.” knowing good and well that it had been me. “Yes Uncle Norm I would reply, I saw Skipper from down the street in your back yard, it must have been him.”
Norman loved making things with his hands. We would go to the hardware store in his 1952 white Chevrolet, “The White Angel” he called her, and buy balsa wood. He would tie the sticks together in a cross and glue over it the paper from a brown grocery sack, tie a bunch of rags on the bottom for the tail and we would go out to a field and fly that homemade kite all afternoon.
The biggest project he undertook was to build a wooden fishing boat. After school I would sit in his garage and listen to him tell stories about his days driving the truck and delivering cars. I’d fetch tools and help with some sanding or whatever and just hang out. When it was done, of course, he was always ready to go fishing. He gave me his old rod and reel, or would find some bamboo pole for me to do float fishing. Summer days were spent going out to small lakes and streams. I never caught very many fish but it was the fun of being out with the boat and motor. When we did manage to catch something, we’d clean them and bring them home to Aint Maudie to fry up for dinner in her iron skillet in that bacon grease. I still think that is some of the best fish I’ve ever eaten, at least in my memory they are.
Our neighborhood was filled with post war vet families so all the kids were of the same age and went to the same schools, either the public grade school or the catholic one. We were free range kids in those days, getting on our bikes in the morning, making it home for lunch and then back out until dinner time. At the end of our street was an actual woods, left sitting undeveloped inside the city. It was the perfect place for fighting imaginary battles with indians and germans and Japs depending on what recent movie we would have seen the prior saturday at the Ross Movie Theater.
It was a saturday ritual. The morning would be spent watching the saturday tv kids shows, Sky king, Roy Rodgers, Rin tin tin and cartoons. Then onto our bikes for the 2 mile ride up to the theater. Fifteen cents for the ticket, ten cents for a box of popcorn and a nickle for a box of mild duds. The ritual was unchanged for years. It would always be a double feature with perhaps a serial episode of Buck Rodgers on first, then a cowboy movie followed by looney toons then the main feature, usually a war movie or sword fighting adventure. And the rest of the week, we would play the parts in our woods.
Uncle Norm was always there for us, when a bike wheel would be punctured or a kite would be broken or a ball glove break its stitching, he would fix it. He was the calming presence which made us know the world was protecting us.
And oh yes, the expected dinner story. So after the second helping of turkey and potatoes and green beans for Thanksgiving or Ham at easter or Roast at christmas, we knew it would be coming. Norm’s favorite story. It did not matter where the rest of us were in eating. It would start with his booming voice, “Maw-neek” (as he pronounced my mother’s french name -Monique) What’s for ‘zert?”
“Did I ever tell you the story about the time I was delivering cars down in Tennessee and stopped for lunch at this diner along the road. The waitress behind the counter, (I always sat at the counter cause you got to meet people) was quite nice. After I finished my blue plate special, I asked her what was for ‘zert.”
“Well”, she drawled out in her southern voice. “Well, we got three kinds of pie. Open faced, cross-barred and ‘kivverd…all apple.” And then there would be that deep laugh and he’d repeat the line as if it needed explaining, “Three kinds of pie, all apple.” And we would all laugh again. It would mean that another holiday had passed with us being together and things were right with our little world.