Tag Archives: Memoir

Freddy at 18 Pearl

Liquid Joy

Liquid Joy

After school one day in 1950 when we were twelve, Freddy and I got to Pearl Street and found a small plastic bottle sitting on the porch by the front door. There was a large tag attached to it proclaiming that “Liquid Joy,” a brand new product, would get your dishes, glasses and silverware cleaner than any of the old fashioned powders could. What’s more, the tag said, this very sample of “New Liquid Joy” was free.

Neither of us I had given any thought to dish washing detergents, but we brought the sample into the house anyway. No adults were home. We took it upstairs to the bathroom and I got the idea of pouring the whole bottle down the sink. I did and ran a lot of hot water after it for good measure. After a while we went into my room which had a window overlooking the side yard. I looked out and saw a large mound of soapy bubbles in the center of the yard. The pile of bubbles billowed larger and larger as we watched. I knew right away what I should have thought of before dumping the detergent into the sink and sending all that hot water in after it. In the middle of the side yard was a vent connected to the sewer pipe that joined the drains in the house to the sewer line in the street. The bubbles were lighter than water, and like the sewer gases that the vent was designed to expel, they rose to the surface.  The bubbles stopped growing and, very slowly, began to pop. By the time the adults came home an hour or so later no evidence was left.

After I reconnected with Freddy in 2102, he and I were talking on the phone when I thought of an incident my mother had recalled, but that I had forgotten. Freddy and I were around eleven when we came back to my house at 18 Pearl Street after an afternoon of fishing in the harbor. My mother was fixing dinner and I asked if Freddy could eat with us.

“Sure, let me speak with Vivian and make sure it’s OK with her,” my mother replied.

“My mother isn’t home, it’s only Omama,” Freddy said, referring to his grandmother.

“Fine, I’ll speak with her.”

“She doesn’t speak any English, only Spanish and German,” Freddy answered.

“Well….” My mother paused and said, “OK, can you call and ask if it’s all right for you to stay over?”

Freddy called Omama and emitted a rapid-fire burst of Spanish. He listened for a minute and turned to my mother and said, “It’s OK.”

Later my mother told me that she had been uneasy. After all, she didn’t want to get into hot water with Vivian, a very strict European-style parent, but she also  wasn’t about to deprive Freddy of dinner.

At age twelve, I knew nothing about Omama except that she and Vivian spoke in German.  For all I knew she could have been the witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”

When I told the story to Freddy he laughed. “Omama’s English was fine,” he said, “She could speak six languages.”  I had forgotten that he had said that she had been married to an Englishman in Argentina for many years. Now we both laughed. At age eleven, Freddy had bamboozled  my mother about his grandmother’s English and gotten away with it. But something about what he said had ignited my curiosity about Omama. His truthful account had liberated her from the fairy tale in my mind.  “If Freddy’s grandmother looked and sounded so Germanic, wouldn’t her name have been something like Hilde or Gertrude?,” I wondered. What was Omama’s name, I asked Freddy.

“Her name was Margaret Lewis,”

Next week; Camp Norshoco

Patience in the Computer Age

Dave's first computer book, 1963

Dave’s first computer book, 1963, $3.95

Why should a person like me, with a long-exhausted reserve of patience, spend twenty-two years working full-time with computers? After all, these devices fail miserably to deliver exactly what you want even after weeks of frustrating effort. I must have been attracted by the tantalizing promise of these machines to complete, in mere fractions of a second, laborious tasks that once took human hours or days.

My early wisdom about computers evaporated when necessity forced me to work with them full time. I said, “Why program a computer to do something you will do once, when writing the program will take longer than the work itself?” Real programmers didn’t understand my point of view. What they didn’t know was that I found comfort and even relaxation in small clerical jobs.

The biggest failure of computers, as everyone knows, is their steadfast persistence in doing exactly what you tell them to do, instead of what you want them to do. A casual comment by a co-worker at a defense plant offered some hope. Speaking of an unclassified project, the Pilot’s Associate, he said, “We’ll use artificial intelligence techniques to lighten the workload of the jet fighter pilot, by predicting his intentions at just the right moment, and commanding the aircraft automatically to do just what he would have intended it to do. Then he’ll be free to cope with more pressing tasks, such as deflecting approaching missiles, for instance.” I had to laugh.“Mike,” I said, “May I borrow this program when you perfect it? It’s just what we computer programmers need to get the computer to do what we intend without our having to tell it exactly what we want it to do.”

Now I’m glad to be retired from computer work. Like the spurious notion that each person is granted a fixed number of two-billion heartbeats to expend at any rate they chose, I think that I was granted a fixed supply of patience at birth. Foolishly, I used it all up when I was a teenager, trying to get my first car, a true junker, to run reliably. I’ve been running on empty ever since.

Next week: Sea Shell City

The Rotten Apple Tree

newtons-apple-treeThe tree in the back yard of our house at 20  Circle Street in Marblehead grew small, hard and inedible green apples that never ripened. They just rotted on the tree and fell to the ground.  As far as I could tell at age ten, they served no purpose, at least to human beings. That is, until the night that a storm broke our roof-top TV antenna and my parents summoned the man who had installed it for a replacement. I watched as he climbed the roof with the new antenna and threw the broken one to the ground. Part of it was a steel rod about two feet long which I saved.

I had an idea: if I could skewer a rotten apple on this rod and then whip the rod over my head with maximum force, I might propel the apple high in the air over the neighbor’s rooftops. It would work just like the medieval catapult that I had seen in a movie.  I tried one and it flew in an arcing trajectory over the next house and disappeared from sight. It was easy to suppress a flutter of worry over the possibility of injuring someone. I flung a few more apples over the rooftops and turned to other pursuits. Then, as now, my attention span was short.

My friend Tim lived some distance away and had an open field behind his house where he and other kids played and roamed in packs and sometimes fought  One day he was excited when I arrived at his house to play.  “Harry and some other guys have a fort just behind Harry’s house,”  he said, “There’s an old chicken coop behind my house and we can use it as our fort and we can have wars with them.”  Like Tim, Harry was in my fifth grade class at the Gerry School. We looked at Harry’s fort and Tim’s chicken coop. The distance between them was around a hundred feet. The question of how to do battle at such a distance nagged at me for a couple of days.

We were playing at my house on Circle Street when something in my mind connected. Rotten apples from my tree, skewered with my steel rod and flung in a mortar-like trajectory might just cover the distance.  I explained my idea to Tim.  “How can we get a load of these apples up to your house? It’s almost a mile away,” I asked. “I’ve got an old wagon. Let’s go get it; we can fill it with apples and drag them to my house.”  We returned to Circle Street in about forty-five minutes with a rusting metal express wagon. The wheels seemed wobbly, but it would have to do. We loaded the wagon with the rotten apples which by now had fallen to the ground.

Express wagon

In the street the loaded wagon was very heavy; it took two of us, one pulling the handle and other pushing from behind to move it along. Little bumps in the pavement dislodged apples from the load and we took turns corralling them before they rolled under cars. Curbs were very hard to manage: two of us lifted the front end of the wagon over the curbstone and then swung the back end up. We were perspiring; this business of moving a few rotten apples was much harder than we had thought.

At the corner of Pearl and Elm, about halfway between our two houses, there was another curb to negotiate. We dragged the front wheels down off the curb and one of them broke off.  I tried to lift one end of the disabled cart. It was monstrously heavy. “Shit,” Tim said, “What the Hell do we do now?” “We could carry them the rest of the way to your house.” “No! That’s much too far, Goddammit. Take ‘em back to your house” “No, No, No. To your house!” “No.To Your God Damn House!”

Tim looked around and found what he needed to reinforce his insistence that we return the apples to my house. There was a large pile of fresh, moist dog feces in the street next to the curb, and a sheet of newspaper next to it. With the newspaper to protect his hand, he scooped up the pile of excrement and waved it excitedly in my face.  Here was a side of Tim’s character that I should have expected to encounter. After all, a ten-year old willing to cooperate with me in harebrained schemes like this one, and others, must have had some reserve of latent aggression that was bound to come out.  Mine, I guess, was manifest in my willingness to get into these crazy adventures in the first place. For both of us, baseball just wasn’t enough to engage our depraved imaginations, and we were too afraid of injury to go in for manly sports like wrestling or boxing.

The threat of being smeared with dog poop was immediate and called forth in me a reflexive response. With my own piece of newspaper and an overhand grab I swept most of the reeking supply out of Tim’s hand, and then followed through in a graceful arc to deliver the entire load to Tim’s face. In a second I sized up my handiwork. There was a broad brown streak running from above Tim’s left eyebrow diagonally across his eye, nose and mouth and ending near the right side of his chin. There were a couple of subsidiary streaks parallel to the main one, on other regions of Tim’s face. I guess that I hadn’t taking the time to align my crap-flinging arm to deliver a square up-and-down pattern, and the diagonal blob was the result. Tim’s mouth and eyes were wide-open in shock.

In the next instant, fear took hold, and I ran to escape violent retribution. When I got home my mother was laughing. “I just got off the phone with Tim’s mother,” she said. I avoided him for the next few weeks, but when we got together again he didn’t say a word about it and neither did I.