by Nils Peterson
I. The Best Meal Ever
My mother’s father died during, but not because of, WWII and so she went back to Sweden on the first possible boat – 1946 – September leaving my father, brother, and me to get along. I, soon to be 13, had just started high school.
We’d always walked home from Evergreen Grammar School for lunch which mother made for us, then back again to school. It must have been an hour break and the walk was not short. But now we had to do other. There was a lunch program at the grammar school my brother went to, and there was a cafeteria at my high school. If you ate quickly, you could go out and pitch pennies against the curb of the graceful, curved driveway with the other guys – the trick was to toss your penny up close but not to touch the curb. if you touched it, you lost your coin. If you were closest, you got to pick up all the pennies which would jingle comfortably in your pocket all afternoon. Maybe “Open the Door, Richard” was the big song, at least for me, though lurking somewhere by way of I think by way of Life Magazine was Slim Gaillard’s “Cement Mixer, Putti, Putti.” But I liked a lot of things on Your Hit Parade too.
But some days I would meet my father for lunch. The war had given him a place where his ability could be recognized – and he moved from the maintenance department – his first job with Mack Motors, the company he’d joined to help with the war effort passing the chauffeur’s job, which he liked, over to Victor Nicholson – to night foreman, to day foreman, to plant manager, this from a man who had to leave school at the age I was at that moment and go to work in a factory which then made two thirds of the world’s stick matches.
So I’d walk out of Plainfield High School, up Park avenue to the White Tower and my father would drive down to meet me and we lunched side by side – sitting on stools before the counter with other working men – my father dressed now in a suit – and we’d order hamburgers made of thin slices of ground meat, topped with grilled onions and slices of sour pickle. I don’t think the world, our world, had yet discovered French fries. The bun was soft. I don’t think we added ketchup. Maybe my father did. Fifteen cents they cost, maybe a dime, but the fancy lunch my godmother was cooking for the rich up on Hillside Avenue was not more heavenly than this gritty texture of meat, tart sharp salt taste of pickle, and onions, the onions, a heaven of fried onions –their taste, their smell, the crispness of the ones slightly burned – and sitting there on stools side by side with my father in this lunch heaven of working-male energy, our varied futures waiting outside the door to carry us away when the milky coffee was finished.
I thought of this meal again today, but I wrote this poem more than thirty years ago:
1990/1946
Soon I will be older than my father
when he died. How often I’ve thought – I’m forty.
What was he doing when he was forty?
or forty five? fifty? when he was this age
or that he was doing . . . and I would fill in
the blank – part memory, part imagination.
Sometimes I see me there too and try
to hold his mind in mine while thinking
back into the mind I wore then – like now,
mother away, I come as my father, day-shift
foreman at Mack Motors and worried about me,
and I come as me just worried, starting high school,
and we meet at the White Tower, eat thin hamburgers,
sliced pickles, comforting fried onions.
But I’ve been for many years now older than my father was when he died. His death left me with a real sense of going it alone.
II. I think I’ve been reluctant to go on with writing about this part of my life because in a way it’s about Eden. Therefore I’ll have to talk next about being cast out, and that will be difficult.
My parents were Lutherans, and in Mount Vernon, N Y where they first settled, there was an active Lutheran Church for Swedes which meant a great deal to them, particularly to my mother. My parents had gone off to Sweden in the summer of 1929 to show off how well they were doing in this country. There was no work for my father when they returned. When my father during the depression 30’s finally got a job, it was as a chauffeur to a family whose main residence was in Plainfield, New Jersey, where I and my brother were born. My father’s cousin, my godmother, was the cook. That’s how he found out about a possible job.
There was a Swedish Lutheran church there too, but small. Maybe they didn’t even have a building at first because I remember going there as a small boy to watch my father help build the chapel on weekends. There were many jobless carpenters among the Swedes, so work was welcome. I hope they got paid. Though Dad was a machinist, he had been one at a cabinet makers. Leaving the chauffeur job made us leave the chauffeur’s flat above the garage and we bought a house I discovered across the street from a school friend, maybe with the rich man’s help.
When it came time for Sunday School, the church was so small it didn’t have one. So, I and, later, my brother, were sent off Sunday mornings to the rich people’s church, a large Presbyterian almost a small cathedral, with a beautiful sanctuary, offices, two ministers with doctorates (and obviously from good families), a Choral Director, a robing room, a fine choir, and enough Sunday school rooms so K through 8 each had their own. [Oh yes, and a library, very comfortable chairs where occasionally I would sit and try to make sense out of Punch, the British humour (yes, of course, English spelling) magazine. I was aware of it being part of a world I only dimly knew.]
Now the rich lady had been interested in the chauffeur’s children and she passed on to us many of her childhood books a couple of which were retellings of Bible stories in the ornate give-no-quarter-to-children language of her time. I was a reader and read whatever came my way, even Lady’s Home Journal. I probably was obnoxious in Sunday School because I had already read stories about much of what they were teaching. I imagine I struck my hand up way too much. Anyway, I skipped a year of Sunday school I think it was mainly to get rid of me though I had already skipped a year in grammar school. I sang with delight in the children’s choir. It was quite good and under the direction of Charlotte Garden, the Minister of Music so I enjoyed the experience of church, particularly the music.
We graduated from Sunday school at the end of eighth grade and were invited and expected to join the Crescent Avenue Presbyterian church (They had communion grape juice instead of wine). My parents left it to me. and, I think, my mother at least, hoped I wouldn’t join.
A Sunday School had started in the Lutheran church, but I was too old for it. My brother was not. So on Sunday mornings, Mother, Father, and Bill would head off to church and leave the house to me.
It was a wondrous thing being alone in the house. Once, and I don’t know how I made this happen, likely by being obnoxious, those three went up to visit Swedish friends in Mt. Vernon. They let me stay home by myself. But even more wondrous, there was a snow storm and they had to stay the night. I woke in the morning in the empty house to a phone call explaining. The house was mine, all mine. Perhaps it was then that I could at last listen to myself. I was 10 or 11, but at that time it was thought appropriate for me to babysit for neighbors with small children.
Perhaps it was that morning I had this experience. Certainly I didn’t know it, but it was one of the great moments of my young life. Here’s my attempt to capture it:
Light flooded through the stair-landing window, fired the cut glass candy dish, and broke into colors across the low bookcase. Home alone, that itself enough rapture, but now this worldly joy. I remember trying to remember it, fix it, make it stay – what was I, ten? eleven? – so beautiful. I knew it could not last, but hoped its memory could.
III. The stair of the new house on the left side of the living room went up to a landing with a window and then back the other way to get to the second floor. That area was not unlit, but not well-lit using the light from above or below. In those days kids my age were all radio listeners, the time from 5 to 6 almost sacred, Jack Armstrong, Tennessee Jed, Orphan Annie, and the like. Sometimes I’d start early, at 4:30 with Lorenzo Jones and His Wife Belle. He was a slightly nutty inventor of impractical things. The one I most remember was a talking clock. Anyway, one of the serials was Superman and in one of the story lines Clark Kent was stuck in a submarine with Lois and Jimmy and others and the submarine was in the grip of a giant octopus and couldn’t move. The problem was, of course, not only was there no telephone booth for Clark to change in, but even if superman appeared, how was he going to get out of the submarine without breeching it to free it from the octopus and thereby letting all the water in and killing off all his friends. Anyway, there was a time of night when going up those stairs I was sure if I were quick enough I’d see the tentacle of the kraken wrapped around our house just outside the landing window. I knew it wasn’t true, but that did not make it less comfortably scary.
One more thing. Dad had given me a kit to make a crystal radio. Some of you may remember those, a simple device, a little lever with what they called a cat’s whisker that you had to feel around the crystal with until you found a station. Very inexact. You also needed some kind of metal connection for an antenna, a radiator was often used. I used the springs of my mattress which worked pretty well. You listened through primitive ear phones at the faint crackly distant program. The wonder of it was that no one else could hear it and when you shut your door at night, ostensibly to sleep, you could listen as long as you wanted to and no one knew. I’m remembering now The Count of Monte Cristo with its exciting introductory music that I learned later was from a piece by Leo Delibes. (Part of the introduction to classical music available when I was young.) What I’m reaching for here is trying to describe my process for creating my own life, my secret life, my real life, different from the public life I often felt forced to act out in the world.