by Nils Peterson
1. Today mind wanted to think back to all of the houses I lived in with my parents growing up and on into my young manhood. There were five, and mind tried to walk through each of the rooms in all of the houses. It was more difficult than I would have thought. I remember so much and forget so much. Give it a try. It is interesting because sometimes you are still there and you can find yourself.
One of the things I noticed was that all of them had formal dining rooms with a good table and matching buffet. It was a room not used except for dinners. And I realized that this was true of all the houses, even the humblest, of my parents’ friends, a formal place to be used in a formal way when guests arrived, the best china taken out of the buffet along with the silver and set carefully around, along with maybe an elegant crystal center piece. I am struggling now to remember if we used it for supper after my father would come home from work in the evening, of course with ordinary plates and flatware. My mind seems unable to answer yes or no when I ask it that question. I think we might have eaten in the kitchen though I can’t quite picture the kitchen table though the word is familiar.
But I started thinking about how in the modern house, there is no such room to be formally gathered together in for a meal, no dining room and no front room (what we called the living room) either where easy chairs, sofa and the Stromberg Carlson radio would sit. Everything is freeform, a flowing from one state of being to another. No sense of a room for this and a room for that, a place for everything and everything in its place. Even the kitchen is open and part of the flow. Well, that’s the way we live now. Is this a memory of loss? an elegy? an “In Search of Lost Time or Space?” Can’t quite tell if this is an important observation about the world we live in or just a wondering.
2. 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, Tom Mix, 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. (I have one now on my wrist.) 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 scary.
One more thing here. 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, different from the public life I felt forced to act out in the world.
3. A Thing of Beauty
My father could not give it away, the Stromberg Carlson, when the tubes failed – the age of the console radio had passed – nor could he throw it away because the wood was so beautiful. He who had worked in a cabinet maker’s shop as a young man, loved the grain of hardwoods with his eye and hand. So it was moved into my bedroom where it sat, a mahogany god no one heard.
When I grew older, I hid books, risqué, not pornographic – Thorne Smith, The Affairs of Bel Ami, Guy De Maupassant and the like – in among the tubes, my secret cave – like the mine where the Lone Ranger cast his silver bullets.
For my thirteenth birthday, my parents thought a reader like me could use a desk. So, in the night, they came and carried out the radio to put in the desk. My books fell on the floor like original sin. The beginning of my fourteenth year was not a happy one – my delights confiscated. As I walked about the house, I felt as if I had been exiled to an obscure, but Lutheran, Elba. I knew then, I’d never fit into a desk job.
Later I found the books in my father’s own secret cave, up in the ceiling boards of the basement. So, I had another, though not public, lending library.
Maybe the books were like the radio – something in them so beautiful, my father could not throw them away.
4. Best Meal Ever
Right after WWII. I’ve just started high school. My mother away, at last able to visit her mother in Sweden. So sometimes I’d meet my father for lunch.
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.
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.
A footnote from 2026. It is hard for me to believe that I wrote the poem above more than thirty years or that now I am more than thirty years older than my father when he died. As the King of Siam said, “It’s a puzzlement.” I say that about more and more, “It’s a puzzlement.”