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| Image by Jo Justino from Pixabay |
Letters of eclectic commentary featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, an auditory hallucination and charming literary device.
"Ward..." (pause) "Don't you think you're being a bit hard on the Beaver?"
-June Cleaver
Dear Gentlereaders,
Reminiscences (say that word six times fast) of a garrulous geezer.
My first memory. It's late August 1953 and I'm a newborn in Mercy Hospital's nursery surrounded by other newborns. I have no sense of myself other than being a point of awareness surrounded by other points of awareness. I remember thinking that the lights were too bright.
{Somehow I doubt that.}
Me too, Dana, but although vague and fuzzy, the memory persists.
WW2 had ended only eight years previously but as I grew up, from my perspective and that of my peers, the deadliest war in human history had occurred in a far distant past. My old man was in the service but never saw combat. I had uncles who did, but I never heard them talk about it.
We're now aware that many combat veterans came home with PTSD. Being members of the Greatest Generation most just "walked it off" as best they could and set about playing their part in the unprecedented economic boom my fellow Boomers and I grew up taking for granted.
Many Boomers still do, and are oblivious/indifferent to the current economic plight of the many, perhaps most, of the three generations that have followed them
The Korean War ended the month before I was born and although I'm certain I heard about it before I saw the movie that came out in 1970, that's the first time I can remember being really aware of it.
I was very aware of a war that the US had gotten itself entangled in, the one in Vietnam that had been going on long before we got there (officially at least). This was because I was in high school at the time and facing the possibility I might be drafted after graduating.
In fact, the possibility of being killed or crippled in Vietnam — which from what I could tell at the time, and have since confirmed, was a well-meaning, deadly blunder of a war on America's part — crossed my mind quite often.
For the record, the military draft effectively ended in 1971, the year I graduated; I dodged the bullet, so to speak. Roughly 200,000 of "my fellow Americans" did not. According to statista.com 58,220 were killed, and 153,303 were wounded.
My big brother, Eddie then, Ed now, wasn't there (officially at least) in the early sixties.
Lessons (I eventually) learned:
Never underestimate the power of dumb luck.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -not Leon Trotsky
{I don't think you're allowed to use the word crippled nowadays.}
Obviously you've never heard of the Grumpy Cripple.
I was brought home from Mercy Hospital, which is still there and has roots reaching back to 1843 to my first home (that I have no memory of, on Marion Street) in the Pittsburgh neighborhood we shared, which according to Wikipedia is called Uptown. This neighborhood wasn't, and isn't, up-scale, and has a number of AKAs: da Bluff, Soho, and Boyd's Hill.
Da (Pittsburghese for the) Bluff is the only name I was aware of as a kid. This was the first of the four houses I lived in within Pittsburgh's city limits by the time I was 16 at which point we moved to the 'burbs.
The Wikipedia article titled Uptown Pittsburgh (linked to above) contains the following passage, "...a residential community that was once flourishing during the first half of the 20th century." This is not quite accurate.
{Mistakes in Wikipedia!?!}
Along with most of Pittsburgh — with some notable exceptions like the Hill District next door to da Bluff which was flourishing in its own way till an urban renewal scheme destroyed it in order to save it from itself — was "flourishing" till the late '70s when the steel industry collapsed and the poop hit the fan.
Nowadays I'm prone to say the excrement hit the air conditioner, or the climate control system. Back then, I didn't personally know of anyone who had an air conditioner, or even a color TV come to think of it. But I don't wish to give a false impression, we didn't live in a ghetto of some sort.
We had electric fans, and I knew of several people who had their "good" furniture in their "front room" sealed in hot, noisy but effective plastic slipcovers. Some people bought a cheap, tri-colored plastic screen that you could stick on your black and white TV and pretend it was a color TV.
{Four different houses?}
Ed, Reda (no, that's not a misspelling), and their seven kids had to occasionally engage in some... um...creative geographic/financial maneuvering to keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered. There had been other houses before I came along.
My second home, which was literally perched on the edge of da Bluff, was on the Boulevard of the Allies (near Marion Street) and overlooked the Monongahela River.
{Right. I think your poetic license should be revoked.}
Well, the house is no longer there, in fact, the entire block of homes has been erased and replaced by an expanded Mercy Hospital, but the rest — Boulevard of the Allies, Monongahela River — can be easily verified by a bit-o'-googlin'.
In retrospect, I had a very cool life till we moved across the semi-mighty Monongahela to the Sou'sidah Pittsburgh the summer before third grade. Not that it suddenly turned awful. Things just got a, um, little more real? A prelude to life in the real world?
I had no idea how lucky I was back then but I do now. In my defense, me and mine were subject to periodic outbreaks of Day Late Dollar Short Syndrome which often prevented me from living the life I thought I was entitled to. Yet somehow, I survived with a minimum of psychological damage.
While I didn't resent my parents for this state of affairs, still don't, I had absolutely no appreciation of how hard they worked to give their kids the best possible life under the circumstances, I took it for granted, completely oblivious to what I now realize they must have gone through.
I have no memory of either one ever pointing out that compared to living through the Great Depression or WW2 we had it made. I thought it was fun when we had fried potatoes and sunny-side-up eggs for dinner the night before payday. I thought that being assigned toaster duty and making piles of toast with a cheap two-slice toaster, out of bread that was more air than bread for egg yolk dipping, was also fun.
I took it for granted, and didn't really appreciate till decades later, that although at our peak there were nine of us at home my mom kept our extremely humble abodes clean and organized with minimal help from her husband or sons.
Sorry, mum. While I'm at it, permit me to apologize to my three sisters, who were also expected to do their share of "woman's work."
In my defense again, if there were meetings of a secret society of toxic men, I was never invited, I suspect that for most men, and women, this was just the way things were at the time, the result of multiple millennia of H. sapiens lives happening to them while they were dreaming dreams and making other plans.
Well, I'm exceeding the word limit and...
{Wait-wait-wait! I've got questions, Sparky. First, what's with the warm and fuzzy Illustration up top there? Second, what's with the h at the end of Pittsburgh? Finally, what was so "cool" about being a working-class kid living on da Bluff in the 1950s in a household where there was often not quite enough money?}
I'll answer the first two questions, but I'm saving the last one for next time, stay tuned.
The watercolor illustration above immediately made me think of my grade school textbooks when I came across it.
I was lucky enough to be a child at the tail end of an era when it was possible to be a kid in an America that still believed in itself, and believed that kids should be sheltered from the real world as much as possible and for as long as possible.
Details next time, sta...
{Yeah, yeah, stay tuned.}
Suffice it to say that even as a kid I would've found the pictured parents unrealistic, they're not even smoking. They don't have bags under their eyes, and they remind me of Ward and June Cleaver. But I would've been certain that someone's parents looked like that in the morning, and that someday, me and my beautiful wife would look like that in the morning.
As for the h, pure serendipity. I remember being taught that while there was more than one Pittsburg in America, the one that I lived in was the only one spelled with an h at the end, which to this day, pleases me for no logically defensible reason. It turns out this is not technically true, but it's my truth, and I'm stickin' with it.
Speaking of truth, urbanDICTIONARY.com defines my truth, an oft-used phrase nowadays, thusly: "Bullshit, a 'Lie.' Often associated with people who are not telling the truth, when they have no defense to back themselves up. Often the choice of words when a horrible liar is confronted with their own stupidity."
Technically, I couldn't agree more.
Colonel Cranky
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