My humble harvest

   Tomatoes, two kinds.  Peppers, two kinds.  Sweet basil, Texas tarragon, and thyme.  

Shoe Shine

   My in-laws moved out of their condo in Wellesley, shipping out to California the things they wanted most, or at least the things their new place would hold.  What they left behind:  dishes, pots and pans, enough wine glasses to host a good-sized reception, several bottles of vodka from Russia – gifts from visiting physicists, a fishing rod that breaks down into several pieces and fits inside a metal tube with a sturdy screw-cap and shoulder strap, sheets and blankets, clothes, cleaning supplies, extra light bulbs, an old vacuum cleaner, sake dispensers, a cane my father-in-law should be using but won’t, glass coffee tables, wooden end tables, two sofas, a dining room table and chairs, more dishes, more cleaning supplies, more glasses, a frozen pepperoni pizza, two frozen dinners of macaroni and cheese, a bottle of Budweiser, several bottles of Boylan’s root beer, many plastic bottles of water long past their use-by dates, a wooden box with my father-in-law’s shoe polish supplies, and so on, and so on.

We are keeping some of these things, which will come in handy.  Like the sofas and dining room set, which are an upgrade for the basement/poker room.  And the root beer.  And the dishes and pots and pans, which the girls can use when they get those first apartments.  And, I decided on a whim, the box of shoe polish supplies.  

My father used to shine his shoes.  Like a lot of things, he taught his boys how to do it.  I can’t recall the last time I shined my shoes.  The style of black loafers I wore for years seemed to hold a shine good enough until the shoes wore out.  Now I’ve got some lace-up shoes that seemed scuffed within days after I bought them.  And so, this past Sunday afternoon, I pulled out my father-in-law’s wooden box of supplies, popped open an old tin of black shoe polish, and went at it – pulling one of the old socks over my hand, working my fingertips into the dried polish until it started to feel like firm butter, rubbing it onto my shoes, then letting them sit for a little while before buffing them with a clean rag.  A quick little satisfying job.    

I’ll keep the box of shoe polish.  I’m making my way through the vodka.  Maybe one day I’ll even catch a fish with that old pole.  These things are meant to be used.   

The day after I polished my shoes -- not coincidentally -- I left on a quick business trip to southern California, including meetings in Gardena and Anaheim.  Gardena is where my wife’s grandparents lived.  I met the grandmother once -- still living in Gardena, I think -- after we got engaged.  She was old, very old, and had reverted to speaking very little English by that time.  She pressed my hand and kept saying, “I’m so glad.  I’m so glad.”  Happy that her little granddaughter had found a husband. 

   That was twenty-five years ago.  My wife’s grandmother is long gone.  My wife’s father is eighty-eight now and will, we think, be gone before too long.  It seems like a good thing that on my brief return to Gardena, I had a little of his polish on my shoes.

Time Machine

   I love the fact that my girls enjoy going to Vermont.  They are happy to visit their cousins or, if they’re just with me, to ramble this way and that among the small towns and back roads.  The like hearing some – but not too much – about what it was like to grow up there. 

   These days, when we visit, we like to stop in Bellows Falls for a hot dog at Fat Frank’s or a cone at the Dairy Joy.  Or both. 

   I’ve shown them the old train station in Bellows Falls, where I used to catch the train to and from college.  But I can’t really say what that was like:  standing in the old station at midnight with my father, waiting for the train to come at 12:15 in the morning, feeling badly that he would have a short night before a hard day’s work.  Watching the simple old man who manned the station grab for his cap and holler out that the train was a-comin’ when he saw the headlight appear up by the dam. 

   Coming home was worse.  I got the train home at 30th Street Station in Philly, watching out the window as we rolled past the boat-houses on the Schuylkill, adorned with strings of white lights.  I would wait and look for the big letters on the bridge that say “Trenton Makes - The World Takes” and wonder how long they have been there.  Then, after Trenton, I would settle in, flipping on the overhead light and rummaging in my knapsack for whatever I was reading at the time and one of the candy bars I had bought at 30th Street.  Reading until New York.  Then resting while they changed engines at Penn Station.

  If the train was quiet, and I wasn't stuck sitting near the café car, I usually could be asleep soon after midnight and New Haven, stirring every once in a while to lift a gritty eyelid and check our progress north.  Sliding through the change at Springfield, where it seemed we always hit the cold, then following the Connecticut River north like a ragged string of wild geese.

  If you rode that train back in the day you know about the moonlight on the snowy hills and the forests in the night; about the cigarette smoke that lingered in the air about the car; about the good feeling you had about the conductors, knowing they would keep track of your stop and make sure you didn’t sleep through it.

   And then, finally, the train pulled slowly in to Bellows Falls and it was time to get off.

   The train was like a time machine that had brought me back to the cold night air of Vermont.  My father, standing by the Volkswagen, its little motor running, under a street light in the lot across the tracks.  The whistle blowing as the train pulls through the crossing up by the dam as I stand there for a moment with my bags, looking into the only past I’ll ever have.

Great Eastern

      This is what learning to ski looked like, circa 1970.  We started in the back yard, before progressing to the sloping edges of our neighbor’s field, and then the so-called Pinnacle – a hill on the edge of town with a rope tow that the town maintained.  Long gone, I’m sad to say. 

   When we were ready for a real mountain, my father would wake us before daylight and strap our skis and poles to the top of the car while we ate a hurried breakfast and stuffed ourselves into our warmest clothes.  We piled into one of our old Volkswagen beetles and drove all the way north to Killington East – over an hour away – to be standing first in line for the gondola when it whirred into motion a few minutes before eight o'clock.  Back then there was free skiing from eight until nine, which made the mountain briefly accessible for Vermonters like us who lived in the back yard of the fine ski areas but could not afford the lift tickets.

   We rode the gondola up over endless evergreens and exposed boulders, the trees at the top thick and white with frozen frost.  We strapped on our skis and trudged to the head of the Great Eastern, a single, five-mile trail that wound all the down to the bottom of the valley.

   There is much to remember about those runs.  The swell of anticipation as we struggled into our bindings in the frigid air at the top.  The nervous turns through tight, icy corners.  The elation of bombing down the straight-aways.  The itch of your forehead inside the wool cap.  The sigh of reaching the last pitch at the bottom, knowing it was a few minutes past nine, and time already for the long ride home.  Except for that one, impossible morning when we reached the lift line again at eight fifty-five and went around again, clambering into the gondola for a second run, as happy as bank robbers who have made the state line.

   The ride home is as memorable to me as the skiing.  Pulling our thick-socked feet out of our old lace-up boots, slowly squeezing the prickly burn of mild frostbite from our toes.  Stopping at a corner store for candy bars.  A Charleston Chew for me, because they lasted the longest.

   Although I remember them now as happy mornings, I felt bad, for a time, in recalling them.  I felt bad for myself, and for my father, that he didn’t have the money to buy us lift tickets.  It seemed pitiful, in hindsight, driving for hours to snatch an hour of free skiing, when others drove in leisurely at nine-thirty to spend the day, taking our parking spot as we left. 

   But then I got old enough now to know better, and to look back on those mornings with an unequivocal smile.  The gondola ride and the skiing – however brief – were pure joy.  And I had a father who was willing to get up in the cold dark of a Vermont winter morning to take us there.