Magic in the Air

Rather than to clutter up your page with any long drawn-out intro, I’m gonna get strait to the point and explain today’s illustration. It depicts an incident that transpired during the summer following my stint in Miss Dyer’s fourth grade class at the Horace Mann.

For thirty-three years, my dad worked as the truck mechanic at Tufts University in Medford. He often came home with interesting odds and ends that either somebody gave him, or that he found in the dumpster. I know that doesn’t sound very complimenting, but it’s true. My dad was a dumpster diver.

Maybe I should explain that. Because they so often had to travel lightly, students threw away all kinds of neat things at the end of each semester when they moved back home. Over the years my bedroom filled up with stuff that he brought home from the dumpster, including my first stereo record player, my drawing desk, and a shoeshine box.

Oh, the shoeshine box, I almost forgot about that. Let me tell you that one first. It was a well-crafted wooden box on legs that sported a built-in footrest on the lid. Opening the lid revealed a plethora of shoe shining supplies inside, like polish, brushes, rags, and etc. It didn’t interest me in the least, but my brother, Carl, went mental over it.

Because Carl suffered with Grand Mall Epilepsy, he couldn’t commit to the rigors of anything that required a daily commitment, such as a paper route and such. Even so, there were some things about Carl’s personality that set he and I at opposite ends of the character spectrum.

For starters, Carl was so neat and clean that I swear this kid glistened in the sunlight. You’d never catch him playing “Rough-N-Tumble” down Glendale Park because of the grass stains you’d get on the knees of your dungarees. He insisted that my mother iron all of his clothes so he could hang them up uniformly in the closet. And he even folded his underwear neatly when he put them away in his drawer.

As for me, when I got undressed I did not fold my clothes neatly or hang them up in the closet. I flung them under my bed so I’d know where they were in the morning. Hey, I was a typical boy. Gimmie a break, huh? I’ve got more important things to tend to than to get all bogged down with cleanliness. I leave that kind of nonsense to the grownups.

So anyway, that shoeshine kit was right up Carl’s alley. Me and Billy got a big boot out of how excited Carl got over that silly contraption. As soon as he laid eyes on it he shouted out, “I hosie that!”

As if either Billy, or I, would even bother with something like that, but since we’re Everett kids, we’d never pass up a golden opportunity to bust them a little bit. So naturally, Billy and I started yelling, “Hey, what about me? Don’t I get a shot at it?”

If looks could kill, Billy and I would have dropped right there on the spot. Carl pointed at me and screamed, “You already have a paper route. This is my opportunity to make it big.” That’s all we had to hear. Billy and I doubled over in our chairs. I laughed so hard that I cried.

After spending hours on end systematically reorganizing its contents, Carl sat down at the kitchen table flowcharting his marketing strategy. He thought of everything, including a SWOT analysis. My dad, being the kind hearted soul that was, sat there for almost an hour and courteously listened to Carl explain how he was gonna make a million bucks with that stupid shoe shining kit.

Here’s Carl’s line of reasoning. During the lunch hour in Everett Square you’d see many a well-dressed professional, like a banker, or an insurance agent, and even a real-estate broker, crossing back and forth across Norwood, Chelsea, and Broadway to do lunch. That was his golden opportunity to rid these people of the pitfalls associated with walking back and forth through heavy traffic. Let’s face it, who’s gonna deposit money in your bank, or buy a house from you, if you’re wearing dusty shoes?

Carl wasn’t limited to just the lunch hour. He could also cash in on the windfall awaiting him every morning at any given bus stop. After all, who wants to show up for work in dirty shoes?

And then there’s the teenagers who hung out in front of Tee Gees, across from Angelino’s, and down at the corner of Ferry and Elm at the front of Glendale Park. Hey, I hope you don’t expect to score a chick if you’re wearing dirty shoes. First impressions mean everything. You know what I’m sayin?

Sure enough, on the very next morning as I coasted down Broadway delivering newspapers, I caught a glimpse of Carl hobbling back and forth between the bus stops peddling his services. I’ve got to hand it to him; he was hustling.

We’re talking some forty-five years ago when I had real teeth and could curl up my bottom lip to let out an ear-piercing whistle. When I did, he looked back at me with this really stern gaze and shouted, “Don’t bother me right now. I’m working!” Well, excuse me – right?

Come Saturday morning when I got back home after collecting from my paper route, I found Carl sitting at the kitchen table tabulating his windfall. You can laugh if you want to, but this kid pulled in Sixteen dollars after expenses. Not a bad take for a thirteen year-old kid back in 1962 - let me tell ya.

Granted, he had to hustle his tail feathers off to make it happen, but he did it just the same. He thought I was just blowing smoke when I complimented him for his efforts, but in all sincerity, I was impressed.

Look at it this way. Here’s a kid struggling with a debilitating disability and yet he set out on a cold calling marketing scheme and made it work. You’ve got to hand it to him. The kid’s got spunk.

Carl’s little business venture only lasted a week or two. The amount of hustle it took to keep the dream alive proved to be too much for him. He started having more seizures because of it. As disappointed as he was over having to give that up, he certainly gained a sense of accomplishment and pride for having successfully pulled it off. In the process, he made many a new acquaintance amongst Everett’s business community.

Some guy would call out and wave to him so I’d ask, “Who in the heck is that?” Carl would beam and say, “Oh, he’s the Councilman from Ward 4,” or “He’s the manager at Gorin’s.” After his shoe shining venture, it seemed like Carl knew everybody on the Everett Who’s Who list.

So what has all that got to do with today’s illustration? Absolutely nothing. That’s just me going off on another tangent as I so commonly do. It’s like I often say that one memory always invokes another and if I don’t tell it to you when it comes to mind I may forget it altogether.

Oh yeah, now I remember. That shoe shining kit was one of the many things that my dad brought home from his job at Tufts. So the story that relates to today’s illustration has to do with something else that my dad brought home from his job at Tufts.

Now you want to talk about something really cool? Okay then. Let me tell you about the most incredible Indian Rubber ball I’ve ever owned. And the clincher is that I only owned it for three days out of my entire life, thanks to old lady Coolin. Even still, that Indian Rubber ball remains so vividly lodged in the forefront of my mind’s eye.

We’re smack dab in the middle of summer. What that means is that as soon as I finish delivering my newspapers, the rest of the day belongs to me. There’s no pencils, no books, and no more teacher’s dirty looks to spoil my day. We’re free to play “hide-and-go-seek,” “you can’t cross the river,” and “Off the Wall,” until the streetlights come on.

Our only interruptions are when somebody yells, “Car’s coming,” or when your mother calls you in for supper, or when the ice cream truck comes jingle jangling down the street. Other than that, we rule the sidewalks of Everett.

Take an afternoon stroll through any one of our neighborhoods and you’ll see what I mean. Peek into the very first corner candy store you come to and ten to one you’ll see a half a dozen kids hemming and hawing over all the candy with their faces pressed right up against the glass.

“I’ll take one of those, and one of those, and two of those funny looking things behind the Mint Juleps.” Funny thing is, they rarely had any more than a few pennies to spend, but that was all it took back then to curb that sweet tooth. Seconds later they’d be sitting side by side at the edge of the curb divvying it all up. “There’s one for me and one for you. And one for me and one for you.”

Just a few doors down you’ll come across a half a dozen kids pitching baseball cards up against a wall. And don’t forget, a “leany” doesn’t necessarily mean that the fat lady sings. With a good flick of the wrist that sucker’s just asking to be knocked down.

Up on the next porch you’ll find a couple of little girls putting their dollies to bed before settling down to a cup of tea and a heartfelt gab about how that useless man of theirs doesn’t appreciate all the housework that they do. And in the driveway after that you’ll find a couple of bigger girls engaged in one of the most death defying feats of physical endurance I’ve ever seen in my life.

If you think “rough n tumble” gets nasty, just get a load of these girls jumping rope. I’ve watched these girls make moves that would shame a Harlem Globe Trotter. Have you ever sat and watched what they actually do?

They get two ropes going in opposite directions at break neck speeds. Then they just jump right into the middle of it with this innocent looking grin as they so nonchalantly skip back and forth singing a song they made up to the rhythm of the spinning rope. Gimme a break – right?

And when they looked back and asked, “You want to give it a try, Paul?” I just smirked back at them and said, “I don’t do that cuz I’m a guy.” The truth is, I can’t do that because I’m a guy. There are just some things that only girls can do. Just for starters, they can tell when you’re lying by just looking at your eyes. Guys can’t do that. Guys only know how to lie.

What guys are really good at is “stick ball.” Yeah, now your talking “guy” language. We’ve got more variations of Baseball than you can shake a stick at. We’ve got “Punchball,” “Homerun Derby.” “Off the Wall,” and “Off the Curb,” just to name a few.

Most times we play with one of those pink rubber balls you get down at the corner store for a nickel. We prefer the “pimple” ball, but that costs a dime. Losing a five-cent “pink” ball down a sewer, or up on a roof, really sucks, but it absolutely breaks the bank when you lose a ten-cent pimple ball. That’s why we cut them in half to play “Half Ball.”

It’s almost impossible to whack a half of a pimple ball out into the traffic on Ferry Street. The furthest it ever goes is about three or four parked car lengths even if you do get a really good piece of it.

You cannot play “Off the Wall,” “Off the Curb,” or “Off the Steps” with a half of a ball. It just won’t work. No, we’ve never tried. We didn’t have to. There are just some things in life that are a given. That’s one of them.

The Storm Shield factory at the bottom end of Arlington Street was perfect for a game of “Off-The-Wall.” Their solid brick wall was opposite to the entrance of the driveway to my six-family house. If the ball cleared the sidewalk and bounced into the driveway then you scored a homerun. And believe me when I tell ya, it was not all that easy to do.

Those rubber balls we got at the corner store were fickle little things. You sometimes got one that was a little low on air so it had a poor “bounce value.” That’s why we’d stand there for fifteen minutes or so squeezing them before we picked one out. That was especially so if we were gonna drop a whole dime for a “pimple” ball.

So anyway, the whole neighborhood lit up when my dad came home from work. You could hear him a mile away because he always had the oldest and noisiest clunker in the whole neighborhood. As soon as he pulled into the driveway, all of the neighborhood kids hopped up on the hood of his car and rode the rest of the way into the backyard. It was probably no more than about a five-yard ride, but we did it anyway.

On this one particular afternoon when he got out of the car he threw me a brown paper bag and said, “See if there’s anything you kids can use in there.” We all crowded around and started pawing through the bag. Stanley pulled out a tennis racket. Joey found one of those little sidewalk rockets that you put a cap in. And at the bottom of the bag, I found a very hard gray rubber ball.

At first I thought it was of little value because it was so hard, but when I accidentally dropped it, it bounced way up over my head. “Did you see that? Hey, watch this.”

With very little effort I could make it bounce up over the telephone wires. This thing was amazing. Right from the very start I knew I was going to lose that ball before very long. It bounced so high that it was bound to wind up on a roof somewhere. I could see it coming. We spent the better part of that night taking turns bouncing it up over the telephone wires.

Stanley’s house was just on the other side of the driveway from my house. I always envied him because they lived in a single-family house. Can you imagine? How lucky can you get?

For a skinny little kid, Stanley had an arm on him that was beyond belief. When he pitched one in you swung on intuition. There’s no way you were actually gonna see the ball pass you by. And nine times out of ten you’d whiff his pitch. He was that good.

So on the second night that I owned that Indian Rubber ball, Stanley wanted to see how far he could make it fly when he bounced it off the steps in front of his house. I was a little leery because it was already dark, the streetlights were on, and knowing him, I was sure that ball was going to wind up somewhere near the Sea of Tranquility on the light side of the moon. He did it anyway.

Needless to say, his pitch was flawless and that ball sailed way up into the night sky. It completely cleared the entire Storm Shield factory and bounced its first bounce somewhere in the middle of Villa Ave. By the time we rounded the corner onto Ferry we caught sight of it bouncing down the middle of the street towards Spencer’s. It disappeared somewhere in the thicket in that empty lot behind Spencer’s near the chain link fence to the Hamilton School.

You talk about looking for a needle in a haystack? We combed through all the thorns and burrs looking for that ball in the dark. Then all of a sudden the sky lit up like daybreak. What looked like a giant star flashed in the darkened sky. It lasted no longer than a streak of lightning, but it was just as bright.

It looked like a huge four-point star with a golden ring around it. God only knows what it was, but it certainly freaked us out. We saw little use in ever telling anybody about it. Nobody would believe us anyway.

We did find my Indian Rubber ball. Joey spotted it while we were coming back out from behind Spencer’s. It was resting right there on top of an old, rusty, and empty oil drum. Go figure.

On the third and last day that I owned that super ball, we were out playing off the wall against the Storm Shield building. When it was my turn up at bat, I pulled that Indian Rubber ball out of my back pocket. I was determined to pull ahead in this game. Little did I know that I was only seconds away from losing sight of that ball forever.

Winding up, I slammed that thing against the wall with all of my might. It sailed clear over everybody’s head and cleared the entire driveway. It never did touch down. Instead, it sailed clear through old lady Coolin’s living room window, smashing not only the windowpane, but also her decorative table lamp in the process.

She stepped out onto her little front porch cradling that ball between her thumb and forefinger. “Take a good look, Paul,” she shouted. “You’ll never see this ball again in your lifetime.” She was right. I never ever caught sight of that ball again.

Looking back on all of this certainly amazes me at how fast the best years of our lives so quickly passed us by. They often said, “Don’t go wishing your life away.” Now I know what they mean.

In no way are the most precious moments of our lives those times when something spectacular happened. It’s usually those common incidentals that so nonchalantly take place that you first give little notice of. Only years later because that supposedly non-sensational moment remains in the forefront of your mind’s eye do you realize how precious that moment actually was.

We’ve experienced literally hundreds of such moments in our lifetime. We were so lucky to grow up at a time, and in a place, that was so ideal for a kid to grow up. That is especially true for us because – “We’re from Everett!”