My father was a brilliant man in many ways. He was a Harvard grad, Class of ’52… a PhD in water chemistry who went to work at Bell Labs, where he worked to develop batteries that would launch this country’s first communications satellite, Telstar. And for 34 years he was a Professor of Water Chemistry & Environmental Health and the Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.
Like I said, a brilliant man in many ways.
But as far as being one of those sensitive and emotionally intelligent people that put a lot of thought into their gift buying… well, let’s just say he was more the type of person from whom you’d hope to receive a Visa Gift Card.
A Trip to Sears
When I was a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, I remember my father asking me one evening if I wanted to go with him to Sears after dinner. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity. After all, I knew that a trip to Sears with Dad meant two things:
1. A chance to sit on and pretend to drive several different riding lawnmowers.
2. A bag of hot cashews from the stand that was right in the middle of the store on the bottom level.
Good times.
So, we get to Sears, Dad and me, and I head straight for the riding lawnmowers. I’d sit on them, making VROOM sounds, pretending to drive to all sorts of exotic locales.
Remember that part of Forrest Gump when even though he’s already a zillionaire, he goes back home and the City Fathers give him “a fine job,” and he’s riding a lawnmower around this field cutting the grass? Yeah, well I understood that part of the movie. I completely agreed… Forrest looked like he did have a fine job there, and one that I might like to have some day too.
Anyway… after a few minutes when my father had run out of patience listening to me making lawnmower engine sounds, he said let’s go and we headed into the store. The smell of hot cashews used to hit you right as you walked in the door of the Sears where I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and both my father and I were huge fans of the toasty warm aromatic nuts.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning that when I was a kid, cashews were not for children. When kids wanted nuts, they got peanuts, exclusively.
There were a few times a year when a can of cashews would find its way onto the shelves of our kitchen cabinet. It meant that my parents were about to have a party for grown-ups… or that my father was about to have his professor friends over to play poker, which he did religiously throughout my childhood. We used to refer to it as “Holy Thursday,” because of its sacrosanct nature, but what I remember most about those nights was the clear message: Don’t even think about touching the cashews in the cabinet.
At Sears, however, it was a different story. We stopped at the stand and Dad got us a small bag of warm cashews before heading off for the guaranteed-to-be-boring part of the excursion, at least as far as I was concerned. When we’d have to actually shop for whatever it was that Dad wanted to buy… the reason we were there, you might say.
Dad explained that Mom’s birthday was the next day, and we were there to buy her a present.
“Let’s get her a board game, Dad,” was the first thing that popped into my young mind.
Well, why not? It wasn’t a bad idea. Plus, it was something I understood and knew I could get some utility from… and heck, I knew Mom would like it quite a bit as well, especially if there was spelling involved. Mom loved to spell things, and she was darn good at it too.
Dad said no, however, he had something else in mind, and we headed on over to the department I dreaded above all others, the “Housewares” department.
Housewares was the section that had the most things I didn’t understand, and I braced myself and took a deep breath, just as I might have done were I about to be placed into solitary confinement while doing hard time on Alcatraz.
We arrived in Housewares and a fat, balding older man who could have played Santa Claus at Christmas if you spotted him a fake beard and some hair, hiked up his polyester slacks by his white belt and waddled towards us. He greeted my father and offered his assistance while simultaneously doing a quick, if unnecessary comb through of his threadlike hair… completely ignoring me, of course.
The Wonder Years…
It was the 1960s, and I was still a member of the class of citizens that when out in public was to be seen, but not heard. Today, we treat our kids a little differently, and today’s salespeople know all about it. In fact, one year we pretty much let our 8-year-old pick out the family car, which is how I ended up driving a minivan for several years.
I heard my father say something about a chair of some kind… but after that it was pretty much a blur. For a boy my age during the 1960s it was genetically impossible to stay attentive during conversations of such flagrant banality.
Soon my father was focused on a particular chair. It was metal with yellow vinyl, sort of a highchair with steps that slid out from underneath, a feature my father was saying would be highly valued by Mom, who apparently was only 5’3” and couldn’t reach certain things without a step ladder. I hadn’t known about her shortcomings before that day, as she was plenty tall to reach whatever I needed her to reach.
It was probably only a few minutes later, although it seemed a good hour or two to me, and we were paying with Dad’s Sears charge card, and heading back to our station wagon, a 1963 Plymouth, in a sickly hospital green color that my father said he liked, although I didn’t see how that could be possible.
We pulled around to the “Pick-Up” area and there was that aging rotund and balding salesman, this time carrying a decent size box, inside which, I assumed, would be the chair even though the box didn’t seem anywhere near large enough.
As the box went into the back of the wagon, the man told my father that there would be, “some assembly required,” to which my father replied, “Sure, no problem.” Dad seemed happy to hear of it.
Dad’s Toolbox
My Dad owned a small grey metal Craftsman toolbox that he kept in the front hall closet, and it was strictly off limits as far as I was concerned. He’d pull it out any time “some assembly was required,” or whenever some minor repair was required.
Dad faced each job with an air of confidence that said clearly that he was more than capable of handling any job that was thrown his way… and he would handle each job with whatever was in his small grey metal toolbox. It was a toolbox akin to Mary Poppins’ carpetbag, if you remember the movie with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It was as if he might reach in and pull out a belt sander and a table saw, if either was needed to fix whatever was broken.
The problem invariably was that whatever he needed he didn’t have, and whatever he thought he could do, he really couldn’t… at least not in the time he had thought that he could. And if I made the mistake of hanging around too long or standing too close, he’d end up blaming me for whatever wasn’t in his toolbox, growing more frustrated by the minute until he got the job done, which sometimes became a two- or three-day affair.
After the first couple of hours, there was no talking to him, and when the project had finally been completed, he’d sit in front of the fireplace or television set and sip what I later learned was Jack Daniels, but what he used to call “Dry Sherry.”
My father was a Harvard man. And you can tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
As a child of above average intelligence, as soon as we walked in our front door, I shot upstairs to my room, claiming I had homework or that a bath was calling, the sort of tasks that I knew would trump helping Dad assemble the chair… so he went to work alone in the basement to assemble Mom’s big birthday surprise.
Yes, my brilliant, Harvard PhD, college professor father had, for his wife’s birthday. thrown down maybe $29 on a metal stepstool/chair in yellow vinyl from Sears, followed by six or seven hours of assembly work. And he looked and sounded so proud the next evening when he presented his gift to Mom after we had finished her birthday dinner.
Mom had made cupcakes, as she was prone to do on such occasions, and she started to light the little candles, one in each cupcake, except for the one that was for my little sister, Karen, who wasn’t even two years old at the time. To my way of thinking, Karen didn’t qualify as an actual human member of our family… certainly not one deserving of a cupcake all her own.
Mom struck the match, but it failed to light. She tried again… nothing. And that was all the chances Mom got on things like lighting matches. Dad reached out and took them into his much more capable hands. He struck the match… nothing. Mom smiled and looked away, for some reason she seemed pleased at something. The next match was the pressure match and lucky for Dad it was a winner and the candles soon flickered as we sang…
Happy birthday to you… Happy birthday to you… Happy birthday dear Mommy… Happy birthday to you!
I grunted as Mom gave Karen her candle-less cupcake. “She can’t eat that, she doesn’t even have teeth,” I said with the air of superiority only a seven-year-old older brother can muster.
“She can lick it,” Mom said smiling at the useless drooling infant that had Zwieback toast crumbs all over her face and in her hair.
I looked at the thing they called my sister thinking, “Enjoy that, you little parasite, because later, when no one is looking, I’ll drag you down the stairs by your hair,” or at least the seven-year-old version of that sentiment.
Karen grabbed the cupcake, squished it a little, mashed it icing side down onto her highchair… and promptly threw it straight onto the floor. Yeah, she may have been unable to verbalize much, but I knew she had done that just to torment me.
“Mommmm,” I yelled out as I jumped for the cupcake, hoping against hope that my mother would take leave of her senses and let me eat it off the floor.
No such luck. “Hand it to me,” she said in that voice. And I did, knowing darn well that resistance was futile when Mom used that voice.
With the birthday dining festivities now over, it was time for gifts, so we all followed Dad into the kitchen to examine Mom’s birthday gift. And there it was… that glorious yellow vinyl and metal, half highchair, half stepstool… sitting poised for action… right in front of the sink. Dad had staged the presentation to add drama to the moment.
You see, as I was about to learn, Mom had been complaining that she was always standing over the sink washing dishes, and so my father caught the hint and figured out that the ideal birthday gift would be a chair high enough so that she could SIT while washing the dishes, the stepstool functionality being an unanticipated bonus.
“Oh, look at that,” Mom exclaimed.
Now, even at seven years old I was sensing something in her voice that told me danger had just entered the room. It felt like the temperature dropped by 20 degrees… like, all of a sudden you could see your breath in our kitchen.
Dad, however, was oblivious, explaining every single one of the chair’s highly valued features and functions. “And I bought it at Sears,” he explained as part of his wrap-up. “So, if anything goes wrong, we can return it and they’ll give us a new one.”
Dad absolutely adored that about Sears. He even bought his sport jackets at Sears when they would go on sale, of course, and I grew up assuming it was for the same reason… Sears’ famous return anything anytime policy.
“Isn’t that something,” Mom said. She picked up a large kitchen knife, and then for no apparent reason, set it down gingerly.
“Well, thank you Julian,” she said in a voice that I would one day learn to call sarcastic. “That was very considerate of you.” Being a mom of the mid-1960s, she was always gracious. It was as if she liked everything. Like, she would have said thank you if someone served her a bowl of dirt.
“I wanted to get you a board game,” I proclaimed. Mom smiled. “And that would have been quite nice as well,” she replied. “But I only want you to make me something.” Mom always wanted me to make her something for her birthday, and of course I did it every year.
And that was it… Mom’s birthday was over for another year.
I knew not to ask her how old she was. I had learned the hard way the year before that a young man doesn’t ask a lady that question. So, I just gave her a kiss on her cheek, said Happy Birthday Mom, and ran up to my room to watch black & white T.V. until someone yelled… “Turn off the T.V. please,” after which I fell asleep dreaming of warm cashews and riding lawnmowers.
About a week had passed when one day after school, I heard the doorbell, and ran to see who was there. A very large truck was parked right in front of our house. On the side it read, “Sears Appliances,” or something like that.
“Mommmmm,” I called out. “It’s a man in a truck from Sears.”
She came out in her apron, admonishing me for yelling for her in front of an adult, and then in her sweet-as-pie voice said, “Oh, hello, yes please, come in,” to the man in the Sears uniform.
And two hours later a brand-new dishwasher was installed in our kitchen… a Kenmore, of course.
Inexplicably, Mom made cupcakes again that night. It was highly unusual as it wasn’t anyone’s birthday, and this time she even let me have the bowl of icing to lick and scrape. She was unusually happy, although I had no idea why.
After desert, we all followed Mom into the kitchen where she started explaining the many features and functionalities of our new Kenmore dishwasher.
Dad listened, his smiles were strained, and I was sensing his patience was running thin. Then, abruptly… and right in the middle of Mom’s Kenmore presentation that I was more than happy to watch, he said: “Okay, are you finished? I’ve got some work to do.”
And with that he turned, left the kitchen, and headed towards the stairs, climbing them two at a time to the second floor where he entered his study… his safe room, if you will.
Mom, however, was undaunted. She kept going on about the Kenmore dishwasher, transitioning into a singing voice that got louder as Dad left the room and started up the stairs. Mom sang twirled around as if she were Doris Day playing a housewife in a movie, and I thought I recognized the melody… it was reminiscent of “Home on the Range.”
“And because it’s from Sears…
We should all have no fears…
If it breaks, it can sure be returned.
~~~
‘Cause it does not compare…
To a stepstool or chair…
That’s a fact that I think we’ve all learned.
~~~
Home, home it can change.
Some things have become quite passé…
If you’re tired of a chore, then go get a Kenmore,
And you’ll have a much better birthday.
Seconds later we heard the door to Dad’s study close a bit harder than usual. Mom walked back into the kitchen humming and on her way to loading the new dishwasher… and without saying a word… she set a second cupcake topped with icing right in front of me. Intuitively I knew, as I stared at the icing on my cupcake, that there was no reason to ask any questions.
It would be many years before I had any real appreciation for what had gone on that year. It was the year Mom had two birthdays. It was the year my father had stared death in the face… and lived.
Yes, he was the Harvard man, the brilliant college professor… the breadwinner of our family… the owner of the tools who never shirked his duty when “some assembly was required”… the one who always sat behind the wheel and got us to our destination… who lit matches when we couldn’t… our very own patriarch who kept our family safe from harm and checked us into Howard Johnson’s when driving long distances and needed to sleep…
But make no mistake about it, that evening back in the 1960’s… Mom let him live.
She let him off the hook with a song about a Kenmore dishwasher from Sears… a song that sounded a lot like “Home on the Range,” but said something entirely different. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think Mom’s song said things that moms all over America had been thinking for many, many years.
Now that I’m all grown up, I understand that for my father, a blow to the back of the head with a shovel would have been much less painful… and healed a heck of a lot faster. My Dad was a really smart guy, but Mom was smart too… and she was a really good teacher.
That yellow vinyl and metal chair/stepstool from Sears remained in our basement for the next 40 years. I’d see it every time I went down to the basement, sitting right in front of an old sink that was never used. Mom was never one to throw important things like that away.
Dad’s gone now, but I’m still learning from him all the time.
Mandelman out.
Other Mandelman Matters posts you may like:
Cancelling Culture, By Dr. Seuss
Why Don’t More Retirees Know About a HECM-for-Purchase?
Homeowners are Happy About Higher Home Values. So are Debt Collectors.
