Memories

‘Two of One Kind’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


This is the story that moved me the most today. Clara Gantt of Los Angeles, 94 years old, accepted the remains of her husband on Friday at Los Angeles International Airport, a short time after learning that he had in fact died in 1951 as a prisoner of war in North Korea. That country has slowly, so slowly, begun to release information about and even the mortal remains of battlefield dead and dead POWs to its sworn enemy, the United States.

Mrs. Gantt’s final contact from her husband was a Christmastime letter sent from the front at the end of 1950. Shortly after, historians now know, he was taken prisoner on the battlefield and died in Korean custody. They had only been married for two years, or 65, depending on whether one asks Mrs. Gantt.

Her dedication to the memory of her late husband was such that she refused to consider him her late husband until this year, when she learned that the government had received remains from North Korea and positively identified them as Sgt. Joseph Gantt. She told reporters that even when she was able to purchase a house for herself in the 1960s, she also hired a gardener to tend it, since she knew he did not like yard work and she wanted him feel free to do whatever he liked when he returned home from the war.

From the Los Angeles Times story: “During the last 63 years, no one else caught Clara Gantt’s fancy as she waited for news of her husband. She told the base officials assigned to check wives’ homes for other men to come by anytime, (as) they’d never catch her with anyone.

“‘I am very, very proud of him. He was a wonderful husband, an understanding man,’ she told reporters at the airport. ‘I always did love my husband, we was two of one kind, we loved each other. And that made our marriage complete.'”

Widow, 94, Receives Remains of Fallen Husband

I learned about that kind of enduring love from my grandparents. Eighteen years ago this month, William Aldrich died, aged 91. Bill and Edith (Pearson) Aldrich were married for 64 years. I asked my grandmother if she could recall how they met. “How did we meet? I don’t think I remember,” she said and looked at her sister-in-law, my great-aunt June, and repeated my question.”What did we do?” she asked. June brightened, “We danced.”

“I guess we danced,” my grandmother nodded and looked at me. The two of them held hands and repeated, “We danced.”

Edith Aldrich had a gift that the widow in Los Angeles did not receive: She saw her husband every day for 64 years. But both love stories are priceless.

As they grew old and then older, my grandparent’s life became that “complete” marriage. In their small Vermont hill town, the mail was delivered twice a day to the country store. My grandfather would march down the hill, cross highway 100 and the bridge over the West River, collect the mail and return. Her eyes would follow him every step.

By age 85, he was living with Alzheimer’s and her watchful care included hiding the car keys and having my uncle (and once, me) conceal the lawnmower behind the barn, lest he act on his foggy desire to fix something, anything, and hurt himself. (When I last saw him, age 89, he was still able to bend at the waist and pluck his hated dandelions out of the ground from a standing position, so he remained physically strong till the end.)

My grandmother outlived her beloved Bill by almost 14 years, dying in June 2009 at age 98. One day, years into her widowhood, she and I went for a walk on her road, the same road as the family cemetery, and she mentioned him.

“I miss your grandfather every day,” she told me, as if this was something she had been thinking about. “I’m not interested in joining him just yet, but I know he’s waiting for me.” 

 

Retailizations

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A coffeehouse in France (okay, that right there may be one of the greatest four-word phrases I have ever typed; one almost does not need to continue. Please return from your daydream when you feel up to it) … . A coffeehouse in Nice, France (oh, come on, does this anecdote just keep getting sweeter? The setting may as well be, “A coffeehouse located in Sweet Kisses in Everyone Is Always Smiling Land”) … and, yes, I certainly know that the city’s name is pronounced “neese,’ and not the easy way to a punny joke, but a pun is a pun. 

coffee

Photo from Gawker.com

A coffeehouse in Nice, France, has posted a new price board, seen above and explained in “This Coffeehouse Will Charge You Less if You’re Nice.” If you stride up to the counter and demand a coffee, you will be charged 7€, which is approximately ten bucks and a typographical nightmare. If you say, “Please,” after, you will receive a discount. If you request the coffee and service in the more formal, polite, fashion, you will be charged even less. How great is this?

I worked at several retail jobs spread out over a quarter of a century. (I have also taught college composition, written for newspapers, and written and illustrated technical manuals. Either I have lived an interesting life or a shambling one; these are not mutually exclusive things.) I worked at a bookstore, an electronics retailer, a department store. At each, I desired the power to post a similar sign: a “ten-percent politeness discount on all hardcovers; twenty percent off before 11:00 a.m.,” at the bookstore, say. 

Retail clerks (sales associates, as we are more commonly titled now) occupy a couple different spaces in the average customer’s psyche, it seems. At the bookstore, there were customers who seemed to believe that one of the requirements for employment was that we had read every book in stock, and maybe every copy of each title. Some acted like they saw it as a personal challenge to find out which books I had not read. (At least once, after I had determined that a customer was playing this game, I started to insist that I had not yet read a book–any book–and that I just liked working retail jobs. “I’d like it more if we sold socks,” I told him.)

At the electronics retailer, it was assumed each of us working there was secretly a computer programmer and desktop publisher and ham radio operator who had not yet been discovered and, in our pure-hearted love of working a low-paying retail job as opposed to working as a high-paid consultant, we would/could/should provide professional-level advice for however much we were getting paid. Or for the fee of free.

Both customers are the same, of course, and they have a reasonable desire. Who doesn’t want to discover one’s own personal shopper at every store one walks into? We all want to be insiders. There were many customers at the bookstore with whom I shared great literary conversations and learned to anticipate their next reading needs, and there were many many customers at the electronics retailer.

But if I am your perfect personal shopper, I am probably letting someone else down. (While I was selling furniture at the department store, I had a customer ask me if I thought one couch was more comfortable than another. You know something? Furniture is a surprisingly personal choice. The couch I find comfortable might strike you as high-backed and about as inviting as a bus-station bench.) 

Other customers see the clerks in stores as interchangeable and invisible. Those are the customers the French coffeeshop is addressing. These are the customers who are supremely irked by the fact that a store opens at a certain time and not earlier–when they are there–or in fact has to close at a given hour–again, when they are there. They want to be treated as exceptional and important even as they treat the employees as the equivalent of a store fixture like a shelf or a display. This customer is the only customer who will actually say out loud to a clerk, “The customer is always right.” 

To handle this customer, I learned the “manager trick”: I would anticipate an impending complaint, announce preemptively that I would voluntarily involve the store manager in the conversation, sally forth to the backroom, and conduct the following conversation:

“Hi. Have you heard my chat with so-and-so?”

“Yes. It sounds like you know what to do.”

“I told her (or him) that I would demonstrate sympathy with their side to management, so I am speaking with you now.”

“This is a positive show of solidarity. But you’ll tell them I won’t budge, whatever the conversation is about.”

“Yes. Who are the Yankees playing tonight?”

I would return to the front of the store and repeat what I had been telling the customer all along, but with the added rhetorical support of the manager’s “words.” It usually worked.

It always worked, except once. I stupidly confessed to a friend that I sometimes employed the “manager trick,” and explained what it is, thinking it would amuse him. A few days later, a mutual friend began to negotiate something with me at the store. When I explained that I was going to speak with my manager, he accompanied me step by step to the back of the store. My friend had betrayed my secret.

 

A Christmas Tree Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am sitting in my girlfriend’s office looking at her office Christmas tree. It is white, snow white, like a snowman in a a Rankin/Bass stop-motion cartoon. (Paul Frees would provide the voice.) We will be trimming it in a few moments.

A white Christmas. Photo by Mark Aldrich


I think that tree trimming was my least favorite trimming when I was young. I still lack the eye necessary for decorating a tree correctly; in fact, I believe that almost every tree I have attempted to decorate has been quietly fixed upon my leaving.

(Two things transpired within moments of me writing the above: my girlfriend credited me with expanding her notions of tree decoration–“You’re the first person I’ve seen who does not put all the decorations on the ends of the branches,” which is true, I sometimes place them on the middle or even closer to the trunk; and we found that I had overloaded one section with the same color ornament and we needed to correct it.)One winter, a friend enlisted me in a project to cut down a real live Christmas tree from a Christmas tree farm so her son could experience a Christmas like the one she and I had never ever had. (The sum total of my experience with freshly cut Christmas trees was buying one in a parking lot from a seller who was asked by the police to pick up his trees and move it along just after we made an offer. We did not get a discount.)

Neither my friend, her seven-year-old son, nor I knew what cutting a live, six-foot-tall or smaller tree would take, so we brought the one saw she had (I believe it was one her uncle had rejected 45 years before for one that was actually sharp; now it also had some rust) and drove to a tree farm in Dutchess County, New York. I have chopped wood plenty of times, and I have helped take dead trees down; none of these experiences served me this day. 

The first task in cutting down a fresh Christmas tree for oneself is finding something to occupy the seven-year-old son of your friend–letting the child select the winning tree to preserve your friendship with his mom is advisable. Next up is failing in negotiations with him to pick a tree that is not on a slope.

Many will ask the question, “Should I cut two notches to make a V or cut straight across?” I know I did, just not out loud or in the presence of someone who could tell me the answer. With my tiny, rusty saw and no one holding the other side of the saw, I started notching one side of a V. The blade sliced some bark off and did not penetrate the green wood underneath. The snow had already penetrated my boots, though. The trunk was no thicker than two inches wide, if that–I’m no tree-ologist!–but it was quickly apparent that I was going to need help. 

With that in mind, I drove away my companion and her son with my grumpy “attitude.”

An hour alone, my inner debate over cutting straight through versus cutting a V had produced several partial starts–some up, some down–all the way around the tree. Instead of a V, I had notched a lowercase w, partway to the center of the tree. My friend returned and we commenced cutting straight across, because it was taking me too long, when we discovered that there is nothing quite as unsatisfying as the sound of a tree not coming down no matter how far one has cut through it until it is ready to come down. 

It eventually came down. I accompanied it down the slope … okay, I rode it down the hill like Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.” I had not reminded her to bring rope to tie it to the roof of her car, so we drove home with it sticking out one of the backseat windows. 

* * * *

My family had one plastic tree for twenty or more Christmases. It was a well-constructed one, actually, a bare metal trunk with a two or three hoops to hook in each individual branch around the tree. It actually had an instruction manual. Our Christmas tree and boxes of ornaments occupied several boxes in the basement; the annual production of “putting up the tree” was my introduction to grown-ups not being able to remember from one year to the next the locations of things they put away in the same box in the same place every year. And now I am that grown-up.

I am sure that my mother and father found it necessary to re-position my ornaments; I swear that something happens to me when I approach a tree, ornament in hand. I have hooked ornaments into shirt buttonholes when I swear I was aiming for the tree. Just as I wanted to cut my one live tree down in one graceful and strong sawing motion, I always want this ornament here and now to be the first, last, and only one needed to make this year’s tree complete and perfect. Christmas brings out the perfectionist in all his mistake-prone grumpiness in me. 

An addition to my kitchen. Photo by Mark Aldrich

Thus, the only part of decorating that I relax and enjoy is either throwing tinsel everywhere or putting the angel on top. (That is an unsung rite of passage, growing tall enough to top the tree with a star or angel.) We had an angel, a cardboard seraph with glued-on glitter and thin, stringy blonde hair. Its halo was glued-on, as well. But it was our angel, and when nicer ones found their way into our house, they were always relegated to lower branches. My family’s underdog mentality extended to angels.

The tree in my girlfriend’s office replaced one she had had for several years. That one now sits in my kitchen, and is the first Christmas tree I have had for my own Christmas in many many years. I do not think I have told her that, yet. Here it sits:

I did not know that trees came pre-lighted. This discovery is revolutionizing my outlook on Christmas. However, I will be leaving the decorating to my housemate, for fear of hooking a ball to my shirt.