Back Pages: Schwinn
My uncle’s bike was stored under the back porch of my grandparent’s house. If it wasn’t a Schwinn it was a ringer for a Schwinn but I don’t remember. That was long ago when the world was uncomplicated as Dodgers vs. Yankees, there were Giants in the Polo Grounds, and no one had yet met a Met, or knew what one was. So many dreams lay claim to the same spot in my skull it’s hard to give them all their due. So what happens is, sometimes I have to change the shape of a few to make everything fit. I have to keep things up to date, and sometimes this makes it rough on the older memories.
So for what it’s worth, whenever I visited my mother’s parents, which was often since they lived just the other side of town, I wanted to ride that bike; but to do so I had to ask my grandfather who was not always amenable –who was in fact formidable, though in the least scary sense of the word.
Sometimes grandpa seemed to live in a vault; but there was love in him, if not a soft love. His was a love that got up every day like clockwork lifetime, and walked to the train in its white shirt, black jacket and fedora, with a tin black box of lunch, and took that train to Hoboken to work on the coaches of the Erie Lackawanna to keep them clean and rolling for his boss, and to feed his family.
I can see him walking the sidewalk to Myrtle avenue, head bent slightly forward as if barging into a breeze, feet and legs screened behind his perfect privet hedgerow, sliding horizontally Myrtleward, floating as in a dream in a dream in a dream, but time will do that.
The soft love, the love left over after his biblical labor and sweat for god and industry, went into his garden. What was left over came in fits and starts to be doled out to his wife and children in cool affection. In her memoirs, my mother insisted “…my father was a good man,” and he must have been, but grandpa maintaned a manly chasm between himself others and had his quirks. And if he said, No! it was like the door to life slamming shut behind you the instant you hit the bridge abuttment, and you knew there’d be no Lazarus moment.
Leave a Reply