Saturday, June 22, 2019

I see you.

Twice in the last month there have been incidents in which I was startled to see myself as a young man. And it was not in a photo.

I've moved my office once again.   I am now back in an office I'd been in a few years back. We at Northeastern have become excellent in many ways. One has to do with the broad area that is called Facilities. Facilities folk do a number of things including moving furniture from one space to another. You fill out a form on line and at a mutually convenient time, movers come to your new space bringing items from the old one. They patiently ask where items are to be moved and place them there.

So, on an assigned date a few minutes before the scheduled time, I arrived at the office. As I turned a corner to a hallway that leads to the office, there I sat.  Two people were there, ahead of time, but one was me.

In the summer of 1970 I took three classes during summer school.  I had switched majors and in order to complete on time I needed nine credits.  Before school actually began I sought work to help pay the tuition bill. I had a short stint in a fast food restaurant chain, another as a pot washer in a catering outfit, and eventually got a pretty high paying job as a toll collector on the New York State Thruway.  There was another job too.

I knew a man who worked in what was the equivalent of Facilities at the university. It may have even been called Facilities. He got me a job as an assistant to a worker who did anything and everything in our multipurpose Campus Center.  An air conditioner had to be moved, it came to him.  Someone wanted a chair that was on the first floor of the campus center. We got the chair. The bowling alley had to be cleaned so bowling balls had to be carted somewhere; he was in charge of the carting.  I was an assistant. There was another fellow there too, a guy from Brown University who played baseball for them who was a relative of the head of the Campus Center. So, he worked with me as an assistant too.

What I remember most about the job was that I felt sorry for the fellow we worked for. He was about 50 and had been laid off by the railroad. This job in the campus center was either beneath him, or paid less than what he earned at the railroad.  And he looked at the two of us with some mixture of envy and sadness.  He had, he thought, had his shot, and here he was shlepping air conditioners. But we, the guy from Brown and me, were just shlepping on the way to something possibly grand or hopeful.

I'm not sure how long I lasted as an assistant, but at some point when the toll collector job came through I hauled my last air conditioner. But during the time I found the job to be a lark; I kibbitzed with the kid from Brown, and listened respectfully to the stories from the head guy with sympathy. 

So fast forward to 2019 as I approach my door waiting for the furniture.  And slumped along the wall are two people who had gotten to the job early.  I came up short because there was me and the guy who worked for the railroad.  The elder person was courteous, and the kid was energetic and helpful.  Lugging my furniture here and there with a sense that this was just a summer gig.  About a week later I found some furniture in the campus warehouse that I wanted so the same two but this time with another young guy came to the office and there I was again, smiling and looking at the furniture. The two of them oozing, hey this is just a summer job and, well it is kind of fun. You want the bookcase here, sure. You want the cabinet there, nothing to it.

And I wanted to stop the kid and shake my hand. And say something like, "hey young man, I am you fifty years down the pike.  Take a good look.  And don't lift like that you could hurt your hip, and guess what-- it isn't going to be as smooth sailing as you think it might be."

But he would have thought I was crazy. So I just smiled in a way that he would have thought strange if he thought about it at all.

Then a week or so later, again I ran into myself  We bought a couch.  And we needed to get rid of the 85 inch monster of a couch that had been in our living room for 25 years. Even I agreed it was time for this guy to go, even though it was in decent condition.  I called the sanitation folks and they said we could bring the couch to the curb.  But the thought of Donna and me lifting the couch and carrying it to the curb was, sadly, comical.  Even when my buddy Kenny came to visit, I didn't even ask.  We would have left our groins on the deck if we tried to carry that thing.

Coincidentally, I had contact with one of the two cousins I have living in the area. She called me for a ride and I happily obliged since we see each other far too infrequently.  In the course of our ride I asked how her 30 something year old son was doing. Very well, she told me, and he was moving to a new apartment.  I asked her if Alex might want the couch.  She did not know but gave me Alex's number.

He did want it.  He just needed a buddy of his to be available with his van to be able to transport it.  In a few days, Alex called to tell us that the fellow with the van was available. He came at the appointed hour.  Out of the van popped Alex, his friend, and his friend's girlfriend. And there I was again.

Three happy bouncy 30 something year olds.  Moving furniture. How many times I moved furniture in my day, I do not want to count.  There was a stretch when I was about Alex's age when I drove a very large truck from Buffalo to Boston having stopped at a number of places along the way to pick up couches, chairs, and bookcases. Quoth the raven...

In no time Alex and his pal, picked up the couch which would have left Kenny and me crotchless, and carried it through our slider and around the corner.  The three maneuvered the couch into the van as Donna and I stood by. Most of the couch was on the bed of the van; part was in the air. After a number of tries they shut the van trunk.

They had a problem, I was sure. The couch took up the entire back of the truck.  How they managed to get it in there was one thing. But there were only two seats in the cab part of the car. Where would the third sit. I offered to drive one of them to the apartment.

No need they said easily.  They sort of laughed and the woman said that she had been in more cramped places.  The two fellows got into the cab.  Then as if it was the simplest thing in the world, the woman climbed through a window into the back of the van and lay down on the couch as if she was in someone's living room. Head on the ground. Legs in the air.

Donna said, "We used to do that." Meaning it metaphorically. I don't remember an incident where one of us had so contorted to climb through a van window and kerplunk on a couch that was part on the bed of the truck and part in the air, and drive however long--but there was a time even before we had met, that we would think nothing of hauling an 85 inch couch into a van and then sleeping on it as we drove here or there.   And doing similar things.

So I saw myself in the van and speaking for myself, but maybe for both of us, it was an odd sensation standing on the lawn watching the van drive away with me in it.

Again, like with the Facilities guy, I wanted to shout out classic middle age platitudes--"Enjoy yourself, seize the day, don't blow it" as the car drove away,

We had a '50 Ford in Brooklyn. It was the only car I knew until we moved away. We drove that car everywhere. In 1961 a year after we moved to Plainview, my dad bought a Rambler.  He put an ad in the paper to sell the '50 Ford for 50 bucks. We could not believe how many calls we got to buy that car. The lucky guy, a hot rodder or so it seemed to me, came by and gave Dad fifty dollars. Dad began to explain the problems with the car. The kid didn't need to hear anything.  He said something like, "I got it." And took the keys. Dad called mom from the house so that she could see the '50 ford for the last time. My brother and I were already at the curb.  By the time my mother got out the door, the '50 Ford was zooming down Forest Drive. And there Dad stood looking a bit stunned at the past, take off down the road.

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