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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky
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of your religious practice. I respect the rites of all castes and sects, but you will have to return the mattress to the bed each morning you engage in this practice.”
And that is what I did.
Next to the window was a small wooden table with two chairs. Behind it was a refrigerator and another table on which sat a hot plate and an Arvin radio. Near the lamp was an armchair with lace doilies carefully placed on each arm of the chair, a dresser with a Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall over it. The clock told the right time. My father’s watch on my wrist was seldom within a two-hour range. The Beech-Nut clock said I had about fifteen minutes to get downstairs for dinner.
The window was open. Dash, an orange cat to whom I sometimes belonged, sat on the ledge looking at me. There was a tree next to the window with a branch that almost touched my sill. Like me, he came and went whenever he pleased. I was always good for some milk and occasional cans of tuna or pieces of chicken filched from Mrs. Plaut’s table.
I went to the refrigerator and got some milk while Dash waited patiently. I had time to grab my dopp kit, go to the bathroom on the landing, wash my face, shave with my Gillette, brush my teeth with Teel, get my kit back in my room, and make it down the stairs and into Mrs. Plaut’s rooms, where I assumed my place at the communal table.
“Punctual,” Mrs. Plaut said from her chair at the table near the kitchen.
Gunther sat at my right. Across from us were the other boarders: the one-armed car salesman Ben Bidwell and Mrs. Plaut’s shy and pretty niece Emma Simcox. Miss Simcox was in her thirties, a light-skinned, pretty Negro. Mr. Bidwell was a ruddy-faced lean man in his forties. Bidwell and Simcox had begun to keep company. They were a good match. She hardly ever spoke, and he hardly ever stopped speaking.
“Hmm, smells great,” Bidwell said, looking at the food on the table.
On a platter in front of us was a platter of baked macaroni with five flat rectangular browned slices of something familiar-looking on top.
“Spam,” said Bidwell, smiling at Emma Simcox.
“Prem,” Mrs. Plaut corrected. “Like Swift’s Premium Ham, it’s sugar cured. Made with Parmesan cheese, margarine, highly nutritious, lots of protein, and B-complex vitamins.”
It didn’t smell bad, and I was hungry. Mrs. Plaut nodded for her niece to serve herself, and the meal began. Dinner conversation consisted primarily of Ben Bidwell assuring us that right after the war the price of new cars would be about nine hundred dollars “unless you want to go for one of the luxury models General Motors is planning. They’ll hit as much as fourteen hundred.”
The vegetable for the meal was boiled beets, and dessert was steamed farina molasses pudding which, Mrs. Plaut proudly announced, cost a total of thirty-four cents.
Gunther and I excused ourselves after dessert, and Mrs. Plaut reminded me to be sure to read the new pages of family history she had given me.
In the car, we listened to Joan Davis on Sealtest Village Store. Joan, in her cracking voice, was telling Mr. Heinzwig the butcher to “trim the fat, get rid of the water, and keep your thumb off the scale.”
The Southwest Museum was on Marion Way and Museum Drive overlooking the Arroyo Seco and Sycamore Grove.
My father had taken my brother and me to the opening of the museum in 1914. It was memorable because it was one of the few Sundays he had taken off from working in our small grocery store in Glendale.
Thirty years later, the museum looked just the way I remembered it, a white concrete building without ornament, a tile-roofed tower at one end and a high, square tower at the other.
We parked in the lot and walked through the entrance, a brightly colored Mayan portal designed, as Gunther now informed me, in the manner of the entry at the House of Nuns at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Inside the portal was a long tunnel, 260 feet long, according to Gunther. It led into
And that is what I did.
Next to the window was a small wooden table with two chairs. Behind it was a refrigerator and another table on which sat a hot plate and an Arvin radio. Near the lamp was an armchair with lace doilies carefully placed on each arm of the chair, a dresser with a Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall over it. The clock told the right time. My father’s watch on my wrist was seldom within a two-hour range. The Beech-Nut clock said I had about fifteen minutes to get downstairs for dinner.
The window was open. Dash, an orange cat to whom I sometimes belonged, sat on the ledge looking at me. There was a tree next to the window with a branch that almost touched my sill. Like me, he came and went whenever he pleased. I was always good for some milk and occasional cans of tuna or pieces of chicken filched from Mrs. Plaut’s table.
I went to the refrigerator and got some milk while Dash waited patiently. I had time to grab my dopp kit, go to the bathroom on the landing, wash my face, shave with my Gillette, brush my teeth with Teel, get my kit back in my room, and make it down the stairs and into Mrs. Plaut’s rooms, where I assumed my place at the communal table.
“Punctual,” Mrs. Plaut said from her chair at the table near the kitchen.
Gunther sat at my right. Across from us were the other boarders: the one-armed car salesman Ben Bidwell and Mrs. Plaut’s shy and pretty niece Emma Simcox. Miss Simcox was in her thirties, a light-skinned, pretty Negro. Mr. Bidwell was a ruddy-faced lean man in his forties. Bidwell and Simcox had begun to keep company. They were a good match. She hardly ever spoke, and he hardly ever stopped speaking.
“Hmm, smells great,” Bidwell said, looking at the food on the table.
On a platter in front of us was a platter of baked macaroni with five flat rectangular browned slices of something familiar-looking on top.
“Spam,” said Bidwell, smiling at Emma Simcox.
“Prem,” Mrs. Plaut corrected. “Like Swift’s Premium Ham, it’s sugar cured. Made with Parmesan cheese, margarine, highly nutritious, lots of protein, and B-complex vitamins.”
It didn’t smell bad, and I was hungry. Mrs. Plaut nodded for her niece to serve herself, and the meal began. Dinner conversation consisted primarily of Ben Bidwell assuring us that right after the war the price of new cars would be about nine hundred dollars “unless you want to go for one of the luxury models General Motors is planning. They’ll hit as much as fourteen hundred.”
The vegetable for the meal was boiled beets, and dessert was steamed farina molasses pudding which, Mrs. Plaut proudly announced, cost a total of thirty-four cents.
Gunther and I excused ourselves after dessert, and Mrs. Plaut reminded me to be sure to read the new pages of family history she had given me.
In the car, we listened to Joan Davis on Sealtest Village Store. Joan, in her cracking voice, was telling Mr. Heinzwig the butcher to “trim the fat, get rid of the water, and keep your thumb off the scale.”
The Southwest Museum was on Marion Way and Museum Drive overlooking the Arroyo Seco and Sycamore Grove.
My father had taken my brother and me to the opening of the museum in 1914. It was memorable because it was one of the few Sundays he had taken off from working in our small grocery store in Glendale.
Thirty years later, the museum looked just the way I remembered it, a white concrete building without ornament, a tile-roofed tower at one end and a high, square tower at the other.
We parked in the lot and walked through the entrance, a brightly colored Mayan portal designed, as Gunther now informed me, in the manner of the entry at the House of Nuns at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Inside the portal was a long tunnel, 260 feet long, according to Gunther. It led into
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