Thursday, December 9, 2010

Unheard Conversations

The extended reverie/remembrance that I recently had while suffering from prednisone-induced insomnia and that I described in my last post didn't end at the point my post did.

Instead, it shifted gears as I recalled that my Uncle Bob had also once gone to see Dr. D. at his office.

The story I heard was that Dr. D. said something to my Uncle Bob during that visit that made him vow never to go back.

I have no idea what Dr. D. might have said, but... don't you think it would have been fun to have been a fly on the wall when he said it?

Pondering this at length in my sleep-deprived state, I realized that this was just one of several conversations or comments that I've missed in my life that I wish I hadn't.

Perhaps the earliest came when I was about 10. We were living in a four-unit apartment building - in the first floor, east side unit, to be precise. The couple who managed the building on behalf of the absentee landlord lived in the second floor, west side unit. Their unit had beams and sun and easy access to a small but comfortable second floor porch. Our unit was dark and buggy (being right above the building's crypt-like half-basement) and it was last on the steam pipe line that provided either too much heat or not enough. All the units shared common front and back stairs. One day the elderly male caretaker (whose neck and head were about as tortoise-like as Burt Mustin's) came down the back steps to see us – maybe to collect the rent, maybe to make excuses for the latest half-assed repair job he’d attempted, maybe just because "Go be a nuisance" had come up on his Ouija board. All I know for sure is that when he was on his way out our back door he whispered something to my mother that amused him mightily but left her flustered and red-faced. Despite my repeated requests then and later, she never told me what it was that he had whispered. At some point, she began to claim not to have any memory of the event whatsoever....

A few years later my sister came home from her job in downtown Toledo in tears. The hour-long bus ride had done little to calm her down after a passing bum had said something to her. She refused to repeat what he had said....

A few years after that I had a job of my own in a warehouse near downtown Toledo. There were about 20 other employees. One of them was John. He was a sweet, older guy who always reminded me of one of Snow White's dwarfs - either Happy or Bashful. He was a good, conscientious worker, but pretty quiet. He'd laugh at our jokes, but never tell any of his own. He might smile and nod if we talked about ourselves or our families, but he never said anything about himself or his family. He seemed to exist all alone, in the world but not part of it. Then one day, out of the blue, a phone call came for him. He took it in the warehouse while I was walking by (and everyone else who worked there was probably exchanging shocked glances over his actually having been paged). It was the only phone call I think he ever got at work. I suppose he said hello. Maybe a dull uh-huh or two after that, but not much more. It was a pretty short call. The next day, John didn't come into work. He'd quit. He was gone. As our co-worker, Carl, succinctly put it, "Somebody found him." I think I saw him once after that. He was sitting on the stoop of an apartment building not too far away from where we worked. It was a hot, sunny day. He smiled and nodded as I walked by - but then scurried inside, as if he'd been found again....

Something somewhat similar happened during another walk I took after work. As I passed an old office building that had been taken over by the city, I just happened to look into one of the shop-like windows and saw my high school's most popular substitute teacher working at a desk. He smiled and waved - but what caught my eye was the shiny badge on his black-shirted chest. The blinds on that window were always down and closed when I walked by after that....

At some point I discovered that this was the street Danny Thomas had lived on at some point during his youth, by the way. The tiny upstairs apartment his family had inhabited was long gone, but the empty lot remained. It was a pretty depressed neighborhood by then, about a million miles from Hollywood and even further from the world he inhabited inside our Admiral TV. I don't think I ever saw another pedestrian in all the time I walked that route to and from work everyday. I certainly never saw Danny Thomas coming back in search of his roots. I did hear people locking their car doors, though, as I approached them as they sat waiting for a light to change or for traffic to clear enough for them to pull away from an inconvenient stop sign. As if they had anything I wanted. As if I were the type of person who might take what I wanted by force....

Not that I can blame them, of course. My mother used to tell a story about how she and her first husband were once sitting at a red light when some guy grabbed her car door handle and tried to open it. Her husband hit the gas and went through the red light, leaving their would-be companion far behind. This would have been circa 1950 - you know, the Good Old Days. By the time I was walking to and from work during the evil 1970s, well... it's a wonder any of us made it out alive, isn't it?

Do you suppose this is how people spend their time in nursing homes, just following a daisy-chain of memories across the years and around the globe? Or do they have all sorts of interesting conversations with themselves and others that we'll never be fortunate enough to hear?

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