The Little Words Mean the Most

Chapter 5: Boot camp

 

 

"The first day we were up at Devens, they threw all the uniforms and everything at you."  

    Fort Devens was a military reservation and assembly point in Ayre, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. "Had this fellow with me, Bill Ryan. Bill Ryan was a tobacco salesman. But he had an uncle in the shoe business.

    "Well, there's an expression they have just in shoe factories. They have names for different sizes. They never say 'C.' They say 'Charlie.' Or 'D.' They say 'David.' When Bill Ryan came through in line, he said to the sergeant who was handing out the shoes, 'I take an eight and a half Charlie.' The sergeant says to himself, 'Oh, here's a wise guy.' He turns around and gives Ryan an eight.

    "The next morning, Ryan said, 'I can't get my feet into these shoes. He gave me the wrong size.'

    I said, 'Go on sick leave. Get a slip from the doctor.'

    "OK, he goes on sick leave. He went over to where they were handing out shoes. There's two sergeants standing there talking. He tries to tell them about his shoes. They don't even listen. One says to the other, 'Had your coffee yet?' And they leave. So he comes back crying, 'They won't change the shoes!'

    I said, 'Come on, I'll take you over.'

    "There was a corporal there. I said to the kid, 'Do us a favor, will you?' He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'Change this guy's shoes. He doesn't wear this size.' Corporal said, 'What size does he wear?'

    "So Bill Ryan got a new pair of shoes. I said, 'See, all you've got to do is talk to people. If you're reasonable, they'll go along with you.'"

            Lesson #3 from my father.

            Watch for brake lights. Life is hard. Talk reasonably.

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 4: Tom and Hazel

 

 

The most influential economist of the 20^th century, John Maynard Keynes, when asked if he could recall anything else like the Great Depression of the 1930s, said he certainly could: "It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."

 

What Keynes referred to was the tempering of my father's generation. Part, anyway.

Dad remembered the Great Depression as a healthy time. "Nobody had a dime." But no one cared. You helped each other, he said. Faded laundry flapping on the line, a family goat, milk bottles clinking, the account at the grocery carried until you could pay.

Economies creaked to a standstill all over the globe. A young century ceased to be promising. William Manchester later wrote, reaching for the rear of the hall: "This was calamity howling on a cosmic scale...."

 

"And do you, Thomas Francis Scanlon Ahern...."

            Scanlon? My father winced. The priest had to say that?

            "...take this woman...." Hazel, his June bride, ready top and bottom for delivery into Dad's trembling hands.

            He heard the predictable whispers skitter through the front pew where three of Hazel's sisters sat, mostly in judgment as the family was wont; three short women with exceptionally pale skin and practical hair. A well-dusted St. Joseph looked down from a pedestal. Frank Smith witnessed for the groom; honest and plain. Hazel's sister, Philomena, a busy mouse, was the maid of honor. Five Presbyterian sisters altogether, counting Hazel, female splinters from a thick plank of Scottish mother. Nervous enough in a Catholic church, with the Pope's finger pointing this way and that. Even though most of them had their own Catholic husbands and had accepted Catholic baptisms for their babies, relinquished — as the Church of Rome demanded in exchange for its blessing on a "mixed" union — to an upbringing in "the One True Faith." The One False Faith, the McKays would insist if cornered. What did the Church of Rome ever do for Scotland except get us killed?

           So: Scanlon?

           The sisters' pew calculated. Hazel knew the story but hadn't told.

 

 

Chapter 2: My Father's War Stories As Told By Toys

 

 

My parents introduced me to my first dead body when I was six.

It was a big decision for them, discussed with the relatives: Should a child go to a funeral? They were afraid I wouldn't understand. Why isn't that man breathing? But I could see their pride, too. Tommy's first funeral. A social occasion. How would he act? In a large Scotch-Irish family, dead people in open caskets were no surprise. The oldest generation went, like a worn edge against a grinding wheel. The young had accidents. You behaved a certain way. Childishness was unwelcome.

I don't even remember which of my countless aunts or uncles it was who'd stumbled into the afterlife. But children have the curiosity of Elizabethans. I was excited, if in murmurs. I tiptoed up, at my father's urging. I kept my eyes fixed on the puckered taffeta lining of the lifted lid. I'd wondered about the smell. Bouquets cloyed the air; otherwise nothing. And then I looked down. The corpse's eyelids were shut. The face looked vaguely familiar. Very wrinkled. Very powdered. Very settled. A face so still it vibrated; maybe it was the molecules.

Now I knew.

Something. I wasn't sure then. Now I know: I'd been shown the end. A voice could have whispered into my waxy ear: "You have now, my fragile little nudgkin. This time you're standing in. And then you'll have this, three showings to anyone who remembers you exist. And between those two points in time you will have to fit in anything you want to do, anything you want to accomplish, anything you want to savor, anything you want to say. We pray it's for good, but that's not truly a requirement."