Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (29 page)

When you were a teacher in grade school at the Albany Academy in the 1930s you must have been five times as old as I was. You aren't even twice as old as I am now so I feel closer to you.

I say I know you and I do, even though it's been half your life since I've seen you … fifty years. Once you know a person, though, you don't forget. I've certainly never forgotten you.

I suppose I'd be surprised at how you look. I have a perfect picture in my mind of how you looked when I knew you and I'm happy with that. You were never Miss America, but you always looked the way a teacher ought to look.

When I see my old school friends, we often talk about you. Did you know that? Except for our parents, you were the first real authority in our lives. We were lucky. You were so direct, patient and fair.

Are you still stern? You were quite stern, you know. You didn't stand for a lot of horsing around. You were the sternest teacher I ever had but all the kids liked you anyway. A lot of teachers think they can get in good with students by being nice and easy in class but a teacher can't fool students. Kids know when they're being taught and when they aren't.

I wish I'd been a better student. You were a better teacher than
I was a student. My mother always had a lot of excuses for why I wasn't doing well in school.

“He's the youngest in his class,” she'd say.

“He's a very shy boy. He works best when he's alone.”

My mother was wrong, though. It was because I was dumb, although you never made me feel dumb.

Do you think teachers are as good as they used to be? There are so many jobs that pay more money than teaching does that a capable person has to be a martyr to stick at teaching. When you were teaching jobs were scarce and a good school had its choice of teachers. Teaching was one of the few jobs an educated woman could get, too.

A lot of people work their whole lives to make enough money to retire on. You did better than that. You worked your whole life to make enough memories to retire on. If you live to be 150, I'm sure you won't run out of memories.

A mother and a father who bring up children sensibly and well take great satisfaction from that. A good teacher has that same satisfaction multiplied a thousand times. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something because you got them started doing it that way thirty, forty or fifty years ago.

To tell you the truth, I can't remember anything specific you taught me. You had one section of the sixth grade and Miss Potter had the other, but classes didn't move around. One teacher taught everything to one class all day. About every forty-five minutes, you'd switch from geography to arithmetic or spelling.

It's good to hear of someone who went north to retire. I notice the temperature in South Paris, Maine, was minus 8 degrees this morning. It proves Florida or Arizona isn't the only place older people live and thrive.

I was thinking maybe you could get a job doing public relations for the state of Maine. Florida is always pushing itself with pictures of sun and sand and saying what a great place it is for old people to live. You're living proof that Maine is good for the health.

Last summer I went back to the Academy for a reunion. The old school is doing very well and it's seventy-five years older than you are.

Lonnie is an institution in the building where I do a lot of my work. He shines shoes but that's only a small part of what he does. The best thing Lonnie does is keep everyone's spirits up.

The other day I had a good talk with Lonnie while he fussed over making my shoes look better. We settled some world problems and straightened out our own company. As I climbed down off the chair Lonnie has mounted on a platform so he doesn't have to bend over much, I said, as you'd say lightly to a friend, “Thanks, Lonnie, you're a good man.”

“Well,” Lonnie said philosophically, “we're all supposed to try and make things better, aren't we?”

That's what Lonnie does in the small piece of the world he has carved out for himself. He makes things better. He makes everyone he meets feel better and he makes their shoes look better. If all of us did as much, it would be a better world. He not only does his job but he throws in a little extra.

Lonnie is black, gray-haired and lame. I've been guessing that he's about seventy years old. His left foot is in a shoe with a four-inch lift on it and he doesn't use his left leg much. When he walks, he lifts it off the floor from the hip and swings it forward. It doesn't seem to be able to move by itself. He parks his car, a car with special controls for the handicapped, in front of the building and it's a tough job for him to make his way inside. Still, Lonnie is strong, with muscular arms and shoulders.

He has a good-looking face with prominent bones. He gets to work about 7:30
A.M.
and leaves, to avoid the traffic, about 4:00
P.M.
In between, he shines as many as thirty pairs of shoes. Lonnie gives every customer the feeling it's his privilege to be working for him.

A shine is apt to be interrupted half a dozen times by people passing the open door behind him who yell, “Hi, Lonnie.”

“Hey, there, Mr. Edwards,” Lonnie will yell back, often without looking up. He knows almost every voice in the building.

Yesterday Lonnie shined my shoes again.

“I'll be packing it in in April,” he told me.

“Leaving here?” I asked, shocked at the thought of the place without him. “Why would you do that?” I asked.

“I'll be seventy-five in April,” Lonnie said.

“But you're strong and healthy,” I said. “Why would you quit work?”

“I want to do some things,” Lonnie said. “Fix up my house. Do some things.”

“Can't you fix up your house and still work here?” I asked.

There seemed to be something he wasn't telling me.

“Oh, I could,” Lonnie said, “but I want to go back to school.”

“That would be great,” I said. “I've always wanted to do that too.” I wondered what courses Lonnie was thinking of taking but decided not to ask.

“Yeah,” Lonnie said, “I been working for sixty-two years now. Want to go back to school. Never did get enough school. Never really learned how to read. I was a little lame boy, you know. Embarrassed to go to school. All the big kids. What I want to do is learn to read, good enough to satisfy myself.”

I've known Lonnie for thirty years and never knew how handicapped he was.

It's too bad life isn't like the movies.

When they make a movie in Hollywood, the women are beautiful, the men are handsome and all the characters are either good or bad. We aren't confused about what we think of anyone. That's the way life ought to be.

Life isn't that way, though. In real life, it's impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys because people are too complicated. Good people are always doing bad things and bad people keep fooling you by doing good things. The ax murderer drops bread crumbs out of his cell window to feed the birds.

The other night we were sitting around with some friends and, as will happen, we started talking about another person we all knew well who wasn't there. The subject of our discussion was Fred Friendly, onetime president of CBS News, a Columbia University professor and
director of Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society. One of the people in the group referred to Fred as a “genius.” A second man in the room exploded in anger and said some things about Fred that I wouldn't repeat here in print.

I didn't say anything because I was thinking they were both right. To almost everyone who has ever met him, Fred Friendly is “My Most Unforgettable Character.” He is one of my best friends and I have not only great respect for his brilliance as an accomplisher of things but great affection for the way he is. I can't explain why I like the way Fred is, I just do. I don't fight with anyone who can't stand him. I understand.

Fred can be an egomaniac and a jerk. When he is, I just smile because he's my friend. I stopped judging him years ago.

That's the real problem. A person can be so many different things. He or she can be a loving husband or wife, a considerate friend who'd do anything for you in an emergency, but also someone who'd steal a sweater from a department store. This mixed-up quality of the character of all of us is hard to get used to and the movies make it harder because they condition us to expect people to be predictably all good or all bad.

The reason for arguments about people, like the one my friends had about Fred the other night, is that one person's memory of another is taken from that person's good side. The one who hates the person can only remember the bad things he's done. I know someone Fred Friendly fired twice. Fred fired him from one company and the man got a job at another. Two years later Fred moved to that company and fired the man again. I do not expect to hear anything good about Fred from him. I like them both and try not to mention one when the other is around.

Whether you like or dislike people can also depend on your relationship with them. I've known several couples I consider good friends. They came to hate each other and were divorced. I still like and see all of them but no longer at the same time because they don't speak to each other.

I understand the complaint these people have with each other. I like them as individuals but wouldn't want to be married to them, either. One of the former wives complained that her husband made her spend half an hour every day clipping coupons from the newspaper so she could get a dime off on things like boxes of laundry soap. I, on the other hand, always found her husband to be quick to pick up a check in a restaurant.

It would be best if we didn't take such satisfaction in our firm decisions about whether people are good or bad. We're amused by our initial reaction to someone and keep repeating it until it becomes our own opinion. In a conversation, we know it's a lot more interesting if we say someone is a genius or a jerk than it is if we withhold any comment.

I don't think any of us are going to change but I wish the movies would.

Last weekend, we returned to the house in the country one last time to close it for winter.

The house has stood for sixty years and I guess it'll still be there on that windy hilltop looking out onto the Catskill Mountains when we get back in the spring, but there were a lot of things left undone. One storm window was missing, I never got to clean the leaves out of the gutters and I couldn't find any insulation to stuff under the door of the little building I write in. I'm sure some snow will drift in.

Those things are minor, though, compared to the big problem. Lloyd Filkins has been shutting off the electricity and the water and draining the pipes and the radiators every fall for about forty years. In the spring, he's been turning on the water and reconnecting the electrical system.

Lloyd knew where all the pipes and valves were because he put them in.

Lloyd knew which switches to throw to cut off the furnace and the electricity to the house and in my shop. He knew because he wired the place, too. Lloyd knew where everything was and no one else but Lloyd knew.

Lloyd died three weeks ago and took a thousand secrets with him.

We often said we couldn't do without him and now we're having to do without him. Lloyd was a wonderfully dependable old grump. You had to be careful who you mentioned in his presence because there were a lot of people he wasn't speaking to and if he wasn't speaking to them, he didn't want you to speak to them either.

It wasn't that he held a grudge for long … maybe fifteen or twenty years at the most.

He was more like a country doctor than a handyman. He knew the medical history of just about every house in the village and made house calls when things weren't going well. He had the keys to fifty of them.

Lloyd thought of it as his town. The rest of us lived there by the grace of his beneficence.

Just about everyone in the village had some job that Lloyd had started and was waiting for him to come and finish. He had so many emergencies that he usually couldn't come … sometimes for years.

Lloyd loved an emergency best. You could call him any time of day or night with an emergency. He'd grumble at you over the phone and he'd tell you that whatever had happened was your own fault … but he'd be there in no time.

When Emily and Kirby were married in the little garden by the side of the house, someone parking hit the standing hose connection up by the garage. The pipe broke and water gushed out. The well pumps only three gallons a minute so it's quickly emptied if someone in the upstairs bathroom takes a long shower at the same time someone is taking a long shower in the downstairs bathroom … or if there's a broken pipe.

The pump cuts out automatically when there's no water in the well and that means no water for washing dishes, cooking, showers or flushing toilets. With sixty people at a wedding party, this is bad news.

When I called, Lloyd dropped whatever he was doing and came. His routine never varied. Without looking or speaking to anyone, he went around to the back of his truck and pick out his tools for the job. He spent a lot of time at the back of his truck.

He fixed the broken pipe that day, restarted the well pump and grumped off without saying a word. Lloyd took some perverse pleasure in not giving me the satisfaction of thanking him. His visit that day of the wedding showed up on some bill with other items later in the season.
FIX PIPE
it said.
LABOR
 … $8.00 … 
PARTS
 … 
GASKET
$.12 … 
TOTAL
$8.12.

There were people in town who said Lloyd had a heart of gold and others who were not sure. He never spoke to them unless they called him in the middle of the night with an emergency.