Rheingold Beer and Pickled Sausages

            I was kind of a surprise for my parents. They were pushing 40 and their last child was born eight years earlier. In addition, I learned many years later, my mother had gone into the hospital for a period of time for an “operation.” At the time, they believed that had rendered her unable to have further children. Surprise! In the mid-fifties that made them the oldest parents they had ever heard of.

            Mom had an established career as a schoolteacher and wasn’t about to give up either the autonomy or the money it provided. After a year, off, she was ready to go back so it became necessary to find daytime accommodations for me. The first try was with the wife of another teacher (a math teacher, I will say no more). I cried and cried and it was clear I wasn’t happy there. After a couple weeks, my parents asked how it was going (asked the keeper, that is- at this point I couldn’t express myself in a useful manner). The math teacher said, “Well, he’s resigned to it.” My mother was furious, she already had guilt about the whole thing and resignation wasn’t good enough.

            Just up the street lived a childless couple who had provided afterschool care for both my parents and their best friends. The problem was that they were rather uneducated, what at the time people called “hillbillies.” They were distinctly blue-collar and while my parents were certainly not snobs of any type, they had concerns about me growing up saying things like “ain’t.” Nevertheless, it seemed the best option and there I went.

            For the next twelve years, they were like a second set of parents for me. I was very happy there. Ellie was a superb cook, making everything from scratch. My mother was never very interested in cooking. She made sure all the food groups were represented at every meal but the only thing she ever really enjoyed making was apple pie. Everett was a fork-lift driver at the local factory which employed pretty much everybody in town who wasn’t a teacher. But it was his after-work activities that fascinated me and would prove major influences on my life.

            Everett would come home from work, change his clothes and begin the never-changing routine that defined so much of his existence. First, he got out his guitar and tuned it up. Then he went to refrigerator and took out a jar of pickled sausages and a bottle of Rheingold beer. He would then spend the next couple of hours until supper playing music. For a few songs, he would strap on a metal holder for a harmonica so he could play that and the guitar at the same time. Every once in a while, he’d pull out the accordion for a change. On even more rare occasions mandolin, banjo or fiddle would make appearances.

            Every few songs, he’d take a bite of sausage and a swig of beer. He never hammered them down. Monday through Thursday he’d just nurse that one bottle. On Friday nights, he’d allow himself a second unless he was playing out at a square dance later in the evening.

 Rheingold of course, was gone by the time I was drinking beer. A shame- not only do I associate them with Everett, but I seem to recall they were radio sponsors of the newly formed Mets baseball team. I still do enjoy sipping a beer and playing my guitar.

            Although I wouldn’t realize it for a long time, this was early exposure to the value of ritual. I like ritual. I think they offer time to consider perspective and keep a contact with the past. I know the experience left me with an appreciation of simple things, self-driven things.

Early Influencers

            Among my particular circle of friends there were, I would say, three influencers that stood out- a philosopher and two storytellers. There’s no question that many of the subtleties in the writings of Henry David Thoreau were lost on us. But somehow much of the essence seemed to penetrate our seventeen (or so) year-old minds. We were, of course, aware of Walden and Thoreau’s escape from society in his cabin on the pond. I would say though, that his most famous writing was not our main influence. For some reason we grabbed onto some of his other writings. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack is actually a very deep treatise on life, death, friendship and mortality. Whether we subconsciously absorbed any of that I can’t say. What appealed to us was that idea of taking off and drifting through life. We ended up adapting his adventure into over ten summers worth of bicycle hiking. It became a major event of our year for many summers. We saw ourselves as philosopher-adventurers, not far removed from Phileas Fogg or Sal Paradise.

            Along with A Week, we also admired Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. Civil Disobedience was a natural fit for our “hippy” sentiments about violence and questioning authority. My personal favorite was always Life Without Principle. I’m certain my adolescent mind missed many of his points but lots of them have stayed with me into old age. The idea of the influence of money and how it can cause people to limit their possibilities, the idea that a person should work hard at something that has meaning to them, not for the money. A surprising number of my closer classmates gravitated toward public service and I think Thoreau’s influence was there, consciously or not.

            The first Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. book I read was Cat’s Cradle. I swiped it from a book carousel in the English room of my high school. I’m sure the teacher would have let me borrow it but stealing it fit in with my disdain of school in general (I obtained Siddhartha the same way-maybe some others I can’t recall right now). Within a few pages I was a Vonnegut devotee. My recommendation spread and soon we were all quoting Kilgore Trout and Elliot Rosewater. It was comforting to know that there were people out “there” who understood the absurdity of our existence.

            Like young people of, it seems, every generation, we were transfixed by the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. In a time when good and evil, right and wrong had become rather more nebulous than what was comfortable, Frodo and Gandalf seemed to have a grip on things. We also liked the idea of life as a quest and this played beautifully into our bike trips mentioned above.

            There were other voices that spoke strongly to us- Kerouac, Steinbeck, Hesse, Bradbury, Heinlein (we grokked Spock). I know, we must have been unbearable. Apparently even as a teenybopper I was one of those intellectual elitists. Well, as Brian Wilson said “I just wasn’t made for these times.”