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| Baby Jimmy in Maine, with his dog "Ranger". |
My Dad's first job was as a shoeshine boy*, and I knew that because he kept the old wooden box in the back of his closet. I used to take it out to play with the polishes and rags, which made my Dad laugh: "Here. (sticks foot out) You want a shoe to shine? Do mine, and if it's any good, I'll pay you." Acadian papas like do that to kids. You ain't never seen anyone pinch a penny harder than my dad and his people. It's how we survive the hard times, becoming so ingrained as a philosophy as to make it's way into a "Mainerism" (http://www.asmainegoes.com/content/youll-only-hear-these-sayings-maine); these folksy sayings that my Dad likes to see carved into wooden plaques, or stitched onto embroidered pillows.
It's crafts-y and also really annoying, because almost everything is some saying, but like so much of his parenting, I may not like the feel of it as his kid, but those sayings are the things that stick with me in good times or bad. One of his famous "Mainer's" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mainer) about money is that he can "...pinch a penny so hard, Abraham Lincoln's head yells out loud." Oh (http://webpages.charter.net/lorilady/glossary.html). So, I guess you will now judge my work subpar so as to not pay me for this shoeshine? Yeah. Now go away, kid.
And so it went. His quips learned as a child, the ones so easy any child could understand, quickly became a very young and rather inexperienced fathers' lifelines that he reached for whenever he tried hard to parent, so much so that it hurt me to watch him struggle to do it right. I passed over all the normal checkpoints any smart child would have, including making the move from using his shoe shine as finger-paints to tying my own shoes, a barrier he never jumped over.
My dad was raised mostly by my grandmother, in a large extended family that was spread out between Rhode Island, Maine, New York, and Canada. At times, he had needed someone to "show him the ropes" besides his working mother, a sharp-tongued Jones girl of hardy British Colonial and early Dutch descent. There wasn't much room for bullshit, and so my dad was often troubled as a boy. He often told me as an excuse that he never had a real father, especially when he screwed up really bad.
I vividly remember one afternoon with him in summertime, as I sat on the top stair of our house in New City. I asked my dad (in desperation) to help me with my shoes, because the front door was open to our yard filled with my yelling, playing brothers and shrieking neighborhood kids. I'd already figured out that he didn't know much about helping me, because he became angrily defensive and impatient like my oft-troubled mother did.
After they gruelingly purchased a door-to door set of Encyclopedia Britannica's on layaway one year (they only sent the next volume with the next payment received), my mom used it as a constant "out" whenever she could, snapping "Go look it up!" in frustration of our interruption to her much-beloved dish-washing chore. My parents couldn't help us with most of our homework in our highly educated Rockland County public school system.
And so it was with my little kid's shoe. My dad, eager to earn money outside the home with his shoeshine kit, couldn't tie his own shoes very well. He tied my sneakers with the childish "bunny ear" method. When I pointed out that I was learning the harder "bow tie" knot, he sheepishly looked down at my feet, as he so often looks at his shoes with his bottom lip pouting in embarrassment, like a scared child who's been caught stealing candy, and then he looked up at me full in the face (which was rare) from the stair below me, and sheepishly admitted that he never learned how to tie his own shoes properly.
I asked him about that on his last visit here in Pearl River, in a car ride over to Louie's for Sunday brunch: how had he got around that, with his clients not knowing about it? I was also raised to sweat over each and every dollar, and I wondered how a kid could do it without an adult catching on. Did he not untie them?
I asked him about it from the backseat of his rental car, his wife in the front seat next to him. He nodded "yes" and said "yeah", inclining his head slightly towards me in the back seat as he read a copy of RISDxyz that I'd given to him to peruse during our wait, as we sat in the parking lot and in the pouring rain, waiting for the doors to the old house to open for business. Of course I already knew that, because I know him so very well, and now I know all about kids, too. I'd become a parent way before my time, just like he had.
This one's for you "Cashflow", on this day that begins your birthday weekend. I figured you were worth at least one good story, after all that money thrown my way. Let's keep this "Midas Touch" thing going that we are so famous for. Bon anniversaire.
* https://www.google.com/search?q=shoeshine&biw=1280&bih=872&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDwQsARqFQoTCK_RhpnOisYCFdEvjAodTZsCmQ
