Collections - 19. Chapter 19 -- Life On Mulberry Street

Five pieces of Life In These United States or And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street – which, by the way, was – and is – in Springfield, Massachusetts, Ted Geisel’s hometown.

First, as I was driving up my block, I was faced with two cars very slowly creeping side-by-side. At first, I thought the drivers were together, lost, and talking over the situation through their open windows. Then I thought maybe one was yelling at the other for driving so slowly down the center of the narrow street that there was no room to pass. Finally, I realized the passenger in one car was filming the driver and passenger in the other, evidently for a student film or video as there was no support crew – union or otherwise.

Second, me in the nearest Home Depot – about two miles away, through there are two others, a Lowe’s, and a Do It! Center nearly as close. I’m standing at the Self-Checkout, since there are almost no cash registers and cashiers left, when the monitor of the half-dozen Self-Checkouts asks, “Are you paying by credit or debit card?”

“Maybe a combination,” I explain. “That’s why I was waiting for help.”

“What combination?”

“Well, first, a Home Depot credit card. But it’s new, and I may have already reached the thousand dollar limit – we’re painting our house.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “We’ll just get you another credit card, and you’ll get fifty dollars off.”

“That’s not necessary,” I insist, not explaining that I didn’t really want the first Home Depot card and only got it so our painters could easily make supply runs. “I’ve only had this card for two weeks, and I haven’t gotten the bill yet.”

“It’s really no problem,” she pleasantly insisted right back. “People do it all the time. They’re allowed up to three Home Depot credit cards, and we give them fifty dollars off each time.”

Third, I just dropped a batch of shirts off at the cleaners. I’ve been wearing drip-dry shirts for several years, because I no longer need that crisp-for-work look. Still, I wasn’t surprised that cleaning them had gone up to $4.25 each.

When I went to college, I discovered it cost 15 cents to have a shirt washed, iron, and returned nicely folded in a box – even a paper band around the chest saying “Thank You!” Home for Thanksgiving, I asked my parents if it was the same price at our local cleaners, and they said, “Yep.” I told them if I’d known, I would have gladly paid that, instead of putting myself through years of character-building ironing almost every night from junior high through high school – my parents would never let me wear an even seemingly spotless shirt more than one day. They said they still wouldn’t have let me send my shirts out. That was for Dad.

I also remember one morning in college when all my shirts were quasi dirty – meaning I couldn’t squeeze even one more wearing out of them, even if I searched out my roommate’s seldom used iron and pressed the least wrinkled shirt on a towel spread on my desk. And I had to go to a goodbye lunch, wearing a tie, but too informal for a cover-up jacket. So I zipped across the street to the small men’s stop opposite our dorm and bought a new, long-sleeved, pale blue, Oxford cloth shirt, complete with a button-down collar. Five bucks, with probably no tax. I remember because it happened to be all the cash I’d had, minus what I needed to pay for lunch. And now, it costs almost as much to clean that shirt as it once cost to buy it.

Of course, my first car – new – cost about what it costs to insure my present one annually. And my parents’ first house cost half of what it cost to buy my modest present car. And I still remember my grandmother complaining – somewhere in the late 1950s, as we walked back from the supermarket, me dragging her folding, two-wheeled shopping cart – that a loaf of bread had gone up to an astonishing 25 cents, when it had only been 3 cents 25 years before.

Fourth: me, up a tree – literally. As a favor, I was trying to pick some of the last oranges on our 95-year-old neighbor’s tree, and the fruit picker – a foot-long, rusty, clawed cage, clamped to the end of an eight-foot broomstick – wasn’t helping. I’d tried a five-foot ladder last week, but it was no use, so I finally decided to climb into the maybe fifteen-foot tree. So I’m tangled and twisted around in there, getting all scratched and buggy and juicy and realizing that “just out of reach” isn’t a metaphor, when all I can hear is Nathaniel Frey singing:

“Call the fire department,

There’s another kitten up a tree.

Up goes Fiorello,

And everybody cheers,

And what does he use for a ladder?

Me!”

Except I wasn’t thinking “kitten.” I was thinking a particular rude body part.

Speaking of which, I was trying to find the origin of a couple of flunky terms after I needed to explain their synonym to a recent SAT student. It turns out “brown nose” is World War I military slang for a subordinate whose nose is so close to his commander’s rear that his nose may as well change color. And the similar “suck up” is World War II military slang describing what needs to happen when a pilot vomits into his oxygen mask. He has to “suck it up,” or he’ll breathe in the acidic fumes and die.

Over and out, Sky King.