Threads of Old Baltimore
In my late 20s there was a period of a few years, when I
worked 45-hours per week, kept a regular midnight to eight schedule and walked
home at a strolling pace, thinking of what I had read the previous day, what I
would write. During this period of the late 80s there was some black crime
infiltrating the area, but it had not become virulent and was confined to
night.
I worked in the 5900 block of Belair Road, U.S. Route #1,
which threads the east coast from Key West to Maine, back down to the 4700
block, an easy 2 mile walk. I lived with my wife and oldest son just below the
ridge line that overlooks the Herring Run Valley, a quarter mile above Holy
Redeemer cemetery, where my younger brother Gerard is buried. At this time,
the spruce seedling that Vance had planted when he was seven, was grown as tall
as him, a smallish 12-year-old boy.
My wife and I had grown further apart with every year and my
return to boxing had ended with injury, so I became lost in books, would only
watch documentaries on TV, and spent much time in the basement with my books
and boxing gear. She knew I was in no hurry coming home and that hurt, I
supposed.
I used to make a right turn off of
Belair onto Woodlea,
which was a curving street that served as a shortcut to the portion of Southern
Avenue that met Luerssen, the street I was unsuccessfully buying a house on. I
had stopped walking up Southern. Bear, the savage black terrier I had given to
Rich the Prison Guard, had not forgotten me and would bark painfully for me to
come visit. When I’d get to the fence,
Bear, all 15 pounds of him, would
savagely attack the pitbull and German shepherd he shared the fenced yard with, so
that I would pet only him as they gave back and cowered, and I scratched his head
and he snarled at me as if to say, “You gave up on me, you two-legged prick!”
When he would howl for me at the fence as I walked by, it
got to be too much, so I avoided it.
Rich told me once, when I came to visit, “I feed this
motherfucker steak, and when you show up I’m chopped liver!”
Woodlea was also a side street, no speeding jerks cutting 30
seconds off of their commute, like on Southern, which was a secondary street.
Once, as I turned left on the steep side street that crested
the ridge just above my house, the old Italian couple who kept a rose
garden on the side of their house befriended me, having seen me pass many
times. They were in their seventies. Asking if I was married, the old man gave
me a pair of roses for my wife and said, “If you ever get in trouble with her
you can stop by and pick her a rose.”
I often stopped and looked at that rose bed, but never did
take him up on the offer.
Further down the way, just above the old Hacienda Mexican
restaurant, which was, at this point a bake-off house for the Woodlea Bakery,
lived two old men. One always had a ladder leaning against his house, which
was a wreck, as was he, looking like some ancient peasant.
Next door lived a fellow who maintained an ornamental
garden, his house pristine, he dressed in slacks, dress shoes, shirt and tie,
even when watering flowers out front.
He had a light sweep of short hair which might have been
blonde before it grayed.
He was a gentle gentleman who often stopped, waved and
said, “Good morning.”
We spoke casually as I walked by on many occasions, usually
about the weather.
He was a nice, lonely man.
One day, a hot summer morning, as I trudged by in my frozen
food attire, carrying an extra shirt, he invited me inside for an iced tea, up
two flights of white, concrete stairs, into…a lady’s palace.
The living room was the sitting room of a delicate woman,
the kind of room my Grandmother LaFond would have arranged had she the space. There
were many brass-framed photos of a young man and a beautiful woman of the
delicate kind.
There were photos—all framed in brass, of this woman as a girl,
as a baby and as a dancer. The type of dancing she did reminded me of ballet
but in a dress. I do not recall what he told me about her art. He was an expert
in everything she had done. He showed no interest in the drab job that had paid for this house and put his son through college. He spoke only of his dear wife,
the dancer and of his son, who had made good and moved off to start a family.
Here this man stood, alone, in his suit, having put on his
jacket to invite me in, next to a short man in worn and dirty work clothes, giving
a tour of the room that was the museum dedicated to his wife.
There was one particular display, a wedge-shaped
piece of elegantly tooled furniture with glass shelves that fit into the corner
of the room. Pictures of his wife winning awards for her dancing were there.
But the thing he treasured most was her brass slippers, made from a mold cast
of her baby shoes. These hung before a silver plaque shaped like a leaf.
He handed me the pair of shiny brass slippers to hold on
their watch-chain cord. Noticing that I was reluctant, he said not to worry
about smudging them, that he polished them every day when he talked to her. I
cannot recall any of his exact words as I had so few conversations with people
at this solitary stage of my life that I was unpracticed in memory. Unless it
was a work or violence situation I could not recall a person’s words.
While taking the slippers back and hanging them in their
place, the man, who never told me his name, as if that were unimportant, shed
silent tears and spoke of waiting too many years to be with her again, of how
he had begun to doubt God for taking her and prayed every day to be with her
again in heaven.
He was the gentlest, most wounded man I have ever met. His
skin was so soft and thin, when I shook his hand I wondered if he was well.
I saw him in his yard a few more times, stood and talked of
plants and things I knew or cared nothing about, like the weather.
Later that year, my life became hectic, work hours long, my
toil-stained mind work-absorbed with the nuances of my enslavement.
I never walked up Woodlea again, once the streets got rougher
and I began leading people that followed me up Southern, where there were more hard
objects scattered in the gutter to fight back with.
The last image I hold of him in my mind is of him standing
bent and tall in a cream-colored suit, watering plants besides the stairs as he
waved with a slight smile at my pacing and I aped him.
Ever since, any time I see a brass thing or notice my skin
thinning with age, I think of him crying, holding that pair of tiny brass
slippers in Her living room.
(c) 2017 James LaFond
