Iterations of Irritation

The voice of the female sitting right behind me had the qualities of a well-honed taser. And yes, the pitch, intensity and power were disabling my volunteer faculties. And it went on and on. Spewing stuff I had no business or interest in hearing.

But it was now 20 minutes after the scheduled 7:30 pm start of the Saturday night performance of "Sleeping Beauty." The conductor was positioned at his podium, repeatedly looking over his shoulder for some magical signal. And wait. And wait some more. I wondered later if there had been a scheduling screw up of ecclesiastical proportions. Daylight Savings time now starts early. There were Seventh-day Adventist musicians in the orchestra. The sun was just now setting.

Mercifully, the lights dimmed. The "A" note sounded. Harmonics of intervals, fifths and fourths were adjusted in the cacophony of bedlam. And then the overture commenced.

I did forget the taser experience.

The "Sleeping Beauty" set was dramatic. The supporting characters made their nuanced entrances. King and Queen and baby princess Aurora wrapped in lace. Dancing fairies. Dotting cavaliers. Matronly court ladies. Pages to the fairies. The stage awash in brilliant color and flashing motion.

And then that woman.

The woman sitting in the row in front of me just to my left. The woman with the camera. One of those new-fangled digital things with the big bright screen on the backside which means you have to hold it out in front of you to be able to see what the camera sees. Of course Mrs. Canon Nikon Kodak had to hold it high enough to clear the heads in front of her. And fiddle with it. And the poor camera went berserk with confusion in its auto-focus and color compensation frantic attempts. So the annoying bright spectacle simply had to capture my eye. And this went on. And on. And on. And I wanted to break her arm. And I bit the inside of my cheek. And decided I would be a pacifist about this and in the mercy of whatever gods there are, it would come to an end.

The middle acts weren't photographed as much. But in the last scene, where Princess Aurora and Prince Desire are entangled in the web of matrimony, Mrs. C.N. Kodak held her camera steady on one stoutly court attendant regaled in flowing blue. And the more frustrated I got with not only on what she was doing, but how she was doing it. She aimed the camera at only one spot. Some motionless matronly court attendant in that blue floor-length frock. She made no attempt at all of trying to capture the motion and athleticism of the dancers. What was possessing her mind? Especially with the camera being constantly confused, cycling back and forth trying to get a fix on something for auto focusing, and the color bleaching out and going black in trying to compensate for the theatrical intensities in the lighting.

Finally the curtain call. People stand up. Mrs. Kodak photo woman stands up. A women behind me leans over and shouts at her "Madam! Madam!" until photo woman turns around. "Do you have any idea how distracting that camera was to the people behind you?!" And now I could see the profile of Mrs. C. N. K. She looked like a fifty year old teenager. The hair. The glasses. Something out of "Under the Yum Yum Tree. " She really needed the original of the Kodak Brownie instead of the high faluttin' thing she was fighting with. And she sweetly smiled and said, "I'm sorry." And I rechanneled a previous taser and fired at her "It was terrible."

This morning The Friends gathered in silence in the Faculty Lounge of Olin Hall on the Whitman College campus. The usual sign was on the door to notify passersby and any that are entering that The Friends meeting was in session and to enter in silence.

The silence is sacred.

After about 15 minutes, we heard the door open. And then some clanging. A lot of clanging. And banging. And water running. And the silence was shattered. My frustration level was on simmering irritation.

The "intruder" left. But returned again in a few minutes.

The worship leader got up. I looked around. I assume it was female by the length of the hair. The face was so very Mongolian/Asian. I looked back down. Closed my eyes. The leader escorted the woman to the door.

The silence was re-assembled.

In that silence I had to think about irritation . . . pacifism . . . tolerance . . . when enough is enough.

Later, in the post silence discussion, the leader told us that she was a visiting professor from Asia. She had come in to make some coffee. She had never heard of Quakers. Entering in silence, to her, meant she was not to talk. She learned something. I could understand.

We talked of Christopher Hitchens' appearance on Bill Maher's Show the previous Friday night. How the Quakers made it into a one-liner about being the "non-violent one" of the world's religions.

When it came my turn to share something of interest from my week, I couldn't help but express my irritation with irritation. The talking woman. The photo woman. The coffee woman. It was not that they were all woman. It was the irritation of invaded space.

Then Nancy, the statesman lady of this fellowship of The Friends, suggested that that photo lady might have been photographing one of the local dancers. I objected, as I had earlier read in the newspaper that this was a professional ballet company from Eugene, OR. But Nancy told me yes and no, there were a number of locals in supportive roles. You could tell them from the lean and lithe professional dancers, like Prince Desire with his micro-thin spray-on spandex flesh-colored leotards that separated the cleavage of his buns of steel and revealed revealing bulges on bulges in the protrusion of his basket. Nancy didn't say that! But she did say that the locals were the big plump ones! The ones that didn't/couldn't move around with all that agility.

And then it hit me.

Photo woman Mrs. Canon Nikon Kodak. Motionless Court Lady in big blue dress. Anthropometrics of similarity between the two. Pictures of a once-in-a-life-time experience.

And now.

I am irritated with myself.

The Refectory Manager

The Ode to a New Day

It would be some time before the sun could sublime Jack Frost's fractal ferns painted on the kitchen window. The front door had already been cracked open to retrieve the two frozen bottles of milk from the front step, left there in the early morning hours by the milkman. The shivering milkman's horse, jostling the leather strap of horse-bells while patiently plodding up the street behind him, was pulling the Palm Dairies Milk wagon, loaded with glass bottles of frozen milk stuck to wire-frame baskets. Forty below zero is the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

The retrieved milk bottles were sitting on the kitchen counter. The cream was sticking up a good inch from the neck of the glass bottle. A little cardboard cap perched precariously on top. And once again, the raspy indention on that frozen cream, made by the licking tongue of the neighbor's cat, would infuriate mother.

But the noises in the kitchen.

The newsreader on CFCN 1060 droning on about Korea. Something more about Eisenhower. And the frantic counting by my mother. The counting in reverse. This time for heating the formula bottle in the pan of hot water on the stove. An interruption in the count-down would end up scalding the milk. My little sister, perched in her high chair, was squawking to be fed and would have to wait longer. And then the counting again, this time necessary for making unburned toast. The old General Electric toaster was all manual. And to ignore it was to offer burnt sacrifices to the morning gods. Counting down from twelve would prevent incense of burnt brown bread from rising to the ceiling.

The pot of Sonny Boy cereal was bubbling on the old gas stove. Years later I would see those same thermal dynamics of explosive steam vents at Yellowstone Park. The old gas stove however, had seen a lot of spouted cereal eruptions. But before that could happen, it would take another Eddy strike-any-where match to ignite that stinky Canadian Natural Gas into a pop and then flicker of flame. And how the oven could singe your eyebrows if you weren't quick enough to get the lit match into the little hole in the center front of the cavity after turning the oven gas on.

Sonny Boy was a real-boy's porridge. A little different from its main competitor Red River Cereal. But far different from the Ogilvie Rolled Oats, with its play-money buried in the contents of the cardboard canister. Play money that we dutifully collected and took to school to accumulate enough to redeem for baseball bats and stuff. But then there was the sweetness and blandness and sissiness of Cream of Wheat. That was the delicate cereal for a weekend treat. But Sonny Boy was a multitude of cracked whole grains, generously infused with flax seed so the effect for some was more like Runny Boy cereal. And this porridge demanded its full 20 minutes of cooking. A time that seemed to correlate in some way as a function to the length of time it would stick to one's ribs.

And then the cat. Our cat. Not the one that licked the cream. Meowing and promoting the annoying staggering and stumbling in her persistence to get my mother's attention to be fed. Which then meant my digging out a glob of Perky cat food from the cat-food encrusted can, opened with the cat-food encrusted crank can-opener, scooped with the cat-food encrusted cat food knife and flipping the glob into the cat-food encrusted cat dish. And the more dead that that Perky cat food smelled, the more the cat seemed to relish it. And the more my nose would turn into a turnip as I did my "chore."

The little kitchen was laid out with a U-shaped counter. The far side had the kitchen sink with the frosted-over kitchen window. That section was also the location of the "junk" drawer with a small arsenal of household tools to include an awl that was used to punch little holes in the top of the canned-milk can. Behind the door, that opened onto the back porch and was adjacent to the counter was sequestered the "wooden stick." That was the means of implementing discipline. And one soon learned to never "hide" the wooden stick.

The dish cupboard was hanging above the bottom side of the "U." In it were the stacks of plates and bowls and cups. And a mystery of unfathomable intrigue as to how my Dad could wipe the top of the top plate, and the bottom of the bottom plate, in his process of drying a stack of plates, and then shuffle the bottom plate to the top and keep everything wet wet, and dry dry, and swipe the newly exposed surfaces again. Within my reach of that overhead cupboard, was a set of embossed red and green and blue aluminum glasses. Just perfect for seeing the top of the cold milk by the position of the condensed moisture on the outer surface. An early object lesson in abstract reasoning.

The near side of the counter-top-U was open and served to divide the kitchen from the little dining alcove. The end of that section of the counter was round and consisted of a bottom shelf and middle shelf extension. That middle shelf was just the right height for me to stir a bowl of new fangled store-bought cake mix, my earliest endeavors in the construction of the cuisine of comestibles .

The chrome kitchen table with four matching padded chairs was nestled within that little alcove between the open counter and the back of the front room wall. It was a haven of refuge. And was just big enough to let all of us, Grandpa Martin and Uncle Scotty too when they came for Christmas, to sit there and eat cold turkey sandwiches with mustard and drink hot cocoa. Interrupted by secret trips to the back porch where Uncle Scotty would let me sip Coca-Cola and I would wonder how he could use bottoms of broken Coca-Cola bottles for his glasses.

The wall opposite the counter sequestered the gas stove and ice box. The kind of ice box that used real ice, blocks of ice, from the ice plant out on the Bow River. The kind where the iceman came down the back alley with his truck, and carried the block of ice, slung on a huge grappling hook, into the kitchen, dripping a path of water on his way. The kind of ice, on a hot day in the summer, when we would follow the ice man and he would give us little broken-off pieces for us to suck. The kind of ice box where even in the winter if we were to be treated by ice cream, I would be dispatched to run down to Alaska Grocery on the corner right after supper, to get a pint brick of Neapolitan for dessert.

By now, the Sonny Boy was ready.

The amount sufficient to stick to my ribs until lunch was meted out into my bowl. The frozen and exposed cream had melted enough to be poured onto the irregular mounds of mush so as to make rivers and lakes separating the hills and valleys of the contour of swollen cracked multi-grains. A little brown sugar added character, color, and contentment. Careful stirring could elicit experiments in the hydraulics of bursting dams and flooded porridge planes.

The little glass of Sun-Rype B.C. apple juice with the big words "Fortified with Vitamin C" blaring on the can's blue wrapper was simply the conjunction of marketing, nutrition and government policy. Canada grew no oranges. Apples are notoriously low in vitamin C. So fortifying Canadian apple juice with ascorbic acid fought off scurvy in kids and balance of trade problems for Canada.

A piece of brown bread toast smeared with that awful white oleo-margarine*, a spoonful of raspberry jam from the Empress Jam tin, a little skim milk in a little glass, a Jap orange . . . all the accompaniments to round out the complexity of Sonny Boy cereal.

The radio guy was still droning. The overheated formula bottle had cooled enough to quiet the baby sister. Dad was off and on his way. My egg-salad sandwich lunch was packed. I was bundled up for the frigid trek to school.

The little kitchen could be cleaned up a little later.

Now, it was my mother's moment of refuge to sit for a few minutes at the piano in the front room. She would flip through the hymnal and find some ode to the new day.

The Refectory Manager


*The dairy farmers of Alberta had enough political clout to prohibit the sale of yellow-colored margarine in the Province of Alberta. There was however, a little packet of beta-carotene that was included in the package and one could "color" the margarine on their own if they insisted.

Runions' Shoes

The excitement in the air was simply palpable. The newness of it all. New school year. New teacher. New books. New clothes. New shoes. New blisters on the heels.

Oh boy! New shoes!

The new clothes, however, arrived in a big paste-board box from the mail-order house Simpson-Sears*. And of course it was so thrilling, yet so disconcerting, to hold up new flannel lined jeans that would finally fit perfectly next June when the school year was over. It meant I would have to roll the cuffs up half-way to my knees. But hey! The exposed flannel lining with that Scotch plaid pattern wasn't so awfully sissy looking after all.

But the shoes.

For new shoes, that meant a trip to Runions' Shoes.

The corner of Center Street North and 16th Avenue was a bustling little hub of commerce. A few store fronts south, on the east side of Center Street, Runions' Shoes was one of those old hole-in-the-wall narrow places of business with the bi-lateral display windows flanking the inset center doorway.

Opening the door not only rang a bell to jangle the auditory sense, but my nose was punched with a tsunami of the essence of tanned leather and shoe polish, old wood and stale air. The worn floor planking invited the way in. And to enter meant to jog to the left or to the right. For down the center of the store was a row of alternating circular tiered tables, displaying pumps and oxfords, wedge heels and high heels, patents and baby shoes, and the ubiquitous running shoes, and chrome-framed chairs with black leather seats and backs holding sway to a few matching chrome-framed shoe-salesman stools. And sitting ki-yi'd on an a few of those empty chairs were those foot-size measuring contraptions that would promote the obligatory "Oh my! How your feet have grown!"

The narrow, cavernous store was lined on each side with shelf upon shelf of shoe boxes. So high that rolling ladders would be rolled back and forth and then climbed upon by old Mr. Runions, gussied-up in his black and gray-striped pants, white shirt, red and blue striped bow-tie and horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose, to find just the right shoe box for the style and color and size in question.

Since this was fall, it was the time for leather shoes. New running shoes wouldn't come until next spring. And so I got to look at, and hold, and smell, and feel, and fondle and press against my cheek brown leather shoes and black leather shoes and then be forced into making a decision with consequences lasting to at least the Queen's birthday the next spring. And when I had made my selection, with Mother's frowning approval, Mr. Runions pushed the ladder, climbed up, and pulled out a stiff paste-board box, coded with the glyphs signifying only to shoe salesmen, the style and color and size.

I climbed up into a cold chrome chair. Mr. Runions pulled over his stool in front of me. He lifted the lid, and inserted the box into the now inverted lid. After setting the box on the floor, he unfolded the paper. Lifted out the right shoe. Pulled the lace out and finished lacing up the shoe. He whipped out a shinny shoe-horn from his back pocket and proceeded to wedge my how-your-foot-has-grown appendage into that stiff protective confinement of new shoe. Mr. Runions laced it up. Tight. I was instructed to stand up. It was supposed to feel good. Mother and Mr. Runions had already had the discussion about how they were to be six sizes too big for me so they would fit me just fine until running shoe season would come around next May.

Mr. Runions told me to wiggle my toes. He pressed down on them. The dimple in the toe of the shoe was noticeable. My mother nodded in approval. But you can't really, really tell for certain, unless you actually look.

And that came next.

The most fascinating part of the whole trip to Mr. Runions' Shoes.

Towards the back, just across from the sales counter was the machine. I stepped up on the little platform. Shinnied up close to the thing and inserted my feet into two oversize mouse-hole grottos. There were three oval viewing-scopes on top. One for me. One for Mom. One for Mr. Runions. And to peer into that oval was to see the mystery of my life. The yellow greeniness of it all. The outline of the shoes. The opaqueness of my toes. The blackness of the little disconnected bones . And I wiggled my toes and curled them up and watched the flexing and the reflexing with awe-struck amazement of the ingenuity of it all. I never heard a word of the conversation between Mom and Mr. Runions about how much space there was between my toes and the months-away Queen's birthday.

The shoe-salesman's fluoroscope was magic to my flesh. And I so hated to be dragged away from that thing. It wouldn't be until years later that I was told of the near lethal doses of x-rays that those machines emitted.

But the next event in the shoe store's enticements was watching and listening to Mr. Runions write up the sale on the Moore Business Forms aluminum sales ticket holder.

After packaging the shoes back into the box, pulling on the string from the spool of string perched high over-head, tying up the box with a little flair of the wrists resulting in a square knot, snipping the string from its source, then pulling the pencil from behind his ear, another enticing little ritual was about to be played out.

The writing up of the sale.

His pencil made that kind of hollow sound on the triplicate sales ticket exposed on the top surface of the Moore Business Forms aluminum continuous sales-ticket case. With the total calculated on an old hand-cranked adding machine and then annotated on the ticket, he pushed the little lever on the side of the case and the triplicate sales ticket ejected out the top end and pulled a fresh new order form from the embedded reservoir of continuous forms hiding inside. The ripping sound was simply neat as he tore off that sale and detached it from the case. The white copy he gave to my mother. The pink copy was stuffed into the little drawer at the bottom of the case. The yellow copy was set beside the big old National Cash Register for reference. He spread-eagled his fingers and thumbs to press the appropriate keys to ring up the sale. With a crunch and ring, the cash drawer popped open while simultaneously, numbers came flying up behind the glass window at the top. After making the change, pushing the cash drawer back in, the yellow copy got spindled on the spindle of yellow copies quivering beside the register.

Now, re-wearing my old worn-out running shoes that now fit perfectly and smelled like dead fish, I clutched a box of brown leather and odiferous new shoes like it was the most precious cargo in the whole world.

It wouldn't be for a few days yet that I would remember just how much new, hard, stiff, leather shoes, could hurt. Ameliorated, or course, with the remembrance of the joy of a trip to Runions' Shoes.



*Simpson Sears was the corporate name of the Canadian division of Sears Roebuck. Both are now known simply as Sears.


The Refectory Manager

The Unintended Purpose

I entered the room and quietly waited for my turn. But it was the movements of another that caught my eye. There was something going on that was not a part of the intended purpose of that room.

He was at the far wall, standing next to the last sink. His back was toward me. I could hear the howl of the air dryer. He seemed to be hunching over it, but it was the movement of his arms that was not typical. And then there was that scrunched up black garbage bag at his feet.

After a few moments, he knelt down and pushed a pair of still-damp white athletic socks into the plastic bag.

And pulled out a pair of obviously soiled tighty-whities.

He positioned himself in such a way as to try and hide what he was doing, as if he were ashamed or something. But what he did do was un-scrunch that precious piece of wadded-up laundry, hold it under the hand-soap dispenser, hit the button a couple of times to dispense a blob of blue hand soap, wet the assembly under the sink spout, rub the folds of cloth together to make a lather, rub it on the impromptu scrub board of counter top, rinse, and turn to the hot air blow dryer.

For a moment I could see his profile. So similar to that iconic Charleston-Heston/Moses-in-the-Ten-Commandments-billboard-poster look.

And in that public men's restroom in a Pasco, Washington Public Library, godliness was doing cleanliness.

The Refectory Manager