Archive 11/15/11

 

   

"LIKE HELL IT'S YOURS!"

                                                                  

This past Saturday afternoon,

Seeking comfort, companionship, by taking refuge from aloneness,

I slipped into my parents' derelict home,

Unnoticed, I suppose, by all but their ghosts,

Looming amidst dust motes, floating in the half-shadows,

Exposed by sun shafts casting through the windows

As if in hope of awakening the residence's sleeping memories,

Bringing the past back from afterlife, to life prior,

Or at least inviting the house to speak its mind's secrets.

 

I did what I've done when seeking my father, since his death:

I sequestered myself behind his basement desk,

The one from which he held forth,

At 1128 Washington Avenue, as Biltwell Co.'s president,

For five prodigiously successful decades,

And just let my reflections transport me

All the way back to that irretrievable time of his Herculean vitality,

When no amount of expendable energy was exhaustible

And the impossible was as easy for him to accomplish as willing it.

 

As I've frequently done, over the past nine years,

I opened the single center and five side drawers,

Ran my fingers through his eclectic collection of odds and ends —

Those trifles my dad, with his pack-rat mentality,

Accumulated because, to him, they were priceless,

Among them myriad business cards from restaurants

In New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles;

Measuring tapes and money clips from fabric companies;

Pens and match packs with hotel logos; keys to forgotten locks.

 

One particular memento, a white advertising card, drew me to it,

By shouting out, with oversize lettering, in black ink,

"LIKE HELL IT'S YOURS!

This HAT Belongs To ______________________

Address __________________________________

               BUT you can get one like it from

    LEVINE HAT MFG. CO.

1416 Washington Ave. • St. Louis, Mo. 63103

231-3359           UNION MADE" —

 

This echo of an era when a man's hat was, year-round, de rigueur,

Tapping into the lingo, the idioms of the day,

That goes-without-saying "pep" of the WWII generation,

The optimistic spirit of the times and "can-do" worldview,

Which allowed the United States and my father, included,

To assert its/his "go-getter" attitude toward life . . .

This resonance, reverberation, of America's glory days,

In the decade following our defeats of the Nazis and the "Japs,"

When the skies, the stars, God Himself, were the limit . . .

 

One well-preserved artifact my father chose to keep close,

To remind him of the time when he waged his own war

And declared himself victor over his destiny's chief competitors . . .

That card meant to be filled out and tucked, neatly,

Beneath the inner band of a Cavanagh, Bee, Dobbs, Beaver Brand —

Those quintessential symbols of that era's male . . .

That card to which my father had pinned eight buttons,

Each, meant to be stuck to the outer band of a dress hat,

Proclaiming a particular forties attitude or streetwise philosophy . . .

 

Eight white tin lithographed buttons, rimmed in red,

Capturing, in blue, slogans my father would have smiled at:

"NOTHING DOING"; "SO'S YOUR OLD MAN";

"THE FLEET IS IN"; "TELL IT TO THE MARINES";

"I AM A RED HOT MAMA"; "IS THAT SO?";

"DON'T SWEAR. IT SOUNDS LIKE H."; "DID YOU EVER?" . . .

That card which I filled out, with my name and address,

And placed inside the Cavanagh Dad gave me before he passed,

On whose outer band I stuck all eight buttons.

 

 

 

 

11/15/11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 

 
   
Site contents Copyright © 2017, Louis Daniel Brodsky
Visit Louis Daniel Brodsky on Facebook!