Tag Archive for Preller Family

“I’ll See You Around Campus!”

October 18, 2024 / / One comment

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“I’ll see you around campus!” I call back to my wife as I head out the door. 

It’s an expression I borrowed from my brother Billy, who first started  saying it back in the day. Fifty years ago, more or less. A little joke. For there’s no campus and we’re not eager co-eds from the 1950s. Get it?

And now I’ve adopted that phrase as my own. Not that anyone ever laughs. It’s not about getting a big reaction. The expression pleases me, tickles my fancy; it connects me to my past, and my brother, who I don’t see or talk to much anymore. I know, I know. I am a failed and foolish person. But I still carry Billy around in my failed and foolish heart, echoing his words. 

I also channel Billy’s humor when I inquire of a college student, usually the child of a friend, if he’s met any “co-eds” on campus.  

I can’t explain why that amuses me, or why it has persisted across 45-50 years, but it does. Why fight it? Maybe there’s pleasure derived from their puzzled expressions, the hapless groans. We go through life doing our familiar dance steps, hitting our marks, fulfilling low expectations. The cornball dad and lame jokester, coming at you.

Or I’ll channel my mother when a redoubtable opposing baseball player comes up to the plate in a tight spot, and murmur worryingly, “Oh, he’s trouble.”

When I first heard her say that, Mom was talking about the Cardinals 3B Mike Shannon -— a “dangerous RBI man” in the parlance — and it was probably 1968. The years slide past; the names change. Now Trouble arrives with a new face. These days, baseball-wise, Trouble is named Max Muncy. But the idea remains, the voice of my mother still in my ears. And the reverse, when the New York Mets need a hit, I’ll remember her and repeat her comment, “He’s due.”

Once again I’m watching a ballgame, fretfully, as always, and my dear old Mom miraculously sits beside me, both of us working over the same anxiety. The small agonies of fandom. 

“Hell’s bells,” she’d say, exasperated. 

I love the old expressions. For the charms of a lost language, certainly, but also because they provide a lifeline to the past. And the past is the only place where some of my favorite people still reside. 

Some days I’ll remember an expression out of the blue, unbidden. “For the love of Pete!” my mother used to exclaim. 

Who’s Pete? I’d wonder. Is he a substitute for God? How did Pete get that big job?

I surmise, thinking now, that Pete must be Saint Peter, an important guy once upon a time, busy guarding the gate into heaven, I guess. I wouldn’t know. The expression has fallen from common use, like so many before it.

But oh, it feels good to hear those words coming from my own mouth. Keeping it alive. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she’d cry. My brother’s humor, the expressions of my late mother. Our glorious, battered, yellowing past. Dissolving in my memory. Still clinging to it, connecting with it, even as it fades away, like an old polaroid snapshot left out in the sun. 

Thanks for reading, folks. And in the meantime . . . 

I’ll see you around campus! 

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Category: Family / Tags: , , , ,

In Defense of Living in the Past

December 11, 2020 / / No comments

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They say you shouldn’t live in the past.

“Be present in the here and now.”

But the older I get,

the more past there is.

It keeps piling up.

And, of course, that’s the only place

I can go to visit

some of my favorite people.

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A favorite photo of my father,

Mr. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Not a big drinker, don’t mean

to give that impression.

But he liked his Scotch.

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Back When Dad Used to Give All 7 Kids Haircuts in Front of the Fish Tank

March 31, 2020 / / No comments

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When I was speaking on the phone recently with my son, Nick, we joked about how people were going to emerge from their cocoons after this either in incredible shape or having gained an extra 50 pounds. He said, “And a lot of people are going to need haircuts.”

This triggered a childhood memory: my father used to give us all haircuts. No, he wasn’t an artist; he was an insurance man, running his own business, trying to raise and feed seven children. He cut corners where he could. And he did it with all the grace and delicacy of a sheep shearing.

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As the youngest, I was spared much of that trauma, though I do vividly recall getting plopped in a chair in front of the fish tank. It was bewildering to witness the passionate reactions of my older siblings. You’d think it was the end of the world. For my part, I still have an almost atavistic fondness for the feeling of an electric trimmer going up the sides and back of my head. The whirr and warmth of it. When I get a haircut today, a part of me returns to that time and it’s a comforting memory. But I recall how much my brothers, older and more self-aware, hated those sessions. It was rough stuff.

Dad had a kit that I remember. It was a red and white box that he kept in a closet. I did a search for vintage hair kits, and this image closely resembles the box I recall:

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I asked my brother Al about it, and he wrote: “He didn’t finesse it whatsoever. I disliked hair cuts in general because of how you looked afterward. Kind of shorn looking. His haircuts were pretty crude. He would also hold the top of your head with one hand and use the other to guide the clipper. The top hand would wrench your head around when he wanted to get to a hard to reach area. I suspect I cried.”

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Our beloved barber: “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Not to give the wrong impression!

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Al remembers the haircuts taking place outside our kitchen door during the summer. Barbara says they happened by the swingset in the backyard. Hair everywhere (and image I also recall). She wasn’t sure if Bill or John hated them the most, though probably both. As the best looking boys, they had the most to lose.

Well, what goes around, comes around. I’m sure we’ll be seeing the victims of a lot more home haircuts in the future. Good luck, all. And remember, it’ll grow back!

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Shucking Corn: Memory’s Golden Haze

August 30, 2019 / / 3 comments

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“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye
And it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky”

— Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’

by Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers

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We all have them, the sights and sounds that trigger memories, connect us to our past. The old times. Our long gone days.

For some, it might be the sight of an old red wagon, the bells of an ice cream truck a block away, or the aroma of fresh, baked bread. We see it, hear it, smell it and are magically moved, transported, to another time, another place. Our former lives, the past.

J.K. Rowling plays with the idea of the transporting object in the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, The Goblet of Fire, when she introduces the concept of the portkey. It is an object that, once touched, holds the power to warp space, shifting a body to another place — a portal not unlike Proust’s light, spongey madeleine cakes. In the case of Proust, the experience takes you to another time. One sniff carries you away.

I experience a reliable portkey whenever I shuck an ear of corn, an act which always evokes memories. The stripping away of outer leaves is similar, in affect, to peeling back layers of time. I instantly (and involuntarily) recall being a boy again — standing barefoot at the side of my old red house on 1720 Adelphi Road, that narrow strip of property just outside our kitchen door abutting the Esteps’ place, literally our next door neighbors. I am handed a brown grocery bag and pushed out the door, tasked with the chore of shucking the corn.

There are seven children in our family and this is a job that even the youngest child can’t screw up too badly, though I don’t recall ever having a perfectionist’s patience while pulling away each fine strand of corn silk. I loved tearing away the rugged green leaves, layer by layer, revealing the bright kernels of sweet summer corn. So delicious and suddenly in season, piping hot on our kitchen table in a great steaming bowl, wrapped in a kitchen towel to keep warm.

I still love that job today — shucking the corn — and always volunteer. I even love the word itself: shuck. Aw, shucks. That wonderful “uck” sound: truck and cluck and who knows what else. It’s as fun to say as it is to do. Each time I’m brought to a simpler moment from the past, a childhood ideal. Our family, bustling and busy, together. A time before any of the hard stuff ever happened.

We even had a dinner bell my mother would let me ring. And I’d shout: “Barbara! Neal! John, Al, Billy, Jean! Dinner’s ready!”

And then we look up and the leaves have turned, we blink and they have fallen, and soon we’re wearing sweaters and tramping off in heavy boots. The harvest season is over. The corn spent, the stalks cut, the fields brown and barren. But the golden memory persists.

Some folks talk with disdain about living in the past, as if it were a bad thing. We’re told that we need to focus on the here and now, the life that’s lived in front of our senses. And I suppose they’re right about that. But the older I get, the more past I gather. There are people I love who exist only in my past, exclusively in that long gone time: two brothers, Neal and John, a father, some absent friends. I visit with them only in memory.

Richard Ford, one of my favorite writers, has his most well-known character, Frank Bascombe, make a casual comment about dementia. Frank opines that it’s probably not as bad as it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps not for the circle of loved ones, but for the dementia-sufferer herself. Living in that white-blue haze, staring off at the television screen, watching something or some time, misty and uncertain. The chair my mother sits in becomes a portkey and the crumbling architecture of her mind lifts off, roams and wheels like seagulls above the surf. And there in the lambent light steps forward a flickering image, her youngest child struggling with a heavy brown bag filled with corn, tasked with shucking, peeling away the outer leaves and silky tassel to reveal, once again, those yellow rows of tasty kernels, a bright golden haze on the meadow.

 

 

 

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Category: Family, Musings / Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Father’s Day Tribute: Dad Used to Cover the Lawn with Horse Manure & Other Atrocities

June 15, 2017 / / 2 comments

 

NOTE: I first posted this on my blog back in 2011. Figured it was worth bringing back today, as we warm up for the weekend ahead.

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Dad was the father of seven children, a veteran of World War II who served in the Pacific. After the war, he graduated from Boston University in two and half years, because why in the world would anybody want to waste another minute in school. There was a life to be lived, a brass ring to grab, things to do. Let’s get on with it.

It was a different time, a different generation.

Dad settled with my mother on Long Island, became an insurance man, started having kids rapid fire in the Catholic fashion, built a business. I was the youngest in the family, the baby. On rare weekend days I’d tag along when my father needed to pop into his rented office on Wantagh Avenue for an hour or two. We never specialized in father-and-son type stuff, whatever that was, and I’m sure the word bonding did not apply to relationships back in those days, only glue, but I do recall those trips to his office. Dad’s place of business offered that most wondrous of commodities, office supplies — electric typewriters, staplers, a copier, boxes of paper clips and, best of all, tracing paper.

I marveled at its magical properties. Dad didn’t part with his supply easily, that stuff cost money, so I was thrilled and grateful whenever he brought a stack home. Those are nice memories for me, a lifetime away. I sometimes wonder: Whatever happened to that kid? That boy with the tracing paper? Where’d he go?

From around that time, somewhere in the mid 60’s, another day presses forward for attention. One spring morning we set off together — in the hazy gauze of remembrance, just me and dad — to a farm somewhere. Because dad knew a guy, a customer who had a stable and a few horses. He possessed, in others words, shit to spare. And the price was right.

I must have  been about five or six years old at the time, no older. We got to the farm, out east on Long Island probably, and I stood around while my father chatted with the owner of the place. Maybe I looked into the stable, fearfully eyed the horses. Did I want to feed one of them an apple? No, I did not. I was shy, watchful and quiet. Eventually my dad keyed open the car truck, borrowed a shovel, and filled it to the brim with horse manure. I stood by, mystified, awestruck. Trunk full, steam rising, we headed back home, where I watched my father spread the still semi-moist shit around the front lawn. It was good for the grass, he explained. Nature’s fertilizer.

My older brothers and sisters recall those times with profound mortification. Imagine the embarrassment they felt, the acute stabbing horror, especially those of a certain age, when the opinion of one’s peers meant only everything. I can’t say this plainly enough: My brothers hated it when dad spread horse shit on the front lawn — even worse, on hot days it smelled like holy hell, the stink filling your nostrils — and yet my father performed the same ritual every year.

And here’s the thing about my dad, really the essential memory of him. He didn’t care. Alan J. Preller simply did not give a hoot what anybody thought. He never did. He embarrassed us, he ticked off people, annoyed relatives, said what he thought and did what he did. Dad lived on his own terms, remarkably indifferent to opinion. And if that made him impossible at times, well, so be it. He wasn’t trying to please anybody.

My father passed away a few years back, coincidentally enough while spreading fertilizer out on the front lawn in Southampton, where he retired. He had moved beyond horse manure by then, thank God, nowadays they’d hang you in Southampton for that, but there was still no way he was going to push around one of those crummy lawn spreaders. No, dad preferred a Maxwell House coffee can, dipping it into a big bag of fertilizer, sprinkling it imprecisely across the yard with a grand sweep of his arm. And to be honest, it’s more fun that way. Believe me, I know.

There he was out on the lawn, doing what he always did, and that’s when his heart gave out, when he fell, when my father left us.

These days, when I’m particularly infuriating — insensitive, implacable, impossible — my exasperated wife, Lisa, will proclaim that I’m becoming just like my father.  I won’t listen to anyone, I’ll just do whatever I want. And as I age, it only gets worse. That’s her complaint. The funny thing is, I always hear it as a compliment.

Happy Father’s Day, folks. A good day to pull some weeds, mow the lawn, tend the garden and then, like my father often did, wander into the kitchen, reach into the bottom cabinet where he kept the bottle of Dewar’s, and announce, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Here’s to you, old man. Cheers and memories.

Miss you!

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Category: Family / Tags: , , , , , ,
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