Reflections on being a gentleman of leisure

I was telling an old friend about my life, ruefully bemused. Here I was, a man with a college education, “reduced” to finishing out his work days in retail stores, a menial clerk. This friend, an old friend whom I commonly regard as the big brother I never had, objected to my characterization. I can always count on Roger to see me as part of some noble hero journey. “Yours is a success story!” he said. He sounded so adamant, I dared not gainsay him. I have staggered through much defeat but, as my mother said, I always dusted myself off and carried on. Nothing would crush my spirit. Deli clerk at age 70? So what?

Me at Edgewater Park in Cleveland several years ago. Hey, I’ve got to get back to Ohio to see my peeps, including my sister in Toledo.

But I am no longer at Safeway. I have retired. I was at first afraid to tell Roger, afraid he’d say something like, “Retire? And do what?” He’s three years my senior and still plying his trade. But there’s little parallel between his continued career as a divorce attorney and how I’ve supported myself for several years.

Once you make a decision, you have to follow through. Life is a science experiment. You’ve got to test your hypothesis. For me, it was time.

Deli, famous storewide for being the gig nobody wanted, had finally got to me. I was surrounded by kids “calling out,” blithely informing the store they could not make it. I got shifts dumped on me because of their dereliction. I had no regular schedule, it was all over the place. My wife complained about inability to plan leisure activities and trips. I did it for a long time, happy to be useful. The boss there, a guy about half my age, must have discerned my resentment at his inability or unwillingness to protect me from having to work Thanksgiving. Nothing could remove the eight-hour shift posted. The extra pay was no consolation. I had thought I deserved special treatment, being a senior staff member. No such luck.

I was weighing tortilla chips on the scale, slapping on price tags, when behind me I heard his voice. “Don’t you have some sort of pension or retirement income?”

That did it. I saw the writing on the wall.

“Well, I’m 70 now,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ve waited till now to get my social. In fact, in five days I get my first check.”

“What’ll that mean?” he persisted.

“I guess I’ll quit,” I heard myself say.

And I did.

People all over the store, including Deli, expressed regret at losing me. When I formally announced to this guy, the deli manager, that, yes, I was indeed quitting, he hugged me and thanked me for all my help. And it was genuine. So I have no resentments over this. It was gratifying to be told I’d be missed. I sure didn’t feel that when I left that trade magazine place, or the last school district that employed me as English teacher.

I FELT WISTFUL as I stuck the landing my last day there. As I artfully fashioned then wrapped a Turkey Bacon Avocado sandwich, relishing the oohs and aahs of my customer, I knew I’d miss this. As I shrank-wrapped my tenth submarine sandwich, of the type we put out on the salad island in front of the deli counter, a smoking deal at $7.99, I realized how I’d improved my game at fashioning both kinds of subs, the All-American and the Italian, and I’d miss this too. This feeling of accomplishment. Yes, accomplishment.

A friend from Customer Service begged me not to leave. “Work just two days.” She mentioned one of the older, mature people who worked Deli, said I should have his kind of schedule. But that was not in the cards. I was a utility infielder, plugging gaps in the lineup. There were holes in my worth in Deli. For one, you have to be a practiced cook to be a main dude. I had no prior food-service experience to begin with. I knew how to drop fried chicken and get baked chicken into the oven, how to rack and cook rotisseries, but the plethora of side things – Nathan’s hot dogs, pot pies, not to mention the eight different kinds of wings for the wing bar – had me lost. I hadn’t the energy to do more than I knew how to do, despite my famous old-guy vigor. Nobody knew I was that old. They saw me run around, tipping garbage cans into the dumpster, performing all manner of physical tasks, displaying immense energy. That’s one reason my retirement announcement came as a surprise.

Because of my overall usefulness and maturity, it had been suggested I go for assistant deli manager, and I’d rejected the prospect. First, that was fulltime. This working-in-stores thing, starting several years ago at Walmart, had been about part time, 32 being the max hours I wanted. After shoulder surgery, my requested threshold was less than that now.

I wanted to help out. I didn’t want to be The Man.

That Thanksgiving assignment I made my last day. They even let me go early. I was glad to go. Halfway through building subs, as I left I made sure the kids knew someone had to finish the task. They knew. They said they’d miss me. I said I’d miss being here, but they’d still see me as a customer, I lived nearby.

A sweetheart of a lady who runs Bakery, which shares backroom space and a three-spigot sink with Deli, even made me a big sheet cake with strawberry and whipped cream frosting, which I cut up upstairs in the break room for the people, telling everybody I had three Thanksgiving pies waiting for me at home already. My Safeway comrades devoured that cake. I mean to go back to Safeway to thank Bree, the bakery chief, who wasn’t there for me to hug the day I left. I’m getting misty as I write this.

So, what have I been doing? Going to the gym, reading Zadie Smith, winterizing my RV, and, after a cleansing fight, coming to terms with a wife who’ll have to get used to me hanging around the house more. So far, I don’t regret this. But I have the kind of mind that figures if I’m happy I must be missing something.

I thought she’d give me heat. I never exactly turned into Stephen King as a writer; I got the feeling Barb was within her rights to see me as a man whose consummate skill was as a laborer. She’s always worked me hard, even been tough on me, but that’s okay, it’s made me a better, humbler man.

I said the other day, testing the waters, “Well, we’ll see how this goes. If I can’t handle being retired, I guess I can beg for my old job back.”

Barb did not hesitate to reply, “I don’t see that happening.”

Welcome the nuts and crazies

I grew up surrounded by eccentrics. As Thanksgiving approaches, I muse over a family tradition of opening the door to oddballs.

That’s how I grew up. Our family Thanksgivings inconvenienced me as much as they inspired me, but I remember them with a glow that increases each year. Today’s political and cultural climate suggests eccentricity has lost its juice. We are in danger of swirling everybody in the Internet-cliché blender into one homogeneous porridge.

At the Gitlin family Thanksgivings, one had to develop a tolerance for those living outside the pale of normality.

At our Thanksgivings, I had to put up with the Wanne sisters, two cranky spinsters Mom kept in touch with after her first marriage, to their brother, ended with his demise in World War II. They weren’t very nice. One was  vaguely pretty, the other tall and lumpish. They sat at table silent, glowering. One time I drove the shorter one home and, trying to be gentlemanly, came around the car to open the door for her. Clambering out, she batted away the proffered hand. “Don’t touch me! I can get out without your help.” Life lesson: not everybody loves you. And that’s fine. And she and her sister would be back for turkey, stuffing, and pies next year, both ever haughtily chill.

And then there was an old, weird uncle who once, in his usual state of ghoulish imperviousness, at this point bordering on senility, wobbled palsy-necked up to the den TV and switched to Lawrence Welk the football game a rapt roomful of men was watching. When he drifted back out, in a few minutes, one of us eased off the couch and switched it back to the Lions-Packers. Nothing need be said. Thanksgiving at the Gitlin house.

Then there was a New York character, never married, who opposed my parents’ leftist politics and cracked my grandmother up with her attempts to speak Yiddish. Her name was Janice but everybody called her Jockey. An unpublished novelist, she was no mean storyteller. Jockey held me and my older sister Lisa spellbound with a recounting of Les Miserables, as concocted not by Broadway but by Victor Hugo himself: a cosmic drama of deception, theft, and conflict. Vast bosomed, magisterial, with a distinctive overbite, she’d tried her hand at historical fiction. She told me and Lisa about an idea set in eighteenth century Ireland, but I don’t know if she ever sat down to write it. She’d worked for a newspaper in Cleveland, but she didn’t have to work. Jockey lived on an inheritance from her dad’s Puerto Rico sugar plantation (how exotic is that?). Years later I would show her a bad autobiographical novel I’d written. She pulled no punches. “You’re blaming your father for your own failings.” This prickly, aging woman lived in Greenwich Village and saw us when she came to town. She was my favorite of the cast of misfits welcomed in the Gitlin house.

Rounding out the cast was Cousin Morris, a bum with a loud, grating way of trying to insinuate himself into conversations. The brother of one of my mom’s commie cousins, he lived downtown in a flophouse and sold see-through socks to pimps. Seeming incongruities round out the edges of things: he was oddly handsome and square-jawed, if a few days unshaved. Mom told me he was so negligent of basic hygiene that a foot doctor, reeling at the stench let loose by removal of his shoes, had thrown him out of his office. Cousin Morris was at our house a lot, not just Thanksgiving. When I remember him I also remember my English cousin, product of an uncle’s marriage to a Yorkshire woman he’d met in WWII. When Becky visited us in summer of 1968, she came steaming over to me and Lisa and seethed, “Ooooh, that Morris thing. I was watching the telly and he came in and said, ‘So, Becky, they have television in England?’ Ooooh.” Dad’s wry take: “They had it before we did.” I think of Cousin Morris when, in my naïve enthusiasms and unchecked curiosity, I rub people the wrong way.

Secular Jews all at the Gitlin Thanksgivings, nobody said grace or anything like that. Nor was it an alcoholic event. You were more likely on your second piece of pie than another beer while watching NFL. But in a way these were sacred events for me, the germination of a profound recollection. There was a kind of ambient thrumming hilarity because of the motley cast. I’m grateful for that crazy household with its open door. It was never boring.