Old Neighbors

           

                                                      “Old Neighbors”

                                                        By Noel Laflin
                                                         January 2002



                                                                  







            “Well,” my dad asked, for what he hoped would be the last time, “do we have everything?”

            “Ya, Ya,” Frieda answered, sniffing back a tear.  “Dat’s all.  Ve go now.”

            The final suitcase was loaded in my father’s Ford. Most of the other small knickknacks had been boxed, taped, addressed and shipped ahead the previous week.  My parents and I had already moved and stored much of Frieda and Eric’s better furniture in the rafters of our garage.  Everything else had been given away.

 Eric was wheeled out of the house and gently helped into the front passenger’s seat.  I locked their front door and joined Frieda in the back seat.  My dad took the driver’s position, started the engine and carefully backed out of the short driveway.  My mother waved and dabbed at her eyes as we slowly pulled away down Flower Street.  We were halfway down the block when Frieda suddenly screamed:

 “Oh, mine Got!  Mine teeth!” which sounded like ‘teth’, as the lower plate was missing from her mouth. “Ve forget mine teeth!” she cried once more.

 Dad slowly braked to a halt and sighed.  My back seat companion instinctively threw both hands over her tightened lips and suppressed a girlish laugh.  Although Frieda, at age seventy, was no spring chicken, she suddenly now looked all of twelve, under the influence of giggles, as she currently was.  I slapped her on the back and hooted hysterically beside her.  Eric, sensing embarrassment, began swearing gruffly in German under his breath. Frieda and I laughed all the harder.

            My dad, appreciating the humor, but trying not to let on, patiently backed the car up the street and explained the situation, out the open window, to my curious mother, who was still standing in the driveway.  The empty house was reopened and the missing false teeth were eventually located in a water glass in the old bathroom.  Frieda popped them back in place smacked her lips and announced once more:

 “OK, ve go again!” 

          And off we drove to LAX, in search of Lufthansa Airlines.  Eric and Frieda were returning to a home they had abandoned almost forty-five years before. They would find family and care there. Eric was going home to die.

  

            The stroke Eric had suffered eighteen months previously had done great damage to this tough, short, hardheaded German.  Our dog was the first to alert us to the change in Eric, as she barked at him incessantly when he entered our back gate one Sunday afternoon.  She had never made such noise with Eric before as she adored the man who lived just two doors down.  But that day, she sensed something strange coming into her domain. The once jaunty neighbor (who had inspired me all throughout childhood to be as sharp on US History as he) had, overnight, become this shuffling old man, with the left side of his face noticeably sagging. He now struggled with a simple gate latch.  His speech was slurred as he called out for my mom and dad.

 I was nineteen years old and had never seen anything like this before. Although I did not know what the problem was, I could clearly see the difference in our old friend and neighbor.  My folks knew immediately.  Eric had not even realized, I don’t believe, that he’d suffered a stroke.  But he knew something was wrong, nonetheless, and had come for help from his old friends and neighbors of twenty-five years.  It was, unfortunately, the first of more debilitating strokes to come.  He was soon hospitalized and after his return home, confined to a wheel chair.  Over the course of the next year, Eric’s fire was nearly out.  He and Frieda made plans to sell the house and return to Germany, where family could care for him, free government health care would be provided and where he could be laid to rest in the old Fatherland of his birth.  He and Frieda had been away for more than four and a half decades.  It had been a long journey for each of them.

Eric had been a young cabin boy aboard a German Merchant Marine vessel when it was blown out of the water by the British in the First World War.  He carried a metal plate in his head ever after, which he would point out to me as he doffed his trademark cap on numerous occasions throughout my childhood. He would then curse the British, once again, in both English and German, at the old memory.  

As he was the first man to ever give me steady, gainful employment at the tender age of eleven, mowing his yards (both front and back at fifty cents a pop), I was a captive, if not always grateful, pupil for at least one to two hours a week as he oversaw my mowing, trimming and cleanup procedures. He would quiz me as to which city each state capital belonged and lecture me on current events, while either criticizing my slipshod answers or helping me with the landscaping task at hand.  He would take time to show me the spelling and punctuation mistakes he would find and circle daily, in red pen, in our local newspaper.  He was fiercely proud of both his English grammar as well as his American Citizenship and tutored me tediously on the finer points of governmental happenings as well as the poor journalism that could be found in the Anaheim Bulletin, right-wing rag that it was.  He tended to vote a straight Democratic ticket and explained his leftist views quite eloquently every Saturday.

            I might have swallowed it whole, without question, had I not also worked for another elderly neighbor, Ralph, whose views were slightly right of Barry Goldwater.  Ralph extolled the virtues of the John Birch Society, the failings of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and viewed the United Nations with great suspicion as he followed both me and the old push mower about his front and back yards each week.  Having just come from Eric’s yards, where I had been indoctrinated on the finer points of John Kennedy’s brilliant conception and success of the Peace Corps and the tragedy of the young President’s untimely death, I was suddenly thrown a political curve ball once I hit Ralph’s turf.

 In the early days, I was one confused boy.  As I grew older I tended to bounce opposing views off of each of them just to get a rise out of them both.

 Having come from a home that pretty much mirrored Eric’s thinking, Ralph and I found ourselves at political odds with one another nearly every Saturday afternoon.  Being young, cocky, immature and mostly, just plain full of myself, I would egg Ralph on with one outlandish view or another.  I felt childishly superior to this old conservative crank of a neighbor. 

 He caught me off-guard one day, however, and taught me a lesson, which I hold dear to this day.  I must have been all of thirteen or thereabouts, when I said something very stupid, or at the very least, not well-thought out.  As soon as I had spoken my mind, I knew instinctively, that I had said it in a mean spirited fashion. Ralph just look at me and said:

 “You know, Noel, you should always chew your words very carefully before you spit them out.”

I felt devastated, as I knew he was right.  This simple, sage advice has served me well all of these many years later.  I have either chewed hard or choked on my words ever since. 

 There was also one other sound piece of advice, which he imparted to me one other Saturday afternoon.  I was raking leaves when he told me that rubbing alcohol was the best remedy for pimples, and the most inexpensive.  I found, here too, over the course of acne-prone adolescence and adulthood that he was right on the money about that as well. 

 Staunchly conservative, kind, old and wise was Ralph.  He was a worthy political adversary and ultimately a splendid teacher for this young hothead.

  So, in the end, it was Ralph’s wise advice and paper currency that I could spend; it was Eric’s silver half dollars that I saved, as he always made it a point to pay me with an old Standing Liberty, Ben Franklin or real silver Kennedy half.  Sometimes, Eric’s remuneration came in the form of an old silver dollar, from the previous century.  I still have most of those old coins to this day; silver memories, as they are, of my old German neighbor who taught me the finer points of American democracy and proofreading at the same time. 

My gardening, as well as manners, improved greatly under the supervision of these fine gentlemen. 

 

From a young age, however, I could see sadness dwelling within the homes of both of these neighbors.

In the case of Ralph and his wife, Ethel, I believe their melancholy was rooted in the loss of their only boy, some years before.  He was killed during the Second World War.  His portrait, a black and white photo of a smiling young man in uniform sat atop the piano in their living room. 

          I had been in their home on numerous occasions and had seen the photo many, many times. I would stare at that old picture, as Ethel would feed me cookies and milk.   Whereas Ralph was always natty in appearance, with neatly trimmed silver hair harshly parted to the side and gold spectacles looking quite proper on his person, Ethel was quite the opposite.  She was a strange looking woman, with unruly, wild gray hair and an intense stare, which could unnerve anyone, let alone a kid, like me.  She would fill my head with tales of her childhood, which must have taken place somewhere in the Middle Ages, to my young way of thinking, and then just stop and look at the old photo on the piano, and grow silent. Ralph always treated her most kindly, patting her hand, as she grew quiet, staring off, as she frequently did, into another realm, perhaps another era.

          I caught on quickly that there was a void in both of their lives.  They just dealt with their loneliness in different ways. 

         Ralph perfected the art of conservative politicking and sage advice on the kid who mowed his lawn. 

        Ethel found solace in the guise of a mean little Pomeranian she named Joey.  One could not pet the thing without risking a nasty nip from that red-haired, ill-tempered tidbit of a dog.

       Neighborhood kids, like me, became their adopted children over time. I believe our presence must have helped.  I would like to hope so, these many years later.

Looking back on it, both Ralph and Ethel were old, even when I was very young.  I do not know if Ethel had ever worked outside the home, but Ralph had been long retired by the time I was big enough to jump their fence and bug Ethel for a cookie or, as I grew older and bolder, ask Ralph if I could mow his two yards for a dollar a week. 

Eventually, over the years, my ancient push mower was upgraded to a power gas mower.  And by the time I had to give up the job altogether, and move on with the process of growing up and moving out, Ralph and Ethel had become downright ancient, in my eyes.

Despite his age, Ralph was still an engaging and interesting man.  Ethel, on the other hand, continued to grow unstable, showing clear sighs of dementia.  Poor Ralph cared for her as best he could.  When he was no longer able to do so adequately, he quietly placed her in a convalescence home, where he still attended to her wild daily whims.  Over time, however, she failed to recognize even her husband of many decades, and died. 

Ralph followed her, in time.

I hope they both found the handsome young man in the portrait that had sat atop the piano all those years. He had been waiting for them for quite some time.

 For the life of me, I don’t recall what happened to the Pomeranian.  I hope he too found Ethel, in the next world, as she was the only one that could ever love him.

 Some sadness should only last for so long.  

 Whereas Ralph and Ethel had successfully given birth to and raised a young man, albeit for a shorter than hoped for time, our other elderly neighbors, Eric and Frieda had always been childless.  This of course, lent a certain amount of melancholy to their lives, as well.

So, they in turn, like Ralph and Ethel, raised a dog they named Heidi. She was their surrogate child.  Heidi was a large German Shepard, (naturally) who had a magnificent walk-in doghouse in the back yard (thanks to Eric’s craftsmanship) and ate wonderfully unbalanced, heavy German food, just like her mama and papa. The dog was very protective of Eric and Frieda.  She had a ferociously loud and sonorous bark.  In short, she scared the hell out of nearly everyone, except her parents. Since she could only understand German, I had no luck communicating with this dog.  I disliked mowing the back yard, even with a chain link fence between the two of us, as she would bark and lunge.  I teased her back, when I thought Eric wasn’t looking, with made-up nasty sounding German commands of my own.  Eric caught me doing this one time, and that was the end of that. Although my brother, sister and I took on the role of real surrogate children to this elderly couple over time, I do not believe we ever really could compete with Heidi.

Unlike disheveled, strange Ethel, Frieda was a well-kept, jolly woman, who never quite mastered the English language as well as her husband.  When something tickled her fancy, she would laugh to the point of tears and try to explain herself in what I called Germenglish.  You kind of got the gist of it, but never really got all of what she tried to communicate.  Something was definitely lost in the translation.  Her laughter was contagious, however, as her heavy frame shook with mirth and she dabbed at her eyes with the old lady’s handkerchief she kept handy in her sweater pocket.

It was obvious that Eric was embarrassed by her sudden fits of merriment and would attempt to scold her in German.  I don’t know what he said, not understanding German (the same problem I had with Heidi) but I could only assume that it went something like this:

“Get a grip on yourself, woman! This is not proper Prussian behavior.  Mach Snell!”

Frieda would look momentarily hurt, but then laugh and cry it off all the more.  Poor Eric would have to leave the room muttering stern, but disregarded, Prussian oaths.

It was the Christmas memories, surrounding Frieda and Eric that stand out most clearly, however.  To be precise, it was the food that I remember best. 

I accompanied those two, on more than one occasion, to Leo’s German Delicatessen in West Anaheim. They would proceed to fill their baskets with pounds of German blood sausage, blocks of Swiss cheese, bottles of thick, dark beer, black breads, crackers, lingenberry preserves, chocolates and cookies of every European description.  The Christmas goose would also be chosen with great care from Leo and the food preparation was soon underway.

Frieda would save the drippings from the cooked goose and use it either as a spread on various breads and crackers or as her oil in which to deep-fry my personal favorite holiday treat, giant Bismarcks. 

A Bismarck was basically a large, round fritter-shaped doughnut filled with homemade plum jam and then rolled in granulated sugar. Frieda swore that the secret to this gastronomical wonder was the deep fat frying in Christmas goose grease.  Whether it was this or my mother’s jam, which served as the filling, I will never know.  What I do recall, vividly, is the first mouth-watering bite into one of these huge delicacies and my craving for more.  It is a wonder that I never made myself sick by overdoing it on the platter of fresh Bismarks, as I was such a pig in that regard.  Frieda soon realized my weakness for these concoctions and would earmark a separate plate just for me.  I loved that woman.

           

On Christmas Eve, Eric would have Frieda boil down fresh raspberries and strain off the thick syrup.  Once cooled down, he would put a fair amount of the juice in the bottom of a large round beer stein and then slowly pour in one or two bottles of a special German beer, careful to keep the sediment out of the mixture.  A large purple foam would rise to the top of the thick glass and when several were similarly prepared, Eric would make a toast in both English and German. Faces then plunged into the thick foam. Loud smacking of lips and belches would soon follow as we each laughed at the purple foam covering one another’s noses and lips.  At age twelve, I discovered this to be one of Germany’s greatest contributions to mankind.  Lord, was that good.  With another bite from a Bismarck and one last stolen gulp from my father’s stein, I was soon regaled in complete Christmas bliss.

As the evening wore on and Frieda became a little tipsy, her limited English was nearly forgotten altogether as she would alternately laugh and cry while describing childhood memories from the old country.  The tears would always come when she would remind us all of just how long it had been since she had seen her family; most  of her kin were trapped in East Germany since the mid-forties.  This would get Eric going on the evils of Communism and drunken civic lessons quickly ensued. 

By midnight, the party would wind down and our old neighbors would bid us a ‘Merry Christmas’ and amble off home, arm in arm.  Eric would steady his large wife on the short walk two doors away.  We were their family here in America, especially at this time of the year.

They would spend much of Christmas Day trying to get through on long distance to family in the Eastern part of Germany, sometimes with success and sometimes not.  Frieda would try to explain it all to us at our next encounter later that afternoon or evening, as she would laugh and cry once more while sprinkling in a few English words here and there.  Eric would pat her on the hand and speak softly to her in German, comforting her.  She would eventually dab at her eyes, blow her nose and regain her composure.

“Any von vant more Bismarcks?” she would ask cheerily.

           I never turned her down.  That would have been most impolite, in my book.  So as not to offend, I took two.  By the time we left for home I was carrying a plateful with me.

          “I think I’ll find the men’s room,” my dad said, as the four of us waited for Eric and Frieda’s flight to leave.  We had made excellent time getting to the airport, despite the problem with the missing teeth.  Bags were checked in and Eric was resting comfortably in the wheelchair, as Frieda sat beside him.  My dad pulled me aside before he went in search of the restroom.

          “Don’t let Eric give you any money while I’m gone,” he said.  “I know him, and he’ll wait till I leave.  We are not being paid for this, understand?”

          “Got it, dad.  You better hurry.  They may be calling this flight soon.”  He dashed off.

           Soon as my father had disappeared, I felt a tug on my coat sleeve.  Eric pulled me toward him and leaned his face into mine.

          “Don’t tell your papa that I gave you this.”  He pushed four folded twenties into my hand.

          “Eric, I can’t accept this,” I said, hoping he’d talk me out of my less than fervent conviction.

          “Yost take it, boy!” he growled.  “Don’t tell your papa.” 

          With that final admonition, he coughed and pushed himself back from me.  I pocketed the money.  I looked behind me and saw my father returning.

         “Everything OK?” he asked, looking suspiciously at Eric and me.

         “Ya, ya.  All’s goot,” he said, looking threateningly at me.

        “Hunky dory, dad,” I said.  I felt the eighty bucks burning a hole in my pocket. Just then the Lufthansa flight number was announced.

        We wheeled Eric to the front of the line and were about to hand his care over to a male flight attendant.  Hurried goodbyes were made, and Frieda began to cry. 

       “Ya, ya, it is OK now, Frieda,” Eric said, choking back his own tears.

       “You be good to your mama and listen to your papa,” he told me.  “Good bye, good neighbors,” he cried, reaching for my father’s hand.  My dad took his extended hand and clasped his other hand on top of Eric's.  I did likewise and then embraced Frieda. 

       We last saw them being led down the narrow ramp by members of the flight crew. Eric looked old and small in the wheelchair.  Frieda, looming large in contrast, followed patiently behind him, tucking an old lady’s handkerchief in her sweater pocket. 

      We would never see Eric again.

          He died within the year.

         Frieda stayed on with the German relatives for a time, before she eventually returned to America and rented a small bungalow, not far from her old house on Flower Street. 

         Ethel had passed on by now too, but Ralph remained in their old home behind us.  Both he and Frieda joined us for Thanksgiving one year.  She came for Christmas, a month later, and brought a platter of Bismarcks.  She knew that I would be there.

         Ralph then passed quietly.

         Frieda lived to nearly ninety.  Upon her death, her body was flown to Germany and buried next to her husband.

          Shortly after we had word of Eric’s passing, a small black kitten took up residence in the old neighborhood and spent most of his time around my parent’s house.  As much as my father disliked cats, he seemed to make an exception for this one.   My mother was convinced it was Eric, come back to haunt the old neighborhood.  The cat was a friendly son of a gun and appeared to have come out of nowhere.

           Being that I never did learn German, I was not sure of what that cat was trying to tell me as he rubbed up against my leg and purred.  It did sound like a guttural purr, I suppose.  Maybe mom was right.

          There was always food and water left out for that cat.

          Old neighbors were always welcomed there.