Civic Lessons

Civic Lessons

Noel Laflin

11-7-18

Class took place every Saturday morning as I pushed an old hand mower across his front yard.

They continued for the required hour as I edged the sidewalk, weeded rose beds, and eventually swept up.

Erik would stand close as I worked, quizzing me on state capitols, amendments, preambles to the constitution and what it meant to live in this land.

He would frequently bring out a folded copy of our local newspaper and point out the numerous spelling errors which he had circled in red ink. He would often swear, in German, at the ineptitude of proofreaders, before moving on to the editorial section of the paper, asking my opinion on one political stand or another. As I was only ten and frequently had no opinion on such subjects, he promptly gave me his.

At the end of my session he would nod at my finished work, lay a shiny silver half dollar in my hand - sometimes a Franklin and later a Kennedy - and make me promise not to spend it.

Paper money was for spending, he would say, but silver was for keeping.

And there were other lessons learned as well.

Erik would sometimes remove his cap and tap his bald head so that I could hear the metal plate placed there by British doctors in 1917. He’d been a fifteen-year-old cabin boy aboard a German merchant marine vessel when it was blown out of the water by the English during the Great War. He was no sailor, merely a kid trying to stay alive during a hellish time. He was fished out of the sea by his captors, treated for injuries, and spent the rest of the war learning English. When the armistice was signed, he returned to Germany, fell in love, married, and immigrated to the United States with his wife during the height of the depression that swept through Germany in the twenties. He worked in a US defense plant during the Second World War, and eventually settled in as our neighbor in 1951.

I became his gardener when I was strong enough to push a lawn mower. I became a captive student of history on that same day too apparently.

I am not sure what is taught on front lawns nowadays. And there is probably no push mower involved either.

But I still quietly celebrate the lessons of one old neighbor who had once been a boy fished out of the sea during a war that he wanted no part of.

And I never spent a single one of those shiny half dollars either.

Paper money is another issue altogether, however. But a promise is a promise.