gat

learned to listen to my senses and see that town as a creature in itself instead of a background for
my activity. We would walk this way for hours, whispering to each other, looking in windows,
and as we walked, Bootie would deliver an only partially intelligible stream of biographical lore
about the families within. I realize now that she must have been talking to herself. It was like
having a private Boswell to the Dr. Johnson of town society. When she had some money, which
was now and then, we would buy candy at the little grocery at the top of the hill and share it
together, sometimes two candy bars for the three of us or in flush times a whole bar each—and in
the weeks following Christmas when there was holiday money, two each. On two-candy nights
the atmosphere seemed so filled with chocolate perfume that I could hardly sleep.
When my granddad was a boy in Monongahela he watched John Blythe, a planing mill operator,
rebuild large sections of the town in the Italianate style. Blythe had no degree, and the religion of
professional licensing was still in infancy, so he just did it without asking anyone’s permission.
Whole sections of the town are now handsome beyond any reasonable right to be because nobody
stopped him. If you see a keystone over a window molding, it’s likely to be one of John’s.
When my granddad was a boy in Monongahela he used to sit in Mounds Park, site of two ancient
burial mounds left there by the Adena people three thousand years ago. In 1886, the Smithsonian
robbed those graves and took the contents to Washington where they still sit in crates. To
compensate the town, the government built a baseball field where the mounds had been. When my
granddad was a boy, school was voluntary. Some went, but most not for long. It was a free will
choice based on what you valued, not a government hustle to stabilize social classes.
The College Of Zimmer And Hegel
The most important studies I ever engaged in weren’t at Cornell or Columbia, but in the
windowless basement of the Zimmer Printing Company, a block and a half from the railroad
tracks that ran alongside the Monongahela. Some of my greatest lessons unfolded near the
mysterious dark green river, with its thick ice sheet near the banks in winter, its iridescent
dragonflies in summer, and its always breathtaking sternwheelers pounding the water up and
down, BAM! BAM! BAM! on the way to ports unknown. To me, the river was without
beginning or end.
Before he went to Germany to beat up the Nazis, my warrior Uncle Bud worked on a riverboat
that went down the Mississippi to New Orleans, on what mission I can’t say, then on other boats
that went up and down smaller local rivers. When I was five, he once threw an orange to me from
a riverboat galley while it passed through a lock. A right fielder’s strong throwing arm sent that
orange two hundred feet out of the watery trench into my hands. I didn’t even have to move.
In the basement of the printing office, Bud’s father ("the General," as Moss called him behind his
back) moved strong hands on and off of a printing press. Those presses are gone, but my
grandfather’s hands will never be gone. They remain on my shoulder as I write this. I would sit on
Table of Contents
Page 252