ON A CLEAR DAY

An earlier version of this yarn appeared years ago in a Hoboken Historical Museum publication. It included a picture of the apartment building my family once occupied. The windows appeared sooty. Not on my shift, buddy. 02/07/2016
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                                                   ON A CLEAR DAY

.       I lived the life of Riley as a young child. My few household chores included polishing the dining room furniture, peeling a potato or two, ironing some small items of linen, and drying the dishes from time to time. Attaching washed curtains to a frame became my most disagreeable task as the needle-sharp pins pricked my fingertips and made them bleed. After complaining about this job, my mom soon gave me a different one, washing windows. It paid the same as my other job, room and board, but it provided me with much more fun.

My mother kept our house as clean as possible but coal-burning furnaces left soot on all our windows. She cleaned them with fanatical regularity and demanded I maintain the same schedule with equal enthusiasm. The task did not daunt me despite the fact we lived on the top floor of a five-story ten-family tenement building. I had no fear of height as a young boy. It is a good thing because my mother sometimes handed me through a window into the arms of a mom in the adjacent building to play with her son during my pre-K days. It saved steps, don’t you see?

One day, while looking out the open parlor window, my brother took hold of my ankles and gently pushed me out head first. He held me in this state of suspense for a few moments before dragging me back inside, confident in his grip or my divinity. I found the experience quite enjoyable. Did it foreshadow a career as a circus aerialist? At the time, it only prepared me to wash windows, Hoboken style.

Let me explain the procedure: Assemble the necessary paraphernalia including a pot of hot water made sudsy using Ivory soap; a second pot of cold rinse water; a can of Bon Ami scouring cleanser; a few clean, dry rags; some sheets of newspaper; and my courage. After raising the lower half of the casement window, I would wriggle and twist myself out to a seated position on the ledge, my backside presented for viewing by pedestrians who might have occasion to look up instead of searching for dropped coins. After washing the window’s exterior, I would rinse and then dry them using crumpled sheets of newspapers, resulting in an exceptionally sparkling clean pane of glass. Over the years, I learned to use my knees to wedge myself in place, which allowed me to wave jauntily with both hands to people on the street below.

Did everyone in town wash their windows this way? If they did, I never saw them. I felt quite unique. Certainly, none of them washed their windows while it rained, which my mom asked me to do one day. I think she may have been a tad compulsive about this cleanliness thing.   Boys who lived on my block played on the roofs of eleven attached tenement houses. These buildings were all nearly the same height, making it relatively easy for us to navigate from one end of the street to the other. Sometimes we would lie down and crawl out to the edge of the roof to get the best possible view, straight down. None of us tempted fate by performing any crazy stunts while playing on them. To my knowledge, while growing up, no one ever fell off any Hoboken apartment rooftop or from a window. .

 Having experienced heights without fear for so many years, it did not faze me when my mother asked me to replace our broken clothesline pulley when I was a young and skinny teen. The line ran from the rear of the apartment to a very old and rickety black pole, which stood about fifty feet above ground. In 1949, she asked me to do it again. Now, fully grown and weighing some 180 pounds, my enthusiasm to replicate the stunt waned. Rung by rung, I climbed higher while my sense of safety sank. After reaching the top, the pole began swaying. Panic did not hit me, rather a sense of unease. I felt quite relieved to return to earth.

A few years later my job took me to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site of our wartime uranium production plant. While there, I peered down from the roof of a seventy-foot high cooling tower under repair that had no perimeter railing. I strode across the structure to its edge wishing to gain the best possible view of the surroundings. Suddenly, and without warning, my knees buckled and I broke into a cold sweat. I inched my way back, gripped by a profound fear of height.

It may have been a temporary condition. However, that one experience convinced me not to apply for that circus job after all. My racing heartbeat made clear to me I had to pursue a different career. Something had smudged my window of opportunity I could not wash away.  

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This picture show the clotheslines from the building next door, third floor apartment.

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