Courtship

Door to door salesmen and handymen came into our yard like stray dogs.

“Your mother home, boy?”

They never asked for my father.

They had insurance policies, vacuum cleaners, cosmetics, and trinkets. Or they had strong backs with keen eyes for repairs to be done, wooden siding to paint, leaves to rake, grass to cut, or trees to trim, and sometimes offers for salvation.

These lost children of the New Deal searched the neighborhood for anything they could find to fill the space life had cut away from them.

Mother never came to the door.  

My grandmother, who everyone knew as Mom, knew how to talk to them. She knew what it meant to go from house to house looking for work.  She paid for our house in the 1930’s by going door to door selling household items.  Our one bedroom duplex was built to her requirements in 1929 and cost $6000.  She and my grandfather divorced not long after October of that year and she kept the house and other small properties and he took $500.  He was sure that it’d be foreclosed on and wanted no part in working to keep it.  She managed to make enough to keep up the payments and make it her homestead.

Most of them she calmly and firmly sent away, some she hired to do some work, and some she gave a dollar for nothing in particular.

Always she kept me away from her discussions with them so I never heard the conversations. They’d either be gone then and there, or something around our home changed shortly afterward.

One of these men came along before I was born when Mother was living with Mom during the separation from her first husband. There were a lot of reasons he divorced her, not the least of which was Mother’s mental illness. They called her a schizophrenic and administered electro-shock therapy and he got full custody of their three children.

The man saw that the roof of the house needed replacement. It was over 20 years old at that point and did need fixing before it started to leak. Mom made some kind of deal with him and he put on a new layer.  A roof could safely hold two layers of asphalt shingles on top of the cedar shake base so it was a good call and less work than removing the entire first layer.

He was charming and handsome and paid attention to Mother.  

“How about you come with me for a beer?”

He asked enough times that she, as lonely and sad as she was, eventually agreed.

Then the roof was done.

Her divorce was final in early June 1953 and Mother married the man the next day.  I was born in January 1954. She left him on Mother’s Day that same year.  Sometime soon after coming back to her mother, she had a miscarriage.

The man called and came to the house multiple times only to be stood down by Mom.  He swore he’d come back and get me some day. Mother lived in fear of this for, I think, the rest of her life. 

He eventually stopped coming over.

I didn’t meet him until 1995.

In August 1975 I replaced the roof myself.