Allan's Parents

         In retrospect, I was fortunate to attend school in a working class area.  Although I witnessed the discordances experienced by many of the less fortunate children of families trapped in the years of 1929 – 1939.  The signs and effects of the Great Depression were abundant – soup kitchens, bankruptcies, hunger, enforced idleness, dispersals, despair and suicides.  It was not long before the ubiquitous hobos looking for a handout frequented our kitchen door. 

         Mother, always the canny Scot, kept a long list of chores handy.  She always fed those who were willing to work for a sandwich and a bowl of soup.  Those hobos saved my father from such heavy work as shoveling snow off our sidewalk.  Dad did not have to exert himself very hard to feel the effects of a bullet through his chest and back – I remember being wakened in the middle of the night to hear his painful whooping as my father struggled to get his breath while Mother slapped him on the back until the crisis passed.  The attacks became more frequent as he aged.

         My father, being a craftsman and union member, was never out of work during the Great Depression.  Each Friday he handed Mother his pay envelope.  She always handed him ten dollars (probably the equivalent of one hundred in today’s money).  Father’s personal needs included a mickey of rye, two or three quart bottles of Black Horse Ale, a couple of dollars for the local bookmaker, a few cigars and perhaps the luxury of a barbershop shave. 

         Mother, a careful shopper, shrewd bargainer and good cook, bought the groceries, replaced household wares as necessary, and managed to put away a little against a ‘rainy day’.  This, in my parents’ eyes was the way things were done.  Even so, whether impelled by true love or rational cohabitation, things did not always run smoothly.

         Both my parents possessed characters heated in the fires of events and hammered on the anvil of adversity.  Each contained a core of steel.  My mother’s was the harder, the sharper and closer to the edge of the blade.  Father’s was the more malleable, the more flexible, and lay deeper within the blade.  But when steel opposes steel, sparks fly.  And they did!

         When my parents clashed, accusations were leveled, charges were denied, omissions and commissions were revisited, and at some point my father would opt to, or be ordered to ‘get out!’

I can’t recall my father being ‘away’ for more than two weeks at a time.  However, there were a few Friday nights when, after supper, Mother would say “Your father wants you to meet him at the corner.”  On such Fridays, Dad would hand me his pay envelope, lighter by his usual weekly allowance, and I would deliver it.  Reconciliations, much more subdued but more meaningful than the occasions that preceded them, followed.  And life, so far as I knew it, returned to normal.