STEEL by Kathleen Novak

Author:Kathleen Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Black Cat Text
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Want

We didn’t have much. That’s what I think. What did we have? Something to wear, something to eat, a house full of kids, some chairs and beds, fresh eggs. I look around now and it’s hard to believe. Boat parked behind the garage. Closets of clothes. A new car every four, five years. If I want a better lawn mower, I go buy one. Then I fix up the old one and make it go again. Monkey around with the engine, replace this or that, wash the whole thing and stick it in the driveway with a For Sale sign taped to the handle. I’ve got envelopes of pocket money just selling things I fixed—fans, lamps, mowers. You name it.

Everybody now has things and more things. Houses filled with them, stacked with them. Stores are so big you can’t find where the hell you came in or what you wanted in the first place. The stores back then were small, like the Markovićs’ store. One-room outfits with the family living in the back or upstairs, running in and out every time the door opened with some customer. Or there were specialty stores, drugstores, department stores. But none of them like these places today. You think you’d walk into any store back then and get lost in the aisles? Think again, I tell you.

Even so, if we had jack squat, we were just like everyone else. Almost nobody had much. I’m not saying we were satisfied or that we wanted for nothing. We wanted all right. I wanted to be a hockey player, drive a car, learn clarinet like Benny Goodman. But we lived too far out for me to be on the hockey team all winter and nobody was about to give me a clarinet or teach me how to play. I did get a car pretty young, a clunker I bought with my own money and hid in the woods. I made that happen on my own.

But Tony never drove a car and maybe he never wanted to. That I cannot say. Keeping an eye on Tony in those days I could tell you what he did want though. Tony wanted one step up. You see a guy combing his hair all the time, reading books, ironing his shirts, dreaming of a girl a mile or so away and you know he wants something better for himself.

And I can tell you all my life I’ve done like Tony. Keep a comb in my back pocket, shave every day, even twice if I need to, press my pants and iron my own shirts since my wife died, keep my nails trimmed and I look ahead. I look ahead. You want to live to be ninety years and then some, I’m going to tell you here and now you better look ahead. What’s the past? A good story or two. Nothing to turn you upside down. Whatever happened, it happened. Tony’s life happened. He had a girl, a gift, a dream. Say what you will, that’s what he had.

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