Mechanical Men (revised)

(Disclaimer: In case you may wonder when you finish reading this, I truly loved both my Mom & my Dad.)

I have previously written about my Dad and his Mechanical Man failings. He was a short powerful man, an excellent Accountant, and meant well, but lacked proper tools as well as any real aspiration to succeed in tasks that did not require Johnny Inkslinger skills.

Despite this handicap, each year he and I would dutifully engage in" The Hanging Of The Lights", a pre-Christmas tradition in the Sullivan household. We did not volunteer. We were a product of non-military conscription by my feisty and often quite funny Irish mom.

This annual torture took place at our residence on Avenue "F" in Forest Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh. We used letters for street names as our forefathers were imagination challenged.

Avenue "F" was barely two cars wide from our curb to the one across the street at the end of the ballfield. In the summer, Dad would sometimes sit on a lawn chair in our front yard with his extremely small baseball glove to protect our picture window from long ball hitters..

Our annual assignment was to arrange and attach Christmas lights to the faded wooden frame surrounding our front door; and it had to take place on the coldest day of the winter. I still miss my fingertip swirls.

Dad was Mechanical Man # 1. I, as the oldest, was designated Mechanical Man # 2. Dad, my leader and mentor, would take from his Burbury flannel jacket several of his brass horseshoe shaped brads while I held the light cords in place against the frame. I found this arrangement to be beneficial and great practice should I opt to catch bullets between my teeth at the Allegheny County Fair, the following year.

Dad would next attempt to impale the brads into the defenseless door frame, which appeared to be pock marked from acne due to these same labor efforts by us in previous years.

The colored lights Mom provided were about the size of baby kumquats and refused to lie supine so the brads could be easily inserted into the wood. We did not remove the bulbs first because this was the final lighting pattern that Mom had approved the previous year. Our goal was to avoid a second mission: "The Arrangement Of The Colors."

As one could imagine, Dad dropped several brads on the porch floor before finally locating and blasting one with his ball-peen hammer. His frustration accelerated when the target brads landed across the street in the ball field and his thumb suggested the need for ER visitation.

When Dad had deposited enough brads in the field to seriously threaten the water run off path from the snow and ice, I opted to take over. His language became more creative and mothers were now scurrying to get any impressionable children into the house.

Dad would then fill his pipe with Half and Half and light up as he stationed himself in his usual observation post against a "telly" pole across the street. Our father-son bonding exercise was taking it's annual "pause for the cause".

Admittedly, my manual dexterity exceeded that of my Dad, but my spatial skills were apparently lacking. This conclusion is based upon my inability to arrive at any alignment of the lights that would satisfy Mom, "The Lighting Engineer".

This disability resulted in about 7 or 8 return visits by Mom during which time she continued her appraisals and dispensed Leona Helmsley non-motherly observations. During one of them I noted Dad was slinking away to Delaney's Morningside Inn, the neighborhood pub. I also was growing impatient and nature was calling. God forbid I would track snow inside the house enroute to the bathroom.

Noting there appeared to be rain dripping from the door frame due to the meeting of the two fronts: heat from the house - icy cold from the porch, I received only passing comfort in discovering a skim coating of ice was now appearing on the door sill. After all, this was Christmas time. I'm sure I would have really felt bad had Mom sustained an injury during one of her visits.

Once the symmetry was reluctantly approved by Mom, she then confronted me with Mission #2 -the previously noted :"Arrangement Of The Colors". Mom insisted the one I had layed out before her was not that which she had chosen the previous year. She also suggested I must have failed "Primary Color Recognition" in Miss Young's 5th grade art class .

Oh yeah! On her last trip she confided she didn't like the way some of the kumquats were leaning either. I continued to plunge on while using some of my newly acquired epithets to curse Dad under my breath and now refer to Mom as Marge.

After recovering her wind blown paisley babushka from one of the prized azaleas I reluctantly recalled Mom for what I hoped would be her last reinspection. She immediately claimed the colors still didn't blend correctly, that the kumquats should stand as erect as a carrot on a snowman, and quickly took her leave. Smiling to myself while reflecting on a Playboy cartoon involving a snowman and a carrot, I concluded: "Bar, this is not a Kodak moment".

Mechanical Man #2 was now becoming numb, feeling faint and a little lightheaded. At one point I imagined I saw a dozen or two of Al Capp's Shmoos laughing at me from Dad's previous observation post. The crowd of Shmoos seemed to be increasing each time I looked over there. I would have chased them away but realized we needed the milk and eggs. (*)

On Mom's most recent visit I detected what appeared to be a departure from her previous "Pick Purgatory or Hell" grimace. Due to a frostbite high, I saw this as a positive sign.

I made 2 more adjustments to the color chart and peeked in the living room window. Mom was sleeping peacefully - if exhausted - on the couch, and I heard the haunting sounds of Liberace and his violin playing brother George on the TV, as they waved goodnight.

I chose to emulate their wave and quickly fled to rejoin Mechanical Man #1 for a "father-son" bonding much better suited to our mutual talents.


(*) (www.deniskitchen.com/docs/new-shmoofacts.html) Shmoo not Schmoo from Al Capp's Little Lil Abner.