Memory 1: Father and Baker Brush
Jan 11, 2023 11:24:31 GMT -5
Post by Radrook Admin on Jan 11, 2023 11:24:31 GMT -5
Father, Newspapers and Baker Brush
Weird how two things can converge to create a controversial situation-isn't it? Things that one would never imagine would converge in such a fashion. Well, this is exactly what happened with my dad's penchant to flirt and his seemingly obsessive interest in reading the newspaper.
Flirting:
As human beings, we all have predispositions. My father, of course, was no exception. One of his was flirting. You see, he felt that as a man, it was his God-given right, regardless of his marital status. As he would often emphatically say whenever anyone, including me, reminded him that he was married: "Casau pero no capau." "Married but not castrated." From that point on, any further discussion was closed.
Well, unfortunately for him, he had chosen the wrong woman. You see, unlike his mom, whom he had grown up seeing humbly accepting his father's gallivanting galore with the ladies, my mom totally and vehemently disagreed, and that was a focus of constant contention.
Newspaper Reading
Besides flirting with women at every opportunity, my father was also a fanatical newspaper-reader. He would meticulously go over every single printed word as if it were some recently-discovered treasure. Seems harmless enough, doesn't it? Yet, it gradually began to grate on my mom's nerves. How? Well, it went like this. After arriving home from work, he would immediately disappear behind the wide newspaper pages while sitting on the living-room sofa, and would only reluctantly emerge several hours later with bloodshot eyes and bags under his eyes.
Then, instead of discarding the newspapers, he would carefully stash them under the sofa-cushions in order to review the parts that he might have missed later. But more often than not, later never came, and some cushions began to get pretty elevated.
“Why don’t you throw those newspapers away Hipolito?” my mother would ask.
“Haven’t finished them yet!” he'd calmly respond.
After silently giving him the up-and-down critical-look, she would invariably ask:
“Tell me something, what is it exactly that you are doing? Are you actually reading the entire paper? I mean, most people are selective readers, you know? They read only the sections that interest them. What are you doing? Reading all the obituary announcements and the classifieds as well?”
After blinking at her several times, and letting her go on for several minutes, he'd respond with:
“How are those newspapers bothering you? Eh? Are they bothering you?”
She'd stand there in front of him gazing at him, and looking like a panther about to pounce, while letting what she considered his unacceptable answer sink in .
“The sofa doesn’t look right-that’s how it bothers me!"" she'd finally say with chest still heaving from the pent-up emotion as he kept staring past her at the black and white TV screen.
"All those newspapers stuffed under the cushions ruin the appearance of la sala.[the living room]”
On it went but to no avail! Sometimes, when she could tolerate the ever- increasing elevation of the sofa-cushions any longer, she'd unceremoniously gather all the newspapers and throw them into the building's hallway-incinerator. Coming home and finding them missing, he would look as if she had just literally ripped his heart out and fed it to the dogs as he sadly sat watching TV.
"See how much better la sala looks now?" she'd say casually as she prepared dinner.
Baker Brush
Well, as destiny would have it, both his fanatical newspaper-reading and flirting tendencies finally converged in a very dramatic way. You see, it just so happened that both my parents wound up working at this brush-manufacturing company where many women were employed. I think I remember my mom being employed there first and inviting him with his assurance that he would not flirt.
Of course, once he found himself there, my father felt as if he had been blessed by being placed in a flirting paradise. Soon after being hired, he was going full throttle.
My mother had pleaded with him to stop, but to no avail. Finally, she tearfully went to the Boss, this elderly Anglo American man, and explained how this was causing her distress, and would eventually affect her work-efficiency.
“Is that so Alba?” the boss asked in a compassionate tone of voice.
“Go look for yourself. Just watch him!” she responded.
That wasn’t hard to do since my dad's leeringly eyeballing the girls and his salacious comments in Spanish, as the Puerto Rican ladies went by, were very obvious.
“You are right! He is flirting. But don’t you worry Alba. I’ll fix it so that he can’t bother you with his flirting anymore!” the boss said after having confirmed that he was indeed ostentatiously flirting with the female employees as they passed by, or else ogling them from a distance as they worked in a nearby section of the factory.
So in order to totally prevent this, my father was unceremoniously relocated to a corner, facing a wall, while operating a brush-handle-stamping-machine, far from all possible female distraction. It was a simple job. His only responsibility was to place the brush-handle beneath the stamper, have it stamped, remove it. and after a brief pause, place another one to be stamped with the Baker-Brush logo. A very uncomplicated task, right? Well, not exactly. You see, being unable to flirt, my father started placing the Spanish-language newspaper called El Diario La Prensa on the chair beside him in order to read it as he worked.
At first, of course, coordinating the reading with the work was a bit clumsy. But after a while, the hand-and-eye coordination became automatic:
It went something like this:
Him: Place Brush beneath the stamper,
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Him: Remove it and briefly read a few words in the newspaper.
Him: Place another brush.
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Him: Remove it and read a few more words from the newspaper.
Maybe turn a page.
Him: Place another brush under the stamper.
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Noticing this acrobatic-like delicate balance between efficiency and bloody disaster, my mom approached him as he was working and asked: "Don’t you think that you should concentrate all your attention on what you are doing, Hipolito?"
He, in turn, responded by placing yet another brush under the stamping machine and quickly reading a few words from the newspaper, before deftly removing it once it had been stamped, and replacing it with another.
"You might injure yourself, you know? Doesn't it occur to you that you might accidentally injure yourself by becoming distracted?” she asked in an exasperated tone of voice, as if failing to comprehend how someone could be voluntarily engaging in that sort of dangerous activity.
“Well, it’s your fault for having me placed in this damned corner facing this damned wall all day long. So stay out of it! OK?” he finally responded after temporarily pausing the brush-handle-embossing machine.
“Why don't you appreciate that I am just telling you for your own good? I mean, you might get hurt doing that. If I didn't care-I wouldn't tell you. You know?”
“So what do you want me to do? Eh? I have nowhere to look! Just a blank wall in front of me, isolated here far from everyone else. I am buried alive in this corner. Don’t you see? That I am buried alive here? Huh?”
Once more, my mom stood there as as if struggling to decipher the solution to a Rubic's cube, while barely restraining a very strong inclination to go upside his head as she had done one time before they were married when she had caught him in a movie-theater cuddling with another woman.
“Buried alive? Why?" she finally blurted out,"...because you can’t flirt with the muchachas any more? Eh? You know, "gosando de lo lindo?" [literally: joyously enjoying yourself with the pretty?] while making as if you are working?"
"Who was flirting? Me?" he said, frowning as if in utter disbelief that someone would imagine him being capable of such a thing. "I wasn't flirting!"
"Yes you were flirting, and the boss confirmed that you were flirting! Keep your eyes on your work. Isn’t that what you are supposed to be doing? Looking at your work? You’re not supposed to be flirting with other women or reading the newspaper anyway! That’s not what they are paying you for. Is that what they are paying you for?”
He turned away morosely back to the machine as if he had just been swiftly kicked in the teeth by a jegua, while mumbling imprecations under his breath. Of course, his new antic didn’t go unnoticed by management. The boss noticed the danger of his being distracted, and also brought it to his attention. But my father promised that everything was under control, and that he was easily keeping up with the Baker-Brush handle-stamping quota anyway.
Well, all was going without a hitch with his new system. But then, baseball- season came around, and my dad was fanatical fan of The Brooklyn Dodgers. So the Diario La Prensa's sports section began to draw his fervent attention.
Engrossed with the news about how the Dodgers were faring in the World Series against the Yankees, he soon began to hesitate a little just before placing another brush-handle to be stamped.
That’s when it happened. He had just finished reading about another Dodger loss, and instead of placing a brush-handle under the stamper, he placed his bare hand, and Bam! Baker Brush! His fingers were pierced.
I remember his high pitched howling in pain at night, and my mother's recriminating's of his foolishly not listening to advice and reaping the consequences. Also, how he kept vehemently swearing that he was going to sue the company. Of course, that attempt came to nothing, since it had been totally his fault.
Then, upon returning to work after a period of convalescence, he accidentally stepped on a nail that pierced his foot while he was carrying some heavy boxes, and once again attempted to sue the company. That time he collected some money as compensation. But by then, the owners were looking at him in a strange way. You know, as if he was just there trying to get hurt in order to sue.
"If you keep having accidents like that you are going to get fired!" my mother warned him.
True to her prediction, he was lighting a cigarette during a break, and accidentally set his chest-hair on fire.
“Get the hell our of here!” the boss bellowed. We don’t want you here anymore!”
“OK! OK! Take it easy! Take it easy!” he said, after frantically slapping out the fire on his chest with the palms of both hands. Then he walked out. Found another job at another factory of which there were plenty that were hiring at that time.
In short, it all seemed to go downhill after he had been deprived of what he considered his God-given flirting-rights. Understandably, my parents never again agreed to work together at the same place after that incident.
==============================================
Weird how two things can converge to create a controversial situation-isn't it? Things that one would never imagine would converge in such a fashion. Well, this is exactly what happened with my dad's penchant to flirt and his seemingly obsessive interest in reading the newspaper.
Flirting:
As human beings, we all have predispositions. My father, of course, was no exception. One of his was flirting. You see, he felt that as a man, it was his God-given right, regardless of his marital status. As he would often emphatically say whenever anyone, including me, reminded him that he was married: "Casau pero no capau." "Married but not castrated." From that point on, any further discussion was closed.
Well, unfortunately for him, he had chosen the wrong woman. You see, unlike his mom, whom he had grown up seeing humbly accepting his father's gallivanting galore with the ladies, my mom totally and vehemently disagreed, and that was a focus of constant contention.
Newspaper Reading
Besides flirting with women at every opportunity, my father was also a fanatical newspaper-reader. He would meticulously go over every single printed word as if it were some recently-discovered treasure. Seems harmless enough, doesn't it? Yet, it gradually began to grate on my mom's nerves. How? Well, it went like this. After arriving home from work, he would immediately disappear behind the wide newspaper pages while sitting on the living-room sofa, and would only reluctantly emerge several hours later with bloodshot eyes and bags under his eyes.
Then, instead of discarding the newspapers, he would carefully stash them under the sofa-cushions in order to review the parts that he might have missed later. But more often than not, later never came, and some cushions began to get pretty elevated.
“Why don’t you throw those newspapers away Hipolito?” my mother would ask.
“Haven’t finished them yet!” he'd calmly respond.
After silently giving him the up-and-down critical-look, she would invariably ask:
“Tell me something, what is it exactly that you are doing? Are you actually reading the entire paper? I mean, most people are selective readers, you know? They read only the sections that interest them. What are you doing? Reading all the obituary announcements and the classifieds as well?”
After blinking at her several times, and letting her go on for several minutes, he'd respond with:
“How are those newspapers bothering you? Eh? Are they bothering you?”
She'd stand there in front of him gazing at him, and looking like a panther about to pounce, while letting what she considered his unacceptable answer sink in .
“The sofa doesn’t look right-that’s how it bothers me!"" she'd finally say with chest still heaving from the pent-up emotion as he kept staring past her at the black and white TV screen.
"All those newspapers stuffed under the cushions ruin the appearance of la sala.[the living room]”
On it went but to no avail! Sometimes, when she could tolerate the ever- increasing elevation of the sofa-cushions any longer, she'd unceremoniously gather all the newspapers and throw them into the building's hallway-incinerator. Coming home and finding them missing, he would look as if she had just literally ripped his heart out and fed it to the dogs as he sadly sat watching TV.
"See how much better la sala looks now?" she'd say casually as she prepared dinner.
Baker Brush
Well, as destiny would have it, both his fanatical newspaper-reading and flirting tendencies finally converged in a very dramatic way. You see, it just so happened that both my parents wound up working at this brush-manufacturing company where many women were employed. I think I remember my mom being employed there first and inviting him with his assurance that he would not flirt.
Of course, once he found himself there, my father felt as if he had been blessed by being placed in a flirting paradise. Soon after being hired, he was going full throttle.
My mother had pleaded with him to stop, but to no avail. Finally, she tearfully went to the Boss, this elderly Anglo American man, and explained how this was causing her distress, and would eventually affect her work-efficiency.
“Is that so Alba?” the boss asked in a compassionate tone of voice.
“Go look for yourself. Just watch him!” she responded.
That wasn’t hard to do since my dad's leeringly eyeballing the girls and his salacious comments in Spanish, as the Puerto Rican ladies went by, were very obvious.
“You are right! He is flirting. But don’t you worry Alba. I’ll fix it so that he can’t bother you with his flirting anymore!” the boss said after having confirmed that he was indeed ostentatiously flirting with the female employees as they passed by, or else ogling them from a distance as they worked in a nearby section of the factory.
So in order to totally prevent this, my father was unceremoniously relocated to a corner, facing a wall, while operating a brush-handle-stamping-machine, far from all possible female distraction. It was a simple job. His only responsibility was to place the brush-handle beneath the stamper, have it stamped, remove it. and after a brief pause, place another one to be stamped with the Baker-Brush logo. A very uncomplicated task, right? Well, not exactly. You see, being unable to flirt, my father started placing the Spanish-language newspaper called El Diario La Prensa on the chair beside him in order to read it as he worked.
At first, of course, coordinating the reading with the work was a bit clumsy. But after a while, the hand-and-eye coordination became automatic:
It went something like this:
Him: Place Brush beneath the stamper,
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Him: Remove it and briefly read a few words in the newspaper.
Him: Place another brush.
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Him: Remove it and read a few more words from the newspaper.
Maybe turn a page.
Him: Place another brush under the stamper.
Stamping Machine: Bam! Baker Brush! Stamped on the brush-handle.
Noticing this acrobatic-like delicate balance between efficiency and bloody disaster, my mom approached him as he was working and asked: "Don’t you think that you should concentrate all your attention on what you are doing, Hipolito?"
He, in turn, responded by placing yet another brush under the stamping machine and quickly reading a few words from the newspaper, before deftly removing it once it had been stamped, and replacing it with another.
"You might injure yourself, you know? Doesn't it occur to you that you might accidentally injure yourself by becoming distracted?” she asked in an exasperated tone of voice, as if failing to comprehend how someone could be voluntarily engaging in that sort of dangerous activity.
“Well, it’s your fault for having me placed in this damned corner facing this damned wall all day long. So stay out of it! OK?” he finally responded after temporarily pausing the brush-handle-embossing machine.
“Why don't you appreciate that I am just telling you for your own good? I mean, you might get hurt doing that. If I didn't care-I wouldn't tell you. You know?”
“So what do you want me to do? Eh? I have nowhere to look! Just a blank wall in front of me, isolated here far from everyone else. I am buried alive in this corner. Don’t you see? That I am buried alive here? Huh?”
Once more, my mom stood there as as if struggling to decipher the solution to a Rubic's cube, while barely restraining a very strong inclination to go upside his head as she had done one time before they were married when she had caught him in a movie-theater cuddling with another woman.
“Buried alive? Why?" she finally blurted out,"...because you can’t flirt with the muchachas any more? Eh? You know, "gosando de lo lindo?" [literally: joyously enjoying yourself with the pretty?] while making as if you are working?"
"Who was flirting? Me?" he said, frowning as if in utter disbelief that someone would imagine him being capable of such a thing. "I wasn't flirting!"
"Yes you were flirting, and the boss confirmed that you were flirting! Keep your eyes on your work. Isn’t that what you are supposed to be doing? Looking at your work? You’re not supposed to be flirting with other women or reading the newspaper anyway! That’s not what they are paying you for. Is that what they are paying you for?”
He turned away morosely back to the machine as if he had just been swiftly kicked in the teeth by a jegua, while mumbling imprecations under his breath. Of course, his new antic didn’t go unnoticed by management. The boss noticed the danger of his being distracted, and also brought it to his attention. But my father promised that everything was under control, and that he was easily keeping up with the Baker-Brush handle-stamping quota anyway.
Well, all was going without a hitch with his new system. But then, baseball- season came around, and my dad was fanatical fan of The Brooklyn Dodgers. So the Diario La Prensa's sports section began to draw his fervent attention.
Engrossed with the news about how the Dodgers were faring in the World Series against the Yankees, he soon began to hesitate a little just before placing another brush-handle to be stamped.
That’s when it happened. He had just finished reading about another Dodger loss, and instead of placing a brush-handle under the stamper, he placed his bare hand, and Bam! Baker Brush! His fingers were pierced.
I remember his high pitched howling in pain at night, and my mother's recriminating's of his foolishly not listening to advice and reaping the consequences. Also, how he kept vehemently swearing that he was going to sue the company. Of course, that attempt came to nothing, since it had been totally his fault.
Then, upon returning to work after a period of convalescence, he accidentally stepped on a nail that pierced his foot while he was carrying some heavy boxes, and once again attempted to sue the company. That time he collected some money as compensation. But by then, the owners were looking at him in a strange way. You know, as if he was just there trying to get hurt in order to sue.
"If you keep having accidents like that you are going to get fired!" my mother warned him.
True to her prediction, he was lighting a cigarette during a break, and accidentally set his chest-hair on fire.
“Get the hell our of here!” the boss bellowed. We don’t want you here anymore!”
“OK! OK! Take it easy! Take it easy!” he said, after frantically slapping out the fire on his chest with the palms of both hands. Then he walked out. Found another job at another factory of which there were plenty that were hiring at that time.
In short, it all seemed to go downhill after he had been deprived of what he considered his God-given flirting-rights. Understandably, my parents never again agreed to work together at the same place after that incident.
==============================================