Over Here: 9 – Freezing Hell
...Although her penchant for hugging me tightly was somewhat less than fully appreciated, what absolutely bothered me most was the penetrating piscine odor that inevitably lingered on my being for something like several months following each such intimate contact...
Ron Pataky recalls unwelcomed close encounters with a market stall holder.
Across the wide middle aisle was my grandma's tiny stall, where she daily sold vegetables fresh from our farm, and a variety of cottage cheeses, prepared and drained over a tin sink only the night before in our stone cellar at the farmhouse.
Not far away in that cellar, not so incidentally, perched a giant wine barrel, only slightly smaller than Mansfield itself. Prone as it was on its gargantuan side immediately to the right of the coal bin door, it early on provided me with a quite pleasant discovery. Lying prone myself beneath the crude wooden spigot, a boy [me] could avail himself of the rapturous nectar without so much as spilling a millidrop! Only infrequently would he [me] be un able to rise up again upon satiation.
At those times [once] he [me] would simply sleep it off without being missed by a grandma at the market and a grandpa off in the fields somewhere. Looking back, it was the perfect set-up for a drunk-in-waiting, and, to this day, I remain utterly amazed that I didn't take fuller advantage of the fabulous and secure, Bacchus-designed quaffing and napping quarters, stone and coal-dusted though they were!
Chilliness and-or dampness, of course, were no challenge at all, since Grandpa's home-made Red readily provided significantly more warmth than the finest Irish wools and Egyptian cottons! Only later would I learn that wools and cottons do have the distinct advantage, in addition to warmth, of not inducing really stupid behavior and really bad morning headaches! Most kids, I noted, didn't even throw-up due to mixing their weaves!
Directly across the same wide market aisle, to the right of Grandma, was the entirely glass-enclosed fortress of Berrick's Fish Market, run by the fattest Jewish man I'd ever seen and his curiously dainty wife, Mrs. Berrick. She was a doll, and had, in my mind, more than sufficient grounds for arranging a slow and painful death for a matchmaker somewhere!
Although her penchant for hugging me tightly was somewhat less than fully appreciated, what absolutely bothered me most was the penetrating piscine odor that inevitably lingered on my being for something like several months following each such intimate contact. (I still catch an occasional, vague whiff of underarm halibut on sweltering August days!).
This was especially true on the half-block trips to the corner bank, during which my constant fears involved being waylaid by sudden, hungry advances on the part of ferocious gangs of famished, fish-sensing otters. That, or just being seen in my apron by any girl I knew or didn't know. (Did I mention that my smudged apron was whipped away and hastily stashed at the first glimpse of Ellen Bromfield coming in the market door? Well, it was).
My frequent assignment involved trimming lettuce, cabbage, celery, and the like in our back room, generally referred to as the Cold Room. Vegetable crates were piled high above on a large partial loft floor. While the job in these heater-prolific times would perhaps be described as merely tedious, we thought of it in those days as Freezing Hell, especially in the icy-cold Ohio winters, during which the notion of simple warmth was to a boy often little more than a mind-and-pecker-numbed dream. The Cold Room was the only place I've ever known where a boy could actually get homesick in ninety seconds.
The sauerkraut barrel was kept there as well, protected by a loose board atop a wet burlap cover-flap. This necessitated frequent trips to Freezing Hell during each and every day, whenever folks "up front" desired their cardboard pint or quart of the delicious stuff.
In retrospect, even the term "frequent trips" is misleading. There were absolutely huge chunks of time during which my young-but-aching body actually labored there for hours on end, trimming stuff, with icy-cold water spurting everywhere as the various vegetables were chopped and cleaned, and with a temperature reminiscent of the much-read-about, occasionally tragic, Perry expeditions.
(Many Chinese restaurants today, incidentally, use exactly the same containers that we used for the sauerkraut back then, although I rather doubt they were used by Perry and his men).
My mouth waters even today at the thought of lifting that board from the kraut, raising up the wet burlap, and grabbing great, dripping digits-full of the cabbage confection. It was ambrosia in every sense of the delightful word, and on-the-spot consumption was, next to girls, the closest I ever came to the purely celestial.
For a long time, girls were WAY ahead. As I've grown older, however, it once again is becoming something of a toss-up! Frankly, I'm liking sauerkraut more and more each year. Talk about history repeating itself!
Nor, incidentally, did a boy worry about washing his hands prior to a hefty and juicy kraut-dip. A boy who'd worked in water for hours on end like that could've safely performed a lumpectomy on a Park Avenue dowager and been every bit as sterile as flaming bleach.
