In the Mood
By Gerald Elias
They don’t let me put a chain on my door. Maybe you think I’m paranoid to want a chain in an assisted living facility—you won’t say that to my face, but I can tell—but I say, you don’t lock your door, you’re asking for trouble. Life’s a coin flip, and sooner or later it comes up tails.
I’m interrupted by a knock at the door as I’m rinsing out my coffee cup and brushing the crumbs off the plate and into the trash. I look at the clock radio on my kitchen table. Remember when the clock radio was state-of-the-art? With hands that glowed in the dark?
“When the sun goes down, the dial lights up.”
It’s still forty-three minutes to Bingo hour. Why is someone knocking? I don’t have a clue who it could be. See what I’m saying? This is why you should have a chain.
I always do the dishes right after eating, otherwise they get crusty and pile up and attract roaches. I use Dawn. I once read an article about an oil spill on a freeway in Cincinnati that they were only able to clean up when they hosed Dawn all over it. So, what that means is it’s more expensive. I can’t stand Palmolive. The smell reminds me of dirty diapers. Makes me gag. There used to be an ad with housewives dipping their hands in it to show how gentle it was.
Housewives! That’s when society said women were supposed to be housewives, like my mother. But just the word, housewife. Think about it. What does that mean? Married to a house? If women had to get a job, a respectable job, they had four choices: secretary, librarian, stewardess, teacher.
What was I saying? Yes, the clock radio. Time. That reminds me of an article I once read somewhere about a so-called primitive tribe somewhere in South America, I think. Their sense of time and space was the reverse of what we in modern civilization believe. Their philosophy went something like this: You can see what’s ahead of you with the same certainty that you know what has already happened. On the other hand, you can’t see what’s behind you in the same way that you don’t know what the future has in store. Therefore, one looks forward to the past and one looks backward to the future. I’m not quite sure I get it, but it’s interesting.
Remember Playtex Living Gloves? Living gloves. That’s a good one. What’s the opposite of living gloves? Dying gloves? They were supposed to be so flexible you could pick up a dime. Yeah, right. Kids don’t even know what a dime is anymore. Paper money? What’s that? By the time they get Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill there won’t be a twenty-dollar bill. They’re even getting rid of credit cards now. They say you just point your device (aka phone) at those black-and-white Rorschach designs, and you’ve paid? Not my cup of tea.
I do use them—rubber gloves—occasionally, but not so much for washing dishes. You have a problem with getting your hands wet? I keep a pair handy, under the sink. They keep fingerprints off furniture. And other things. Someone is still knocking at my door. They’ll just have to wait until I’ve finished the dishes.
First it was affluence, then the Sony Walkman, but what put the final nail in the coffin of our way of life was the opening up of the workplace for women. Wait! Before you jump down my throat for saying that, wait a minute and listen to what I mean. All I’m saying is this: Until the seventies we had millions of brilliant women who had few career options besides teaching. Ergo, our public schools were the best in the world. But the pay was crummy, and when the doors of the workplace were burst open, rightfully so, by women who demanded equal opportunity to make a living, the best and brightest left teaching for greener pastures. And who can blame them? You gotta fight tooth and nail sometimes. Now look at our schools. The proof is in the pudding.
I open the door a crack. It’s Gloria, with her walker. She’s been here longer than me and is due to go into hospice. She’s paler than usual and a little shaky. Not Parkinson’s. Judy’s the one with Parkinson’s. Gloria’s the one with the drippy stuff in her eyes.
I’d had a quiet breakfast, finally, until then. Same routine every day, except this morning there was no racket coming through the wall from Belikan’s apartment.
While the canola oil—just a few drops—heated up in the cast iron pan, medium high, I put the English muffin in the toaster oven. Thomas’ claims it’s fork split, but they never poke it enough. I have to jab all around the muffin using a fork with long tines to finish the job because if you use a knife, you might as well say sayonara to the nooks and crannies. The toaster is set on five-and-a-half, brown but not burn-baby-burn, timed so that the scrambled eggs are done at the same time the toaster oven dings. Ding! End of the round.
I cracked open two eggs against the side of the bowl and scrambled them with the same fork I split the muffin with. One less fork to clean. Maybe it’s one “fewer” fork—until the whites and yolks were fully blended. No one likes when there’s a glob of whites. Can you believe there’s a YouTube video instructing you how to crack eggs without getting shells in the bowl? Does someone really need that? Is that what this country’s come to?
My mother used to make excellent scrambled eggs. I couldn’t eat eggs by themselves in those days. They’d make me want to throw up, especially fried eggs. Don’t even mention soft-boiled. Poached? Aaachhh! So, my mother had to make me bacon and toast (or English muffins) to go with my eggs so that I could choke them down, otherwise I refused to eat them. Or, as my evil third grade teacher used to say about virtually anything I had a hard time with, “You would if you could, but you can’t so you won’t.” Whatever that meant.
I poured the eggs into the pan and let them sear so that they wouldn’t stick when I scrambled them. Who wants to scrub a pan when there’s egg residue stuck like glue? I scramble with a wooden spatula. I could go into detail the myriad reasons why wood is better than metal, and forget plastic, but it might bore you. And we wouldn’t want that, would we? Sorry, am I wasting your time?
My father, who did breakfast on Sundays, his day off, occasionally made salami omelets. He’d slice rings of Hebrew National salami and arrange them in a circle in the pan. Salami was a snack mainstay as well, along with Triscuits and Kraft Cracker Barrel sharp cheese. We’d sit in front of the TV watching baseball games together—like father, like son—when baseball was still baseball: Before slo-mo instant replay, radar guns, pitch counts, play reviews, helmets, batting gloves, designated hitters, free agency, and blood-sucking agents. It was hit-and-run, sacrifice bunts, stolen bases, fastballs high and tight, metal cleats raised to take out the second baseman, and kicking dirt at the umpire.
“Ya bum! What are ya, blind?”
Speaking of cast iron pans and my father, not necessarily in that order, he once spent half of his one day off scouring a cast iron pan with steel wool to get off the black stuff. For some reason he didn’t grasp the concept of a seasoned pan, and scrubbed and scrubbed like a maniac until it was shiny as a mirror. No one dared suggest that maybe it wasn’t worth it or, just maybe he was being stupid. By the day’s end, he felt he’d achieved a great accomplishment.
I’ve got Triscuits on my shopping list.
With a pan at the right temperature, it takes no more than thirty seconds to scramble two eggs. I emptied them onto my plate, side by side with the English muffin, which I buttered with a fairly new product that’s a blend of butter and olive oil so that it spreads easier. It’s also cheaper than pure butter. Remember margarine? Oleo is probably the most often-used word in crossword puzzles. Parkay? “Tastes like butter!” (Not really.) That’s a crock. Bad joke.
The blueberry jam in the fridge had some fuzzy grayish stuff on its surface. Dare I? No, I don’t think so. Let someone else eat it and kill themselves. I should’ve gifted it to Belikan. Add it to the shopping list. We used to have Welch’s grape jelly. Nothing else. Maybe once in a while we’d have strawberry. But that was “jam” or “preserves.” We stuck with jelly for the most part. Thanksgiving we had blood-red cranberry jelly. You cut off both ends of the can and pushed it out like a placenta. Once a year was enough.
Thanksgivings were strictly traditional. It was about the only time we ate in the dining room and not at the green Formica kitchen table. The only thing different about our particular Thanksgiving dinners was the appetizer my father made—his pièce de résistance—individual chopped liver sculptures shaped like turkeys, with black olive slices for eyes and celery and carrot sticks for tail feathers.
My doctor says if I eat chopped liver or any other organ meats, for that matter, it could kill me. Cholesterol. But I’m tempted. That and pastrami, corned beef, and tongue. My mother had a hand-operated meat grinder that she’d dump fried chicken livers into and turn the crank. The liver came out of the holes like wormy spaghetti. Sweeney Todd-esque. There’s a van that can take us to the deli after stopping at the market.
I hated tongue when I was little. Along with eggs, it was on the list of things that made me want to barf. It was how my father made it. (For some reason, my mother kept her distance from this one.) He’d lower an entire, gross cow’s tongue into a big pot of boiling water. It looked like it was still throbbing. When he deemed it done, he’d slice it, taste buds and all, into thick slices. One day, he made me a tongue sandwich for lunch. I faked eating it, waited until he left the kitchen, wrapped it up in a napkin and hid it in the bottom of the trash can under the sink. Somehow, he smoked me out and unearthed it in two seconds flat. Foiled again. I had hell to pay for lying and for wasting food.
These days, wouldn’t you know, I love tongue, especially when it’s thinly sliced, on rye bread with deli mustard. If my father could only see me now. But he also liked Liederkranz cheese. It would sit in the fridge, heavily wrapped, for about two years, and if you unwrapped it and the wind was blowing toward you, you could pass out from the smell. We always thought Liederkranz was European because of the name and because it stank so much, but amazingly it was invented and produced in good old U.S.A. I could never forgive him for the Liederkranz.
Since the jam was inedible, I found a slice of Swiss cheese in the fridge.
At least there’s no more noise from next door. Couldn’t stand when that bastard, Eddie Belikan, blasted his Big Band crap. Didn’t he know they don’t make walls like they used to? They used to be plaster. Now it’s sheetrock, and even the two-by-fours aren’t two-by-four anymore. How can you eat breakfast in peace when you’ve got that racket in your ears? It’s worse than the Super Bowl halftime show. You remember the first Super Bowl? It wasn’t even called the Super Bowl and halftime wasn’t the noisy, degrading extravaganza they refer to as music.
But it’s not the thin walls that ruined society. You know what it is, or was, I should say? As I mentioned, if you were listening, it was the Sony Walkman. Yes, the Walkman. Before then, people listened to music together. It was a communal experience. With the Walkman, everyone went off into their own universe. The social fabric fell asunder. Hey, I’m just the messenger.
I poured myself a cup of coffee to go with my breakfast items. These damn paper filters nowadays fall apart and let all the grounds stream through like a dam opening its gates unless you fold them along the edge. You never had to do that before. And if you grind the beans too finely, the water just sits there like a Superfund pond. Remember those old aluminum percolators? My parents boiled the crap out of coffee, but I liked watching the water pop up in the little glass thing at the top, like blood in a beating heart, getting darker little by little. Maxwell House was their favorite brand. Remember their slogan, “Good till the last drop?” My father wrote to the company. He said, “What’s wrong with the last drop?” Very funny. They sent him a coupon. His moment of triumph.
I’m out of coffee. Et tu, Brute. I put it on the shopping list.
I’m enjoying the quiet. No more Big Band. I mean, how much Glenn Miller should one be expected to tolerate at nine in the morning? “Moonlight Serenade,” maybe, but not “In the Mood.” Definitely not. Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-de-DAH! Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-de-DAH! Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-de-DA! Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-Da-de-de-DAH! Over and over again. It could drive you insane. I complained about it to the office.
They said, “Have you tried bringing this issue to Mr. Belikan’s attention? Maybe you could work it out.”
I said, “That’s not my job. That’s your job. That’s what I’ve paid my life savings for, so that I don’t have to work out issues with Mr. Belikan.”
They said, “We’re sorry, but as long as it’s not during quiet hours, residents are permitted to play music. There’s nothing we can do about it, but please inform us if there is a problem during quiet hours.” And they gave me their smiley face. So, I worked it out with Mr. Belikan. And I didn’t buy him a damn Walkman, either.
Eddie Belikan was a lawyer before he retired. Not the corporate kind with the fancy offices, or even a public defender, God bless them. He was one of those sleazy personal injury attorneys who’d show up at funerals, say “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and hand out his business card. An ambulance chaser, that’s what they’re called, and with good reason. The worst of the worst. That’s why he can’t afford a better old folk’s home than this dump. And with the nerve to blast his so-called music. He deserved everything that was coming to him.
My kids put me here, against my better judgment.
“Dad, once you get used to it, you’ll love it.” Blah, blah, blah. Right. They didn’t know about Belikan. I threatened to hire a lawyer—that’s pretty ironic—but who has that kind of money?
Actually, the social fabric started to unwind long before the Walkman. The Walkman just accelerated it. The coup de grâce, as it were. As I said, it started with post-World War II affluence. No, I’m not kidding. You see, what happened was this: Until then, in the evening everyone sat out on their front porch or stoop.
Why was this important? Isn’t it self-evident? When neighbors walked by—yes, people used to walk—and you were out front, they’d stop and you’d talk. It was called a community. It was a neighborhood. But then, people started making more money, and what did they do? They moved to a nice home in the suburbs with a backyard, and then they built a fence. Voilà! No more community. People became invisible. Insulated, isolated family units. The return of tribalism.
Okay, okay, there were weekend family barbecues. I don’t deny it. My father would squirt a half-gallon of lighter fluid on the charcoal. He didn’t really get it that after the initial conflagration, the coals took another twenty minutes to heat up. We ate burnt, benzene-soaked hamburgers and hot dogs. You didn’t complain.
These days, it’s fancy-shmancy smokers and temperature-controlled gas grills. You want to spend a thousand dollars, more power to you, bud. If my father hadn’t been a tightwad and had bought a gas grill, I could never have burned the house down and no one would have died. Accidents will happen.
Most people don’t understand that when you grill a hamburger you don’t want lean. They think lean is healthier. Well, maybe it is, but it’s also drier, and it’s the fat that adds flavor. You want eighty-five percent, no leaner. Sometimes he’d grill them with chopped up onion inside.
I add ground beef, what we used to call chopped meat, and onions to the shopping list.
Do you know what they get for yellow onions these days? A dollar-sixty-nine a pound! Plain old yellow onions. Come on! And now they try to sell you even more expensive ones: sweet onions and white onions and red onions and Spanish onions and Vidalia onions. Honey, let me let you in on a little secret. They all taste the same.
And don’t get me started on salt.
I poured a tablespoon of half-and-half into my coffee.
You remember when milk came in glass bottles, with paper caps? No one worried about someone poisoning your milk. These days it takes a pair of pliers to get the top off an aspirin bottle. Child proof. More like human proof. The milkman delivered to your doorstep and put it into the milk box to keep fresh. (Remember those jokes about housewives and milkmen? You can’t tell them anymore or you’ll get a frowny face, but my father didn’t think they were funny, even back then.) It was pasteurized but not homogenized so you had to shake it to mix the cream on top with the milk. When nonfat milk first came out, it looked blue and tasted like dishwater. Skim milk, it was called. Nonfat sounds more marketable. Now it’s much better. Once in a while I see one of the old-timers still shaking a carton. Habits die slow, like the people here.
I still have half a container, so I don’t need to put it on the list until next week.
Fortunately, the cheapest brand is also the most environmentally friendly. It doesn’t have that twist-off plastic cap that just adds to the huge garbage dump in the Pacific. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is what they call it, three times the size of France and two billion pieces of plastic. I use as little as I can, but what can you do? Everything has plastic in it. It’s killing us all. Death is in the air, and it’s in the water, too.
How many times did I have to bang on the wall to get Belikan to shut off his music? Take a look. You can see my fist marks. Good thing I didn’t punch a hole in it, it’s so flimsy. A lot of good it did, trying to work it out in a neighborly way. The only thing I got was bloody knuckles.
When I was a kid, they didn’t have plastic. Toys were metal or wood, and they lasted. Lincoln Logs are now made of plastic. Can you believe that? Logs. Plastic. Logs. Plastic. No wonder kids are screwed up. They say metal and wood toys are dangerous, but look what’s dangerous! The earth is drowning in plastic. That’s what’s dangerous.
But that’s not all that’s dangerous. Look at the violence today. When I was little, if a kid got kidnapped, it was front page news. For a child to be shot was unthinkable. Unthinkable! And all of us had cap guns. We played cowboys and Indians and shot each other.
“I got ya. No, you missed me. No, I got ya. Okay, but it was only a flesh wound.”
Politically incorrect now, but no one took it seriously then. Years ago, I think I read that almost all homicides were between people who knew each other. Not that killing someone you know is necessarily a great idea, but just that there was a reason. Sometimes the reason could be compelling, like if a wife got beat up or someone acted so loony you just had to put an end to it. You could justify it, in a way. Sure, you’d have to have a good reason. But the idea of the random massacre of innocent bystanders was off the radar. It would never happen. Now, it’s every day, almost. Innocent people dropping like flies. What’s the statistic? Thirty-thousand homicide victims every year? The new normal. More like the new abnormal. Guns, guns, guns.
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Excuse me, sir. The second sentence is true, but the first one is false, though I’d amend it to say, “Weapons kill people.”
Gloria is standing in my doorway in her white fuzzy robe and seems to be looking at me in a strange way. Well, stranger than usual, anyway. How long has she been doing that?
“You’re early,” I say. “It’s not Bingo time.”
“It’s not that,” Gloria says. “Have you heard? Eddie is dead.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, Eddie Belikan is dead.”
“Strangled, huh?”
She nods.
I start to close the door. Gloria starts to shuffle away on her walker with the tennis balls at the bottom of its legs, but then she turns back and sticks a walker leg in the door so that I can’t close it all the way. See? If I had a chain, she wouldn’t’ve been able to do that.
“What?” I ask.
She cocks her head and looks at me like a curious poodle. All I can see through the crack in the door is her rheumy left eye, a tuft of her puffy white hair, and her smeary pink lipstick. It’s almost comical. When I was a kid I had a dog. It lived till fifteen-and-a-half. It was a mongrel, what we now call a mixed breed, named––
“How did you know that?” she asked.
Gerald Elias leads a double life as a critically acclaimed author and as an internationally noted musician. His award-winning Daniel Jacobus mystery series is set in the dark corners of the classical music world. His standalone Western mystery was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. In addition to his mysteries and short stories, he has also published a memoir of life as a professional musician, Symphonies & Scorpions. A former violinist with the Boston Symphony, Elias has been music director of Salt Lake City's popular Vivaldi by Candlelight concert series for 20 years. Elias divides his time between his home on the shores of Puget Sound in Seattle and his cottage in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, savoring the outdoors and maintaining a vibrant concert career while continuing to expand his literary horizons. He particularly enjoys winter, coffee, cooking, travel, watching sports, and being a hands-on grandparent.
