In high school I worked after classes and on Saturdays delivering furniture for Carl’s Furniture store in Orlando. Miss Brewster was the secretary and bookkeeper for my boss. She was what we used to call a handsome woman, probably in her fifties. She wore reading spectacles with rhinestones on the rims, and was one of the first persons I knew who had a chain to let her glasses dangle from her neck when she wasn’t using them. I was fascinated by the way they bounced off her bosom when she let them go.
There were two of us working in the delivery van. When we had no deliveries, Miss Brewster put us to work sweeping the premises, washing the display windows, polishing the tables and whatever she could dream up to keep us earning our wage.
She was hard to please and kept after us, never satisfied, especially with the floor and those dust balls which would flee from the air current created by the push broom, scuttle under a sofa, and later reappear to follow Miss Brewster as she swept by to greet a customer in the showroom.
She called these elusive fluffs whiffletockers, pointing them out to us with her spectacles. Whiffletockers were hard to catch, and if you managed to grab one with a broom, it stuck there and had to be plucked loose from the bristles by hand.
I never heard the word before or since. Miss Brewster has since become dust herself, and for me all that remains of her is that pair of spectacles, slanted like cat’s eyes and beaded with rhinestones, and her contralto voice saying whiffletockers.
Memory is often like that.
You try to catch it and it scurries away from you, hiding under other more vivid furniture in the head. In that sense then, they resemble Miss Brewster’s whiffletockers, and I am determined to track as many of them as I can, weightless though they may be, and flatten them like oversized asterisks on the page. Maybe then they will cease flitting about on the floor of my mind, or at the very least accumulate in an orderly fashion in a corner where old light is coming through a window.
*
‘Nita and I are standing on shining wood. Barefoot. Naked. Bright sun illuminates our skin, makes a puddle of light beneath us. We seem to be floating on the thickness of varnish.
In another room dark and windowless, my newly arrived brother has my place. He arrived without the harmonica promised to come with him.
That is the beginning of all.
*
Patrick Meadows 1934 – 2017.
I especially love this passage:
Memory is often like that.
You try to catch it and it scurries away from you, hiding under other more vivid furniture in the head. In that sense then, they resemble Miss Brewster’s whiffletockers, and I am determined to track as many of them as I can, weightless though they may be, and flatten them like oversized asterisks on the page. Maybe then they will cease flitting about on the floor of my mind, or at the very least accumulate in an orderly fashion in a corner where old light is coming through a window.
Fascinated by all of your Patrick stories and find this one particularly interesting. I love Patrick’s turn of phrase and analogies. Every time I read one of your P stories, I kick myself for not saving or making notes about conversations with my father. Although I remember bits and pieces, I don’t remember enough to put together anything like what you have done. Above all else, what an outstanding tribute to Patrick. I hang on every single word.