Shut the window...

Inside of 24 hours with the stock market crashing, my teachers/administrators pension fund lost $5,000. 1985 all over again. My father would have said "1933 all over again." He often sat and ruminated. When I was a child and he was sober, which he always was during daylight hours, he recalled the many years of his life. His life endlessly unfolded in his recollection of scenes where he was always the defender of some political cause or defending himself against family and business injustices...always in defensive mode, on guard. He liked to recall that day and though I wasn't born yet, I was there- I could always see the grey green rain as it fell on the pale buildings and in the rain sheets that filled the streets, flooding gutters, creating mud that stymied the horses trying pull their wagons loaded with metal wares, clanging against each other as the drops splashed on them and drenching the rags and old newspapers in the wagon of the rag man. My father said he was staring at the black rotary phone on his desk by the window, waiting for a call that would mean an order for bolts of fabric for suits, the call was coming any minute, he was waiting. He looked up, glanced out the window and from his small garment district office, he watched as another man, had perched on a window ledge. Wearing a business suit, the man was too far up to hear anything except wind, the man slid down into a seated position, held himself tightly by the knees, with his back to the open window, when suddenly head down he rolled himself off, fell with the rain into the mud below. My father continued to wait for a call to shake that heavy black phone. It didn't come that day or the next. Months later, he opened his office window and swung his own legs out, let them hang from the sill, above him a clear blue sky. As he sat there making cheshbonas the phone rang. The buyer needed blue serge and no one had it in stock...except my father. He had bought up every bolt of the shimmery blue fabric a decade earlier, thinking he would sell suits to the back country working men in Maryland, mostly log cutters who wouldn't have known that blue serge was out of style in the cities. But there were few sales made for suits that year and he got stuck with hundreds of bolts of fabric that he put into cold storage. He wrote down the order details and shut the window on his way out.