Give Us This Day

On days my mother wanted bread, rolls, or cakes, she'd put a sign in our front window for the Helms Bakery Truck. It was a blue and white sign printed on cardboard emblazoned with the letter "H" in gold. Each weekday morning, the Helms truck would make its way slowly along Longridge Avenue, stopping at every drive where residents showed the sign in their windows.

The Helms man, in his fresh-pressed white uniform and sporty cap, would toot his horn, hop out, and open the side of the truck revealing tray after tray of freshly baked donuts, glazed and plump in the bright Southern California sunshine, sheets of white or chocolate iced cakes, and loaves of bread still warm from the morning ovens.

On days after mom had placed a specific order--say for rye bread or rolls--the driver would have it ready when we went to the curb. The smell was heavenly. On days I was home from school, I'd wait outside on the lawn for the Helms man. The trucks had no air conditioning and if you we lived near the end of the route toward the end of a hot summer's day, the Helms man would hand out free donuts to neighborhood kids. Was this going on all across America, or just our street?

The Helms bakery was established in 1931 near Culver City with 31 employees and 11 delivery trucks. Before the freeways carved ribbons of poured concrete from the sea to the inland deserts, Helms trucks would drive for hours each day along city streets and over the winding passes of the coastal range to deliver the bread to Angelinos, sometimes extending their routes several hundred miles north to Fresno in the hot San Joaquin Valley, or southward to San Diego and the Mexican border. Even the Apollo astronauts who first landed on the moon packed Helms bread along, crumbs floating like leavened snowflakes in orbit.

To have been a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to witness the end of personalized service by hard-working merchants and professionals. My father and mother tell stories of horse-drawn ice trucks of the 1920s and 1930s, clumping along the cobbled New York City streets bringing blocks of relief to hot and woozy residents. We still called our refrigerator an "ice box", and when I use the expression today, people tilt their heads and laugh.

The last vestiges of those days expired with my coming of age. But well into my adolescence, we still had a dairy man, who left bottles of milk and cubes of butter on our doorstep, taking away the empties in a metal carrier that jingled like a glass xylophone. Then one day the glass bottles gave way to plastic jugs. My sister, barely a year old, had her photo taken and put on a carton of milk that the Adohr Farms delivered to our door. She had been named an "Adohrable Baby". Adohr was founded in 1916 by Merritt and Rhoda (spelled backwards, it's Adohr) Adamson on acreage dating from the California days of Spanish land grants and grew for a while to be the world's largest milk producer.

Then, one day, the milkman stopped coming. Whether mom had canceled the route or if the dairy had gone out of the delivery business I don't know. But after that time, we began to visit a drive-through dairy up on Chatsworth. It was spanking clean, with shiny washed driveways, and you pulled your car to the door and picked up buttermilk, margarine, sour cream, and cottage cheese.

I date myself, but those were also the days, in the early 1960s, when you telephoned the doctor when you were sick and he came to your home. I remember him coming after I had my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was eight. I had been looking forward, of course, to the promised, endless bowls of ice cream that were said to soothe the ache. But I couldn't eat any of it, I was so sore. Then the doctor came to the house, gave me an injection with a needle so large it would make most present-day patients faint, and I fell asleep.

Of course, in summers the Good Humor truck would roam the streets every afternoon when school let out. The driver would play the familiar tune through a loudspeaker atop the truck and when you heard it coming, you raced from the street where you had been playing, into the house to beg for money.

The Good Humor man also wore a clean, pressed white uniform and cap, and opened heavy freezer doors at the back of the truck that smoked with cold and held Sidewalk Sundaes and King Cones. Good Humor was founded in 1920 after Ohio candy-maker Harry Burt created the first ice cream on a stick. After he patented the Good Humor Bar, Burt assembled a fleet of twelve chauffeur-driven trucks, all with bells that announced the pending opportunity for a sugar high. Even the company name reflects the ancient medical notion that body "humors" could be adjusted to make a person happy. And I was plenty happy after eating my Sidewalk Sundae, at least for a little while.

You got to know your milkman, your Helms driver, and the local Good Humor man. You gave them small gifts at Christmas. Like a good bartender, the Good Humor man would remember your favorite ice cream and have it ready from the freezer as you ran up with change in your hand.

But those were the days when the world came to you, and even the visitors to your neighborhood had familiar faces and names, were part of the fabric of your life, and promised that comfort and prosperity would flow like human kindness to your door.

Above the Chena

You would need one of the many Athabaskan words for winter to adequately describe the depth of cold. Perhaps the word "heyii" will do. Some days, the thermometer outside my bedroom window barely climbed above 68 below. At noon, the weak sun threw beams above the Chena River and dashed the skies with the color of roses, but not high enough so you could see its yellow disc. The frozen river was filled with the color of blood and the trees, clad with ice for months now, took in all the available light and glimmered like glass. Then, an hour later, it was pitch black again.

I was living in a three-story log house built by a Scottish surgeon at the top of Puffin Place, just beyond Farmer's Loop Road. In the summer, you could play golf on the carpeted excuse for a course that wrapped around the birch tree forest. But this was winter, and the course presented long fairways of crusted snow where an occasional raven, fat and jet black, sat alone gazing into the fading light.

The doctor had taken the winter off. He flew away to the warm veldt of central Africa, leaving me to care for the house, to keep the furnace fueled and lit, the circular driveway plowed, and to feed the tanks of tropical fish and the doctor's golden retriever. Even the heated garage was freezing cold. Once I dropped a bottle of distilled water on the concrete floor and it shattered. By the time I returned with a mop, the water had formed a sheet of ice.

You could feel the moisture in your eyes begin to freeze the moment you walked outside, and your sinuses would crackle. You left your car running when you stopped anywhere for fear it might not fire up when you returned. Or, you plugged the car into an electrical outlet to heat your oil and radiator while you were gone. You packed your trunk with extra clothing and a sleeping bag to keep you warm in a breakdown. It was illegal to drive by a motorist stranded by the side of the road.

Steam rose out of the Fairbanks heating plant, but refused to rise into the frozen sky. It hovered like a white anvil just hundreds of feet over town. And you pasted plastic sheets into your car windows to form a layer of air between the inside of the car and the frozen glass. It was like peering out a porthole of a submarine into a foggy sea when you drove.

On days when the temperatures climbed into the minus 30s, I bundled up and took Goldie for a walk. He loved the snow and scurried around the darkened yard of mid-day after crows. You even left your garbage bags piled in the open yard. In minutes anything you left inside them would freeze, rather than rot, and had little allure for passing moose or arctic fox.

That winter we would drive up Goldstream Road far enough out of town to see the aurora without the haze of city light. We'd sit in the idling car, rubbing our hands in the blast from the heater, fortifying ourselves with Russian vodka, then risking five minutes outside to watch the curtains of blue and pink light that stretched across the entire sky from horizon to horizon. When you stood beneath the corona, the descending light seemed to originate directly overhead, with veils of particles streaming down around you as millions of glowing starflakes. Four of five minutes, then you'd hurry back into the car to defrost your eyebrows.

Some days I would take Goldie with me as I skated up the dogsled trail in my cross-country skiis. Even with layers of polypro and down, it was cold. Once, in 20 below temperatures on a clear, dark day, I had overestimated my stamina and on the way back, barely a mile from home, I was exhausted. It took another hour to get back, taking a step, then resting, then rubbing my mittens up and down my legs to get the feeling back into them, then taking another stride.

Some days were just plain stupefying and I sat in the dark vastness of the heated house listening to the bubbling aquarium, gazing out the plate glass window at the endless whited trunks of birch trees where they faded into the forest.

In the early spring, the sun crept back above the horizon like a lost friend and hovered as hope for longer days. One morning it actually occurred to me that I had survived the winter, and I fell to my knees in the snow and wept.

But the doctor had been gone much too long, and I had discovered the black medical bags he had stashed throughout the upper floors of the house, the bottles and bottles and bottles of pain pills he had prescribed in his own name, a sufficient number of bottles that you would hardly notice if a few were missing. And in the springtime, I was missing too, and it would take more than the re-emergence of a tired sun to help me feel warm again.

Going Under

The Granada Hills High School "Highlanders" chose the McLean tartan. Only a few members of the marching band were allowed to wear kilts, sporrans, and flashes. I took great pride in it, although I was a Russian Jew and the closest I had come to the highlands was the corner of Chatsworth Street and Zelzah Avenue, where palm trees and burger joints dotted the landscape.

I wore the kilt around town just to call attention to myself. I wore it to the store, the dentist, on cruise nights on the Sunset Strip, and to the pancake house. If I could, I would have worn it to synagogue.

I was certain it underscored my manhood. Matt Garbutt had a Falcon station wagon and after football games, I'd ride in the back deck, my naked legs hanging out the open window toward following cars. There were jokes about what we wore underneath, but none of us would tell.

In the fall of my senior year I wore the kilt to Dr. Abraham's office. The doc was a fully paid member of one of the twelve tribes of Israel and, like myself, had no prior experience in man skirts. At the end of the appointment it was decided that I had a lazy eye that would require surgery. The procedure was scheduled and off I went to parade my uniform about Ventura Boulevard.

The operation required a mild sedative. In those days, strabismus surgery had to be performed without anesthesia so the patient, gazing consciously at spots on the ceiling, could let the physician know if the adjustment to the muscle was on target. Only then would the anesthesiologist deliver the knock-out drug.

To begin, the anesthesiologist injected my eye socket with a numbing solution, making six or eight insertions around the orbit. They burned like iodine. When the doctor had successfully moved my eye out from its setting to reach the muscles beneath it, the pain was absolutely intolerable. It felt like he was pushing a screwdriver into my eye. Worse, I could see everything through my good eye, reflected in the mirror the surgeon wore on his forehead.

"Just a little longer, " he said. I was wriggling in my restraints and the nurse put her hand on my shoulder. The dots on the ceiling seemed close and in focus through my tears. "A little more," he said, "you're doing great."

The pain shot back into my skull and down my neck, and I cried out. At that second, Dr. Abraham lifted up his mirror and peered at me.

"What do you wear under that thing, anyway?" he asked.

For a moment we were laughing. And just after that, the full anesthesia hit like a sledge and I passed into the heather.