The Contemplative Eye

I had a true shock—really like seeing a ghost—at Starbuck’s the other day.

While the clerk was getting my coffee, I noticed there was a wheat penny in the tips jar. Wheat pennies are U.S. Lincoln-head cents minted from 1909 to 1958; they have the usual image of Abraham Lincoln’s head on the obverse (front) side and a now increasingly unfamiliar pair of wheat stalks on the reverse. The wheat stalks were replaced in 1959 with an image of the Lincoln Memorial that has remained on our pennies ever since.

With the clerk’s permission, I pocketed the wheat penny, a sentimental favorite from my boyhood days of coin collecting, and replaced it with another, ordinary penny.

“We get lots of those,” the clerk said, handing me my coffee.

“What?” I asked, uncomprehending. I’ve checked tips jars and cash-register change for decades wherever I go and feel lucky to find three or four wheat pennies a year.

“Sure,” he said, riffling through the jar. “Here’s another one. And another. And another!” We stepped out of the line of customers and went through the jar together, my jaw dropping ever farther as we gathered a good 20 pennies, some dating to 1911. I haven’t seen so many of them together in one place in 40 years.

The clerk explained that the rolls of pennies the shop receives from the bank are packed automatically by coin-counting machines and sometimes include caches of old currency, long in storage, that people decide to clear out.

“I associate it with bad times,” the clerk concluded. “People need the cash, and they dig into the back of their cupboards. It’s kind of sad, really.”

I gave the jar a three-dollar tip in gratitude, and the clerk my new gold-colored $1 coin, which he’d said his nephew would be interested in.

Good coffee, too.

Mary and I went to New Bedford, Mass., not long ago to visit her sister, brother-in-law and niece and to participate in the city’s “open studios” weekend holiday art sale.

The trip eventuated in an excursion to a nearby liquor store, as such trips can, to disburse our profits and learn a thing or two about the latest local microbrews. The manager showed me all the usual suspects, and I said, “No, no, no. I’ve been coming here for years, and I know all these brands. What’s new in the area?”

He then led me down the aisle to an astonishing sight, a stack of 12-packs of Narragansett, a prehistoric beer of southeastern New England that I’d believed had long since gone the way of the trilobite, Whip & Chill, and Sea Hunt.

The manager explained that a fellow formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, had remembered the brand fondly, decided there was room in the market for a nostalgic resurrection, bought the rights to the name, started brewing it again (with the help of an extant Narragansett brewmaster), and aimed to relocate the brewery back to Rhode Island from Rochester, New York, shortly.

Ah, well.

So we bought a 12-pack, naturally (for a mere $7.99, compared to the usual $1.25 or more a bottle for microbrews), stole off to Maine, and have been enjoying it in a mild way ever since.

Narragansett beer, let it be said, is no great shakes. It’s crisp, at best, with possibly a hint of spiciness. And it seems to have a lot of water in it. When I was a kid in Connecticut in the 1950s and ’60s, it had no virtue whatsoever that I’m aware of other than being the chief regional beer of New England (in addition to being, as they say, “well spoken of in the advertisements”). But you’ll recall that in those days, America as a whole was in the middle of a 75-year beer slump, like a Little Ice Age, brewing and drinking weightless, stone-cold weaselwater that was the laughingstock of the planet’s beer drinkers. This makes it difficult to render sensible views on what Narragansett was, is, or should be.

Meanwhile, according to the liquor-store manager, young people in Europe have started drinking old-time American beers like Narragansett—specifically Budweiser—because they’re “light.” Oh, merde! By that reasoning, we should be eating turkey baloney instead of foie gras.

Another brother-in-law, who lives in Appleton, Maine, listened to my tales of Narragansett on the phone this morning and informed me enthusiastically that when he was in college, in the late 1950s, he and a pal used to go skiing by tucking a couple of Narragansett GIQs (behemoth “Great Imperial Quart” bottles) into a snow bank, smuggling one of them onto an old-time enclosed ski lift, drinking it on the way up, skiing down the mountainside, and then starting all over again.

I went to college in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1970s, where we enjoyed—or, mostly, laughed at—a local New Haven beer called Hulls. “How is drinking Hulls like making love in a canoe?” the riddle went. Answer: “They’re both fuckin’ close to water.”

As (I am told) the implausibly starchy old mum of an acquaintance of mine used to say, 60 years ago, “My, aren’t we gay….”

By the way, the Narragansett people, bless their hearts, have an amusing little website you might enjoy.

[Above: The Narragansett Brewery in Rochester, New York. Well, no. Actually, it's a paper mill I photographed with my pal Davey when he and I were wandering around Westbrook, Maine, last month, trying to find something interesting to shoot. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the mill resembled a beer brewery.]

When I was a little boy, I lived behind the building you see here, just off Main Street in the seacoast town of Branford, Connecticut.

It wasn’t called “Panache” in those days, needless to say. It was a branch office of the Connecticut Light & Power Company. Note the Art Deco facade, with its bas-relief light bulbs and commercial smattering of William-Powell-Myrna-Loy style. I’ve been interested in Art Deco ever since, although it’s slightly jumbled in my mind with black-and-white movies, which I disliked because they were pervasive on TV and dull when I was a kid.

I enjoyed my childhood, I think. But my parents were having difficulties in their lives—and I sometimes suspect it’s meaningful that I don’t remember much from before 1960.

Our house was “landlocked” (i.e., no street frontage), a big, brown-shingled three-story apartment building with yellow trim reached via a driveway along the ugly backside of a two-story commercial building and a greasy spoon’s belching incinerators. Our front yard was mostly CL&P’s fenced parking lot, we had neighbors on both sides, and our backyard was a fenced lumber yard. I’ve been interested in landlocked buildings, too, ever since.

It makes me sad to realize how my parents, well-intentioned, educated people from good families, must have suffered here. My mom’s father was a prominent WWII general. Her grandfather was a prosperous Edwardian eye doctor. My dad used to be an elite economist for the U.S. government in Germany after the war. His father was an editor of the old New York Sun. But here they were, through no fault of their own, living in near-poverty—in a near-tenement, now that I think about it clearly—while my father’s health drained away and the U.S. postwar economy boomed around them.

Me, I was having a ball, sort of. My brother and sister and I jumped as high and far as we dared from the swing set; flung ourselves from bicycles onto the lawn, pretending to be stunt men getting shot; ran a lemonade stand on the sidewalk out front; built snow forts in CL&P’s plowed parking lot complete with tunnels and underground snowball caches; dug a splendid hole in our sandpile aiming to reach China; climbed the roof of the lumber yard’s warehouse to survey the realm; ate stolen concord grapes from a neighbor’s wild vines; secretly explored the other neighbor’s abandoned barn; raced around in a wagon with one kid facing forward, steering, and the other facing backward, feet astern for propulsion; camped in a tent made from old sheets draped over a sumac branch; and built a wildly ramshackle two-story tree house in the farthest, darkest back corner of the yard. Whew.

I have tender memories of planting marigolds in half eggshells as a second-grader and watching them grow, day by day, in a ragged, mud-spattered flowerbed all summer long.

Damaged goods? Maybe so. The old house is damaged, too—gone entirely, in fact, demolished about 20 years ago to expand the lumber yard. But unlike the house, I’m still here. Still finding my way. And not landlocked.