NOVEMBER 23, 2024 – The other day on my return from delivering Illiana to school, I was cruising west along Larpenteur Avenue toward the lefthand turn into our neighborhood about a mile down the pike. Right after I’d passed the Presbyterian Church and was abreast of the “+55 adult community,” I caught a glimpse of a man with a slight stoop and wide stride, hiking toward the entrance to the “community” building. In the eyes of most observers, the man’s forward lean might have been attributed to the bulging backpack strapped to the man’s back.
I knew better. With or without the backpack, “Mitch”—our former neighbor three doors down— always leans into the direction he’s headed. And he’s always headed somewhere with a most determined pace and stride. On this most recent sighting of Mitch, I figured he was lugging groceries home from the local supermarket.
The nickname “Urban Walker” would suit him well. Thirty years ago, Mitch walked to work—for the first few years, downtown Minneapolis; later, downtown St. Paul, each six miles distant from our block, to practice law—or in the case of St. Paul, to swim laps at the “Y” either before work or afterward. He also walked to Hamline University off Snelling Avenue beyond the railroad tracks to teach law. I even met him once at an SPCO Sunday matinee concert at the Ted Mann Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, seven miles from home, just after he’d arrived . . . on foot. It was a cold Sunday in January. I offered him a ride home, but he declined.
On occasion Mitch rode the bus—the same one I took to and from work almost every workday. We’d sit next to each other and chat for the 20-minute trip. In his Brooklynese and I in “modified Minnesotan,” we’d exchange views on one subject or another of common interest. Mitch reserved his most strident opinions for major league baseball.
Though he possessed a sense of humor, Mitch was mostly quite serious about pretty much everything. His wife, a native of Wisconsin, was mellower. I can’t remember the source now—it might’ve been other neighbors—but soon after Mitch and his wife moved into the neighborhood I learned part of their back story. Yes, Mitch had grew up in Brooklyn and had never learned to drive; never wanted to learn to drive. His wife, on the other hand did, and for her benefit and that of their two kids, the family owned a plain vanilla car (it a was a light blue Taurus, as I remember), which occupied the garage 99% of the time.
Unlike most garages in the neighborhood, the garage of the subject family was attached and faced the street, not the back alley. It had a gable roof, just one level high, with a shallow pitch. For the patient reader, in due course this roof will become the main stage of the unfolding story.
First, back to . . . the back story. According to my aforementioned source, Mitch had struck a deal with his wife: he’d agree to their buying a single-family house . . . provided it was in a reliably Democratic neighborhood and if she agreed to do 100% of the yard work. That would explain why I never saw Mitch pushing a lawn mower or shoveling the sidewalk. By all appearances, during the entire quarter century or so that they owned the house, his wife held up diligently her end of their bargain.
In short, having grown up in one of the boroughs of the Big Apple, Mitch presented a classic example of, “You can take the native New Yorker out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the native New Yorker.”
This axiom was brought home to me one Saturday afternoon when I was comfortably seated on our back porch, alternately reading and snoozing. During one of the transitions between these two pursuits I happened to look up and gaze beyond the narrow confines of our backyard. When turning my sight across the yards of the neighbors between our house and Brooklyn, I noticed a man doing a crab walk up the backside of Mitch’s garage roof. It took me a moment to realize it was Mitch himself. Curious, I put down my book, exited the porch and stepped furtively down the alley for a better look.
A short ladder was leaning against the back gutter of the garage roof. Toward the roof ridge-line was a sizable dead branch that had fallen from the tree above. Mitch seemed to be crawling toward the branch, and I guessed that far from having volunteered for the task, he was responding to his wife’s directive—not a breach of their yard work pact but an imperative under some unspoken force majeure clause of their unwritten contract.
In my mind, Mitch’s doing the rooftop crab walk in advancement of home maintenance said a lot about the couple’s arrangement. I might have thought it said something about Mitch’s mettle too, his crawling on a roof like that and risking his neck. Except . . . the edge of the roof wasn’t more than six feet off the soft grassy ground, and as I noted above, the roof itself had a very low-pitch. Plus, Mitch’s mission didn’t require him to curl his toes over the edge of danger. No. He was doing a very slow, very cautious . . . crab walk away from the edge of the world. But what nearly announced my presence by a royal guffaw was . . . Mitch’s football helmet with the rather large face-guard on the vanguard of his crab walk!
Where, I wondered, had Mitch, the Yankees fan, procured a football helmet? Certainly not from his daughters, neither of whom played football, I can assure you.
As I stepped slowly away, back down the alley to our driveway, I watched Mitch reach the branch, clutch it by one hand (as he kept the his other hand firmly planted on the shingles) and toss the limb off the side of the roof. He didn’t look in the direction he threw it. He was too focused, I assumed, on how he’d do the reverse crab walk back down to the top of the ladder. Fortunately, he’d given the toss enough muscle to chuck the branch clear of the roof and avoid having to do a sideways crab walk for a second shot.
My amusement, however, soon turned to empathy. If Mitch was using the crab walk and such a bundle of nerves that he’d gone to the trouble of tracking down (or buying?!) a football helmet, he was probably scared to death up there. And after all, whether he’d volunteered or been conscripted, his current mission was definitely outside the contractual requirements of the deal with his wife. I knew from experience that the scariest part of roof “excursions” is transitioning from roof to ladder. Mindful of the main risk Mitch faced, I waited until he had safely completed his descent.
I wonder whatever happened to the football helmet. I’ll bet good money, however, that it didn’t make the move from the house on our street to the +55 adult community on Larpenteur Avenue.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
