During a recent thunder and lightning storm, while I was standing outside, just out of the rain, letting the mist and windblown rain droplets work on dropping my body temperature, and while listening to the thundering monsoon-like rain falling on the tin roof of the roadstand (well, ok, enameled steel), standing there, I was thinking. 

 

I was thinking of the time during my sophomore year at Fordham, of that time when I determined it would be a good idea, a necessary idea, to undo all my habits, undo all my emotional, financial, whatever types of habits there might be, that I might have had, undo all my personal habits except brushing my teeth.

 

I would brush my teeth no matter what. My Grandma Phelps said all my growing life, “Have you brushed your teeth?” “Yes, Grandma.” “Did you brush your teeth today?” “Yes, Grandma.” “Let me see,” she would demand in her sweet, gentlewomanly way, her thumb and pointer finger latching onto my chin, her Cameo brooch pinned to her white, silk blouse. “Here, see?” I would retort, mumbling, my mouth open for inspection. I think it was because her own sons’ teeth were so bad: my father’s teeth were very rotten, soon to be pulled; and Uncle Bill’s were knocked out in a snow sled accident on the steep pasture hill below the barn – at least some of the more generous called it an accident. It may have been more like an intentional brotherly hit gone way bad, beyond any conceivable design. I never understood how my father’s teeth could be so bad, so brown, missing and straggly, like pre-Hillbilly Elegy, except not all fictionalized for effect.

 

But maybe they could just not afford a dentist, until Dr. Kimball came to town. Came back to town, rather, after the war, after dentistry school, as he was born here, and a classmate of the Phelps boys. 

 

It’s a little foggy trying to remember what habits I had back then. I guess I broke them so well, I can’t remember them, but I do remember breaking the habit of wearing underwear. I stopped wearing underwear. Then I heard other people had stopped wearing underwear too, like when everyone stopped wearing socks, or on a more adult level, when everyone stopped wearing hats. If you catch some old footage of 1920’s Yankee games, you can see every male wearing a straw-hat during the summer and, later, a fedora during the fall. There was a straw-hat rule: straw-hat Easter to Labor Day, fedora Labor Day to Easter. And then, suddenly, no hats. JFK went hatless during his Inaugural Swearing-In-Ceremony in 1961 and the de-attired boldness sent waves through a bottled-up society still living the shock of Pearl Harbor. 

 

I initiated other reforms as well, like trying to be nice.

 

It’s not that I was not nice. I was impatient, some would say, short. The problem is I usually knew what people were saying before they finished saying it, and that was a problem. Most people don’t like you not letting them finish their soliloquies, (sometimes even for the second time, because if they have not finished their sentence and there’s an interruption, they have to start again with the whole thing, ((now that’s painful)) with me interrupting with the end of the sentence, or the missing word, or a countervailing idea, or an argument in the philosophical sense. I tried hard to stop this habit. I’m still work on it. 

 

As a corollary, I tried hard to stop tapping my fingers. I’ve tapped my fingers for a very long time, sometimes my whole palms are tapping, and when my mother asked me that day at the kitchen table if I wanted to learn to play an instrument and I said, “Yes, the drums” that was an immediate “NO. No drums in this house.”

 

The only time you are allowed to tap your fingers, or your hands, in polite society is during a concert. When my daughter was little and we pushed the chairs around the room to make a theater to watch the pirate movies and my hand would be tapping on the back of the seat, she would put her hand on top of mine and I would be still. Sometimes, she said, “Dad, Dad?” “Ok,” I said. We watched all the great movies, “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Kidnapped,” “Robinson Crusoe.”

 

Lastly, I gave up frequenting the dive bars across the tracks from the university, under the EL, over on Webster Avenue. Gave it up. The Jesuits themselves used to patrol there – gave it up except for Fridays. Maybe Saturday. Never Sunday.

 

Sunday was for Central Park, or a Hare Krishna dinner in Brooklyn. Which reminds me, I gave up the habit of religion then too, all of it, any of it. And I found, with cool self-reflection, that I became the most impatient, my fingers drummed the most uncontrollably, when someone was reciting to me their delusional views of the supernatural, or that there was proof of an afterlife, or how evolution had too many gaps to be true, and I am still working on losing these lost habits, but that one was easy. I love people enough to leave them alone. 

 

The rain has ended now. There is a little break in the action. I’m packing up the stand. I might just make it into the house with the goods before the next deluge. Peaches to cooler, honey to warm space. Cover the potatoes from sunlight. Keep the garlic dry. 

 

PS: Take a little time off. Drive over the mountain to Ellenville, Saturday August 10. Take your time. Stop at one of the turn-offs. Get out of your car. Look down at the city and the Roundout Valley. Look for hang-gliders over your head and their landing strip way down below. See if you can make out what remains of Nevele’s abandoned golf course. Come to the Blueberry Festival on Main Street. We will be selling our famous honey there. Look it up. Blueberry Festival, Ellenville. Then stop at our stand on Rte. 52 on the way home.