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On this date -- January 8 -- in 1947, my mother would celebrate her 30th birthday in a dwelling only a month or two since it had been equipped with indoor plumbing. A budding thought stirred in my almost 8-year-old mind that, given the privations attendant upon raising three kids -- one less than a year old -- in an old, drafty rented house, she might like to be surprised with something nice.
Sixteen months earlier, our family had moved from a near-in Detroit suburb to a northwestern lower Michigan village to which Dad had come as a single man in the early 1920s to fish for trout on a brief vacation. As I learned the story much later, my mother early on in their courtship agreed, if somewhat reluctantly, to leave Detroit and environs in due course for this mecca of outdoor sport. She loved Dad that much.
So there she was -- bereft of her brothers and sisters and their families still sorting out life in post-war Detroit -- in a hamlet of fewer than 150 souls. I guess I was on some level aware of her loneliness and, remembering that she was partial to fresh oranges, wanted her to have a birthday gift that would bring a smile to her face.
Thus I took the longer way home from school that day under a leaden sky and into the teeth of a frigid snow squall off the nearby lake down to the block-long village and its sole grocery store, hoping to find there an orange or two.
People who have since "discovered" Alden, Michigan, and erected lakeshore manses that rival those in upper-class neighborhoods in leafy American exurbs would have thought that Leo Angell's grocery store in the winter of 1946-47 was a movie set in which 19th-century life on the prairie was being depicted.
Nevertheless, there my eyes fell upon a pile -- a whole pile -- of fresh oranges, a delicacy not ordinarily available in such volume at that time of the year, as I was told. I'm sure now that they would have retailed for something near solid gold. Mr. Angell told me that two crates of the fruit had been put off the express car of the northbound train that very afternoon with the name of his grocery on the shipping label marked "PAID." He said he had neither ordered nor paid for them but was glad to sell them for pure profit.
I told him of my mother's birthday and of my desire to buy oranges for her. Whereupon he took out a large paper bag and threw in a dozen oranges, asking 50 cents for the lot. What made him think that a lad of my age would have such riches in his pocket, I cannot tell you. I think I had may have had all of a nickel and perhaps should've asked if I could buy just one orange with it.
But suddenly it had become too complicated for me. Just as I shrugged my shoulders and turned away he said, "Wait. I'll charge them to your father, and you can take them home to Mom." I did not then know what charging them meant. Some while later, I found out that the price put on those dozen oranges was a damn sight more than 50 cents.
Be that as it may, I lugged home that bag of oranges, nearly falling in the front door whilst handing them over to my mother. "What's this?" she asked. I said they were oranges and that I had bought them for her birthday present.
One of the few times I can remember her weeping was that day. She took me in her arms and murmured something about what a good boy I was. Then doubt clearly set in: "But how ever did you get the money to pay for them?" It would be another six months before I began to be useful to the village railroad agent by hustling baggage and delivering Western Union telegrams for tips, allowances being unheard of in those days.
So smiling victoriously, I said, "I charged them to Daddy." Her face fell, but for just an instant. I was unaware then that Dad did not have much of a job. He had only recently been admitted to the practice of law and had been picking up such work as there was until he could get established. I think life during that winter must have reminded my parents of the rigors of the Depression in the midst of which they had been wed.
The episode of the charged fruit occasioned my first tutorial in economics. Dad was kind but stern in his lecture on the subject. It was to the effect that one spends what he does not have or cannot replace to his own eventual peril. Thus, over the years I have tried my best not to live on credit, for the simple reason that I like a sound sleep unbothered by nightmares featuring bill collectors and bailiffs at the door. I cannot now remember the exact amount billed to my father in l'affaire des oranges. It wasn't all that much, but I was required to pay it back to him in the performance of a couple of weeks' worth of extra household chores. It was a useful lesson.
All this comes to mind as of late I have been testing my post-Proustian hypothesis that memory and history are sometimes one and the same, though often not. I learned that the hard way during my days as a newspaper reporter.
Leo Angell is long since dead, as are my mother and father. No one living would have cause to remember the story of the oranges, save me. Accordingly, you will have to take my word for it: The incident as described is a brief flash in an otherwise inconsequential sliver of history. Yet each January 8, it emerges intact from memory as I feel the cold of the long walk home toting the bag of oranges and, at its end, the warmth of my mother's embrace. Today I will eat an orange in her memory.
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