Officer Alex finds a connection to a familial past in a mixed drink
I’m looking down at my drink slowly churning the ice as I tend to do and I notice I’m using a swizzle stick from a jar that was packed full of them that my old man had collected for the two decades he drank.
They’d been on a shelf in the kitchen since being discovered in a parental alcove a while back, but I hadn’t paid attention to them other than being mindful they weren’t tossed out (as kids tend to do with every scrap of material a loved one has ever touched after they’ve died).
Plastic. Unassuming, usually plain Jane, but occasionally extravagant...kind of like people themselves.
“Johnney’s Strand Tavern, 237 W 47th St, N.Y.C.” this one read. By my weak recollection of Manhattan West 47th was near Hell’s Kitchen, and I couldn’t help but think of him as a young sailor in New York hanging out with his fellow swabbies on leave, barhopping without a care in the world.
“Juniors Cocktail Lounge, 22 W. 52nd St., N.Y.C.” read another. Near Radio City Music Hall, where he took his future wife on dates. (Sorry, swabbies.)
“Hale Koa Hotel, On the Beach at Waikiki,” a far more ornate paddle-shaped one read.Puerto Rico. Rome (Italy, not Georgia). Mare Island, San Francisco. All these visits and souvenirs from places he visited before I was even born…and I now had more grey hair than he ever did.
I apologize; it’s not my intention to be giving cirrhosis-related geography lessons here, I’m just trying to describe my reflections on the timeline of a man that was fairly important to me. Thinking of him in his youth, picturing him in these places as time passed (Waikiki was 20 years after Johnney’s but long before retirement), and thinking of the person he was at the beginning, then the middle, and of course the end. I was looking for a basis of comparison perhaps.
(I wasn’t stirring a drink for no reason, as you can tell.)
You see, I try to break out of the cloud I’m in now and then; I try to consider the person that has been formed by the experiences life has thrown at him when something’s bothering me. I try to compare that guy to the person he used to be before the polyester and the drama of a hands-on career like police work, and I get stuck…because at the end of the day, I no longer have any idea who that guy was now. Maybe I would have liked him? But probably not, hah.
Life molds you. For most, like a river shapes a rock…and for others, like a glacier carves out a valley. Experiences. Education. Even injury. But that basis of comparison is imwportant when you need a yardstick to gauge the difference between growth and atrophy.
I’d received bad news and I never saw it coming. As a consequence of the job it was not in my nature to discuss it, but it was also the nature of the job that led to the bad news. A vicious circle, right? And here I was without my mentor to discuss it.
I was squinting my eyes for no particular reason and realized I was actually having to remember to take a breath so I snapped out of it. The drink I was stirring obviously had no answers so I unceremoniously poured it over the edge of the deck railing I was leaning against in all this silly deep thought.
Still though, the question lingered even as I began to walk and coerce fresh blood into my brain: Who was that guy that started this job twenty something years ago?
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, but I recommend you take notes on these things, dear reader. Like growth marks in a childhood doorway, pay attention to where you are now and then so you can see how far you’ve come—or how far you may have fallen. Take stock and don’t be afraid to make minor course adjustments. Just whatever you do, don’t fly blind.
Is this related to police work, given the nature of my column? Hah. Absolutely. But we’ll get back to the “exciting” stuff next week. Until then?
If you’re ever in NYC, see the sights and maybe have a drink. But it won’t be at Johnney’s or Juniors, I can tell you that much. Time moves on; just look around.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.