A Memoir by Tim Clancy

In 1964, when I was ten years old, my parents gave me fifty cents a week for doing the dishes or cleaning a bathroom. Knowing that she could trust me to do it right, my mom would sometimes pay me a dollar or two for an especially arduous several-hour cleaning job, like washing all the walls in the house or scrubbing all the scuff marks off the basement floor. If I wanted anything more than that, I’d recruit a friend, and we’d go to the houses of older folks in the neighborhood, folks who didn’t have kids, and just get right to the point: Got any work for us? We can pull weeds, rake, shovel snow, clean your garage. If it meant hours of scraping paint on a hot summer day or chipping away at an ice covered driveway on a bitter cold day in winter, the lure of a payoff in dollars—or just one dollar—was, for me, at the age of ten, irresistible. 

But so was spending it. That same year, I rode my bicycle to Kresge’s, a “dime store” in Berkley, the next town over, and, with just three dollars, I bought Christmas presents for my entire family, which, at the time, consisted of two parents and six siblings. These gifts were mostly small, plastic, and soon lost or broken; nonetheless, it was thrilling to buy a little something for each person in my family: key chain, spool of thread, squirt gun, pair of dice, miniature baby doll, tiny bar of soap.

My mom’s mother—Margaret Bailey—lived in Berkley. We called her “Grammy.” The summer following my Christmas shopping spree at Kresge’s, I rode my bicycle to her house on Cumberland Street. She knew I was trying to earn some money and had promised to “put me to work.” I was happy to oblige. 

It was a still, humid day in late August. Grammy’s yard smelled of fermenting apples that had fallen from a huge old tree that shaded the deep green of her small backyard. Using a butter knife as a digging tool, I spent the afternoon swatting mosquitos and pulling tightly packed tufts of grass and dandelions from between the bricks that formed a path between Grammy’s house and her garage. After a few hours, my face and arms itching and my hands raw from clutching and digging with the butter knife, Grammy invited me in for lunch. 

In her tiny green kitchen, she served me a baloney sandwich with a pickle, a few potato chips, and some iced lemonade. Since I almost always had several siblings or a friend to eat with, it felt strange, but certainly special, to be eating in the company of just one other person, my grandmother, something that had never happened before—or since.

The underside of the gray formica-topped island where we ate our lunch was covered with hard little lumps of dried chewing gum, probably stuck there by the youngest of my mother’s siblings, Patty Jo, who, at the time, still lived with Grammy in the house on Cumberland Street. Chewing gum was not allowed at my house (“It rots your teeth!”) so whenever we visited, I’d sneak a chunk loose, slip it into my pocket and, later, in the privacy of my wanderings, chew it back to life, with gusto. 

After lunch, I went back out in the yard and resumed my work until all of Grammy’s brick walkway was clearly visible: an interlocking pattern of hard brown rectangles, connecting house to garage. I walked back and forth on it a few times, admiring its simple, sturdy construction and the way it seemed to glow in the shady yard. 

Grammy fished two dollars from her purse, handed it to me and said “I wish it could be more.” 

I believed her. 

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Tim Clancy is a retired English teacher. He lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a short walk from Lake Superior. Among others, his writing has appeared in Paul Auster’s anthology “I Thought My Father was God,” The MacGuffin, and Catamaran.