My father, before whom inanimate objects cowered, used to say, “You all go at things like bulls at a red blanket. Take it easy. Things are not just there. They’re made to work. Think of how they work before you touch them.”
“Okay, Dad,” I would say, and take my fountain pen out of the ink bottle, press the wrong knob and squirt ink on his white shirt. He would never kill me or anything like that. He’d just say, “You never listen, do you?” and go and change his shirt.
Sometimes he would speculate mildly on what my mother’s kinfolk must have been like before they emigrated from Sweden, conjuring up ancestors like Sigurd the Fingerless, Einar No-Nose and Burnt Njal.
Anyway, many Viking generations later, there I was with my fingers stuck together with powerful glue. I could scarcely believe my misfortune, having carefully perused the directions on the giant sheet of cardboard attached to the tiny tube of Magic Sticky. Despite my cautionary muttering of “Heat and Water Resistant, Sets Within Ten Seconds, One Drop Holds a Ton,” the family curse had caught me out. I was, at least on one side, a finned creature.
Anyway, many Viking generations later, there I was with my fingers stuck together with powerful glue.
I could just hear my father saying, “Are you daft? You read that acetone dissolves the stuff. Why didn’t you get the acetone ready first?”
Rummaging one-handedly in the bathroom cupboard, I found a bottle of acetone-based nail-polish remover. By this time all four fingers on my left hand were bent together like a mitten, so I was able to get the stopper out. As I rubbed away at the stretched skin between the fingers (“Do Not Use Force or Mechanical Means.” Dear heavens, what mechanical means?), my whole life passed before me and I lived once more the high points as a descendant of Sigurd the Fingerless.
There was that day in Sydney when a stranger in foreign garb bowed low to me and extended a piece of paper on which was written, “This man wants the Immigration Department.” Just as I turned to point it out to him, my jaw spontaneously dislocated and stayed that way. Judging from his hasty departure, the man headed straight back to Pakistan.
And then there was the definitive battle of my continuing war with zippers. Zippers hate me. They reach out and grab everything—necklaces, bits of underwear, lumps of lady—and then jam irrevocably.
This time I had been to a glamorous party and had worn a form-fitting dress with a zipper at the back. As I began to undress, the zipper got stuck. It was far too late to go next door and ask someone to rescue me, so up and down the room I raged, extending my arms to unbelievable lengths behind my back. I was like an advanced Yogi—but not advanced enough.
Finally I tried to get out of the dress without unzipping it. It had long sleeves. With dire and painful contortions, I got one arm out of the sleeve and down inside the dress. Now I had only one arm and the dress was more form-fitting than ever.
Exhausted, I fell on my bed and slept fitfully through the rest of the night. Imagine, then, the humiliation of having to go next door at eight o’clock in the morning with only one arm and smeared make-up, and beg to be released—especially when the zipper just purred open.
“What a party!” I could see the words written all over my neighbor’s face.
During these recollections, my fingers had gradually been letting go of one another. But a fearful thought struck me. Had I, when I realized my fingers were glued together, dropped the tube of Magic Sticky and perhaps fastened the washing machine to the floor forever? Fortunately, in my delirium I had placed the Sticky on the hammer, and I now had a hammer with a tube on its head, as if it were convalescing from brain surgery. Once again, though, Sigurd had protected a descendant from major mishap.
The hammer brings me to the matter of the screwdriver in my lavatory. I have rewarded myself in my declining years with a singularly lush john full of books and potted plants and other comforts, including a screwdriver. Let guests think what they like when they see the screwdriver between the works of Paul Theroux and the gloxinia. Their amazement and even their sympathy leave me unmoved.
Recently the john door jammed immovably, with me on the wrong side. Not wishing my whitened bones to be found in such a place in six months’ time, I spent an hour fighting strips of glass out of the louvered window. Then with terrible difficulty I climbed through, all hunched up like a dead fly, and fell out on the veranda.
The entire time I could hear my father nagging, “You never listen, do you? If you kept a screwdriver inside, you could have taken off the doorknob!”
So that’s why the screwdriver is in my lavatory. I have at last listened and taken one small step toward neutralizing the curse of Sigurd the Fingerless.
Originally published in the September 1984 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
The Day We Planted Hope
by Conrad Kiechel
I tucked five seeds into the dirt, then sat down and…
We had just moved to France, and my wife Nancy and I were unpacking on a quiet August afternoon, busy making the rental apartment into a home for our uprooted family. At our feet our three-year-old, Claire, sat leafing through books. Far from friends and relatives, she was clearly tired of living with packing boxes.
“Please read me this,” she said, thrusting a thin blue book in my direction. It’s Fun to Speak French was stenciled on the spine of the faded cover. My grandfather, who had grown up speaking French, had given me the book when I was a child, and my parents had unearthed it from somewhere and sent it along with us.
Claire pointed to a page with line drawings below the bars of an old French children’s song: “Do you know how to plant cabbages?” In blue ink, someone had crossed out cabbages and written “Watermelons!”
“Daddy! Did you do that?” Claire asked, looking up with an expression of shock. We had only recently convinced her not to write in books, and suddenly here was proof that her parents weren’t practicing what they preached. I told her my grandfather had written in the book.
“Daddy!” Now she was really confused. “Why did your grandfather do that?” As I sat down to tell the story, my thoughts traveled a well-worn road back to Nebraska.
“Are we almost there?” my sister Vicky demanded from the back seat of our family’s ’54 Ford station wagon. It was the last, and toughest, day of our annual drive west to our grandparents’ house perched above a creek bed in Tecumseh, Nebraska. For a few weeks each summer, Vicky and I had all the adventure we needed—working the old pump to see what kind of bugs came up in the water, choreographing fireworks displays in the back lot, escaping the midday sun under a canvas tarp thrown over two clotheslines.
When we pulled into their driveway, my grandmother burst from the back door to greet us. Behind her, Grandad hobbled over the lawn, then gathered us in his strong arms.
As a young man, Grandad had been a comer: a farmer, teacher, stockman and, at age 26, a Nebraska state senator. The trajectory of his life was straight up—until a massive stroke felled him at age 44 and crippled him for life. Sometime between his stroke and my boyhood, he had made peace with his life. His scrape with death had convinced him not how awful life is, but how precious. His zest for living made him a playmate Vicky and I fought over.
Each morning we pressed into Grandad’s car for the drive to the post office, entertained along the way by the incessant patter of his nonsense rhymes: “Hello, Mrs. Brown. Why are you going to town?”
Best of all were trips to “the eighty,” the only bit of farmland Grandad had managed to keep; the rest had been sold, or repossessed, to pay the bills in his years of recovery. Vicky and I would climb into the barn’s hayloft and, from an old cow stall below, Grandad made mooing noises that sent us into convulsions of laughter.
“I’m going to be a farmer too,” I announced proudly one afternoon as Grandad sat playing solitaire at his desk.
Laying card upon card, he asked, “What are you going to grow?”
Suddenly I thought of a favorite pastime—spitting watermelon seeds as
far as possible. “How about watermelons?” I asked.
“Hmm, there’s a crop I haven’t tried!” Brown eyes sparkling, he put his cards aside. “Better get your seeds in the ground quick though.”
It was mid-August, and the days were growing shorter. Soon we would pack up for the drive back to Virginia—and school. I shuddered, feeling the first chill of autumn separation.
“Let’s do it now!” I said, leaping out of my seat. “What do we do?”
First, Grandad said, we needed seeds. Remembering the slice of watermelon I’d seen in Aunt Mary’s refrigerator, I raced out the door and across the yard to her house. In a flash I was back, five black seeds in my hand.
Grandad suggested a sunny spot in back of the house to plant the seeds. But I wanted a place where I could easily watch my plants’ progress skyward.
We walked outside into the shade of a huge oak. “Right here, Grandad,” I said. I could sit with my back against the tree, reading comic books as the watermelons grew. It was perfect.
“Go to the garage and get the hoe,” was Grandad’s only reaction. Then he showed me how to prepare the ground and plant the seeds in a semicircle. “Don’t crowd them,” he said quietly. “Give them plenty of room to grow.”
“Now what, Grandad?”
“Now comes the hard part,” he said. “You wait.” And for a whole afternoon, I did. Nearly every hour I checked on my watermelons, each time watering the seeds again. Incredibly, they had still not sprouted by suppertime, although my plot was a muddy mess. At the dinner table I asked Grandad how long it would take.
“Maybe next month,” he said, laughing. “Maybe sooner.”
The next morning I lay lazily in bed, reading a comic book. Suddenly, I remembered: the seeds! Dressing quickly, I ran outside.
What’s that? I wondered, peering under the oak. Then I realized—it’s a watermelon! A huge, perfectly shaped fruit lay nesting in the cool mud. I felt triumphant. Wow! I’m a farmer! It was the biggest melon I’d seen, and I’d grown it.
Just as I realized I hadn’t, Grandad came out of the house. “You picked a great spot, Conrad,” he chuckled.
“Oh Grandad!” I said. Then we quickly conspired to play the joke on others. After breakfast we loaded the melon into Grandad’s trunk and took it to town, where he showed his cronies the “midnight miracle” his grandson had grown—and they let me believe they believed it.
Later that month Vicky and I got into the back seat of the station wagon for the glum ride back east. Grandad passed a book through the window. “For school,” he said seriously. Hours later, I opened it to where he’d written “watermelons”—and laughed at another of Grandad’s jokes.
Grandad showed his cronies the “midnight miracle” his grandson had grown—and they let me believe they believed it.
Holding the book Grandad had given me that day long ago, Claire listened quietly to the story. Then she asked, “Daddy, can I plant seeds too?”
Nancy looked at me; together we surveyed the mountain of boxes waiting to be unpacked. About to say, “We’ll do it tomorrow,” I realized I had never heard Grandad say that. We took off for the market. At a small shop with a metal rack filled with seed packs, Claire picked one that promised bright red flowers, and I added a sack of potting soil.
On the walk home, while Claire munched a buttery croissant, I thought about those seeds I’d planted. For the first time I realized that Grandad could have met my childish enthusiasm with a litany of disappointing facts: that watermelons don’t grow well in Nebraska; that it was too late to plant them anyway; that it was pointless to try growing them in the deep shade. But instead of boring me with the how of growing things, which I would soon forget, he made sure I first experienced the “wow.”
Claire charged up the three flights of stairs to our apartment, and in a few minutes she was standing on a chair at the kitchen sink, filling a white porcelain pot with soil. As I sprinkled seeds into her open palm, I felt for the first time the pains Grandad had taken. He had stolen back into town that August afternoon and bought the biggest melon in the market. That night, after I was asleep, he had awkwardly unloaded it and, with a painful bend, placed it exactly above my seeds.
“Done, Daddy,” Claire broke into my reverie. I opened the window over the sink and she put her pot on the sill, moving it from side to side until she found the perfect spot. “Now grow!” she commanded.
A few days later, shouts of “They’re growing!” woke us, and Claire led us to the kitchen to see a pot of small green shoots. “Mommy,” she said proudly, “I’m a farmer!”
I had always thought the midnight miracle was just another of Grandad’s pranks. Now I realized it was one of his many gifts to me. In his refusal to let his crippling hinder him, he had planted something that neither time nor distance could uproot: a full-throttle grasping at the happiness life offers—and a disdain for whatever bumps get in the way.
As Claire beamed with satisfaction, I watched my grandfather’s joy take fresh root in her life. And that was the biggest miracle of all.
Originally published in the March 1994 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
PHOTO OF LASTING INTEREST
A Soldier’s Best Friend
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s an… airborne dog? When military canine handlers drop into combat zones, their dogs jump with them. And while the two- and four-legged warriors often ride in a harness attached to each other, sometimes—especially when jumping into water—the dogs go it alone. This Special Forces soldier and his dog were practicing their solo jumps off the ramp of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during a training exercise over the Gulf of Mexico in 2011. Don’t worry—this was a low-altitude jump, so neither man nor dog needed a parachute. Photograph by Manuel J. Martinez/U.S. Air Force/Alamy
The Over-the-Hill Gang
by Mark Seal, from Vanity Fair
How a ragtag crew of aging criminals pulled off one of the most daring robberies in British history.
The audacious April 2015 ransacking of safe-deposit boxes in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district, was epic. So much cash, jewelry, and other valuables had been taken that the loot had been hauled away in giant trash containers on wheels. London’s newspapers were filled with artists’ renderings of the heist, featuring hard-bodied burglars in black turtlenecks doing superhuman things. Experts insisted that the heist was the work of a foreign team of Navy-Seal-like professionals, likely from the infamous Pink Panthers, an international gang of master jewelry thieves.
British crime aficionados saw the operation as a throwback to the meticulously planned, supremely executed jewelry heists of yesteryear, which had inspired such classic crime movies as To Catch a Thief and Topkapi.
The vault was in the basement of this building at 88–90 Hatton Garden
But when arrests were made the following month, Great Britain collectively gasped.
The Hatton Garden heist, it turned out, had been the work of a ragtag group of superannuated criminals. “Run? They can barely walk,” Danny Jones wrote to a reporter from jail. “One has cancer, he’s 76, another heart condition, 68. Another, 75, can’t remember his name. Sixty-year-old with two new hips and knees.”
Yet they had defied age, physical infirmities, burglar alarms, and even Scotland Yard to power their way through walls of concrete and solid steel and haul away a prize estimated at more than £14 million, at least £10.3 million of which is still missing.
* * *
Retirement is a bitch. Your wife has passed away. Most of your mates are in exile, prison, or the grave. You skulk around your run-down mansion in the suburbs of London, infuriating your neighbors by running a used-car dealership out of your home, and “hobbling over to the news agent,” as one neighbor put it, for the daily papers to read about younger men doing what you used to.
This was the life of Brian Reader at 76. “He ain’t got no friends no more,” a colleague would say of him. “Sitting down there in the café, talks about all their yes
terdays,” said another.
And yet for practically his whole life Reader had exasperated Scotland Yard. First arrested for breaking and entering at age 11, he was allegedly part of the “Millionaire Moles” gang, which burrowed underground to loot safe-deposit boxes in a Lloyds bank vault in London in 1971, a haul worth more than £41 million today.
Reader had generally managed to walk away until the Brinks-Mat Job in 1983, involving the theft of what today would be worth more than £83 million in gold bullion from the high-security warehouse at Heathrow Airport. Reader was a “soldier” on that job, moving the gold between a “fence” and dealers. He was found guilty of conspiracy for handling stolen goods and sentenced to nine years.
When he got out of prison, it seemed he had put the life of crime behind him. But two decades later, suffering from prostate cancer and other ailments, he decided to get back into the game with his biggest caper yet. Scotland Yard commander Peter Spindler, who oversaw the London police in investigating the Hatton Garden heist, told me that Reader was called “the Guvnor,” the leader in British gangster parlance, who, possibly with associates, “set it up, enlisted the others, and called the job on, to the best of our understanding.”
Number two on the heist was Terry Perkins, 67, suffering from diabetes and other health issues, living in a little house in Enfield. He was a ghost to the neighbors, who had no idea he had once been a ringleader in the largest cash robbery in British history at that time: the 1983 Security Express Job, in which a gang raided a cash depot in East London and stole cash equivalent to £19 million today. Perkins was sentenced to 22 years but escaped when he was close to release and went on the run, returning to jail in 2011 to serve out the rest of his sentence. He wasn’t a known criminal before the Security Express robbery, said retired detective Peter Wilton. “Usually wore a suit and had a portfolio of houses.”
The Best of Reader's Digest Page 16
