Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  With an ice-pick wind screaming off Lake Erie and rattling the windows, indoors we wrapped ourselves in blankets or else jumped around to keep warm. There was a small minority of citizens with heat—those who lived in apartments where utilities were included and they happened to reside closest to the furnace, old people with thin blood, and rich people, who set their thermostats to an extravagant seventy degrees. When I walked into one of these homes after being refrigerated for so long, I stumbled over to the couch and passed out as if I’d just eaten three Thanksgiving dinners.

  However, the people hoarding the heat got their just desserts in the form of dry, flaky skin and chronic dandruff. With wool hats, coats, and socks constantly being put on and taken off, the inside of our homes were laboratories for experiments with static electricity. Shuffle across the floor in a pair of fuzzy slippers and then go electrocute the cat or, in the case of my friends, zap a younger brother or sister. When Dad came to kiss me good night with those leather soles scraping along the gold shag carpet, he could basically set my hair on fire with a single peck to the forehead.

  Sure, we could use a humidifier to try and avoid middle-of-the-night nosebleeds. But the old-fashioned machines increased the mold and microbes in the air, and eventually we’d end up with pleurisy in addition to well-entrenched bronchitis.

  There was no doubt that the cold was a beauty treatment all its own. Any Manhattan modeling agency will tell you that the best finds in fashion photography of the seventies were Polish girls from Buffalo, with their flawless skin, chilled to perfection. Or as my childhood friend Heather puts it, “Buffalonians are the other white meat.”

  As kids, when one of us complained of being cold, we were told to move around. We were told to wear layers. We were told to stop complaining because did we think we were the only ones who were cold? Jimmy Carter wore a cardigan sweater, thus earning him the nickname Jimmy Cardigan. Apparently he was cold too. But did we see him complaining? No, we did not. Catholic children were of course instructed to “offer it up,” meaning to suffer in peace so that God could use their sacrifice for the good of the church or a specific intention close to their heart.

  Yet we loved to play in the snow, and our parents didn’t seem to worry about us dying out there. They knew how to do it right, like suntanning—start ’em young with a few hours out in the cold every day until they build a base and can stay out until bedtime.

  We kids regularly heard rumors that the school district maintained in its files a study concluding that children learn better when the heat in the building is kept extremely low. And that cold builds moral fiber. However, I think they made a mistake between the thermostat being low and completely off—we were being kept fresh like minnows. For us, the problem wasn’t so much the shivering as the telltale sign of whispering to a friend; even though the teacher couldn’t hear us talking, she could see the steam created by the warm breath rising from our mouths.

  The Energy Police were everywhere. Classroom light-switch plates had bright blue stickers warning KEEP THE MIDDLE SWITCH OFF! This was before people connected the high rate of depression and suicide in Buffalo with seasonal affective disorder (translation: foul-weather fatigue). It’s one of the few places where a person can open her window shades in the morning and the rooms actually become darker. I grew up two decades before the University of Buffalo school newspaper started running ads in March asking if students needed to talk to a counselor or sit under a sunlamp. The dark side to the nearby and popular Niagara Falls is that one person takes the plunge at least every two weeks—and it’s not for lack of guardrails and warning signs.

  Statistically, Buffalo is right up there with Seattle when it comes to the number of overcast days, and Lands’ End wouldn’t be off base in creating a sweater color resembling dried mud and calling it Buffalo beige. A local newspaper ran a cartoon of a mother taking the hand of her frightened little girl and saying, “Don’t be afraid, dear, it’s only the sun.” At any given time, the city is half under skies the color of duct tape and half under indictment. That being the case, Buffalo is not used as the backdrop for many romantic comedies. Or in the rare case that it is supposedly the setting, such as in the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty, most of the filming is done elsewhere.

  If someone encounters native Buffalonians now residing in other parts of the world, he should never ask them about the weather when deciding what to wear. “Fine” to them means it isn’t a blinding blizzard. “Nice” implies that the mercury is above thirty degrees Fahrenheit, with a low windchill factor. And “hot as blazes” is anything above fifty.

  Likewise, most Buffalonians who move away (deserters) tend not to be big consumers of air-conditioning. Hot air will eternally be looked upon as a luxury, something for which we once paid almost an entire month’s salary. Also, we’re not raised to view a continuous blasting of cold air as climate control so much as a draft; it was the thing that came seeping through our windows and underneath doors, caused flu, pneumonia, and sent Grandpa to an early grave.

  Buffalo should be called the City of Space Heaters. For denizens of the Magnolia Belt, these are operated with gas or kerosene (though nowadays they tend to be portable electric devices that plug into a wall), and they can more or less heat a room. However, space heaters were and still are responsible for a lot of fires. We may as well have had a pile of newspaper (which people often left next to the heater, go figure) doused with lighter fluid lying around the house. For this reason, older

  Buffalonians are terrified of fire, especially mothers; before leaving the house they shout, “Is everything turned off? Is everything out?” while frantically dashing from room to room searching for lit candles, plugged-in curling irons, and electric blankets with short circuits.

  Twelve

  Mary Tyler Moore for President…Hit Parade…

  The Americans with No Abilities Act

  The only political drama other than the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison riots to enter my early consciousness was Watergate—a word that has since become shorthand for an amalgam of scandals and disclosures that culminated in President Richard Nixon’s decision to resign

  in 1974 rather than face impeachment. And, it also led to the guilty pleas and convictions of more than thirty White House and Nixon campaign officials.

  This one made absolutely no sense to me. I’m certain there were more-aware-and-intelligent eight-year-olds around who not only understood it, but could have gone so far as to explain why Gerald Ford issued a pardon so that Nixon couldn’t be indicted for any crimes he may have committed while president. I, on the other hand, was still coming to grips with the fact that the letter y could sometimes be used as a vowel. This information alone was so overwhelming that I was barely able to absorb anything else that was happening at the time.

  In fact, the only reason I even recall President Nixon resigning is because my mother made me watch it on TV during dinner that night. I couldn’t have been less interested, but she insisted this “historic moment” required our full attention. Thus were the drawbacks of living with someone who came from a newspaper family.

  Eventually we’d start watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show while eating dinner. That’s how we all knew when to arrive at the table—at 6:01, when the daily MTM reruns played on channel twenty-nine. (The actual show ran from 1970 to 1977.) Watching TV during dinner every night helped disguise a Chekhovian household where my mother and father only spoke to each other when necessary, which pretty much meant when snow tires and storm windows needed to be put on and taken off. We lived more like roommates, with the subtext that everyone was on the way to something else more permanent that didn’t involve the others, and this was merely a way station, albeit one with a resplendent lemon-and-tangerine-colored kitchen. My parents took separate cars wherever they went and slept in separate bedrooms as far back as I could remember. The hallway outside my room had always been Kashmir, with Mom (India) living off to the east and Dad (Pakistan) to the west.

  As one
character put it in Michael Bennett’s hit Broadway show A Chorus Line, “It wasn’t paradise, but it was home.” Though he also said that suicide in Buffalo is redundant. It was meant to be an inside joke, since Bennett was a native Buffalonian. Or perhaps an outside joke, if he was taking the harsh winters into account. (I’ve since heard that this wonderful line was contributed by the playwright Neil Simon.)

  As a kid, I simply enjoyed the characters and jokes on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In retrospect, I think the groundbreaking sitcom had a deeper impact. I’d occasionally hear how a woman could pursue almost any career, live on her own, and put off having children, but I didn’t see much of it in my neighborhood. Most women were homemakers. If an older woman passed away and her husband died a few months later, people

  said it was a result of a broken heart. But deep down, they suspected he killed himself with his own cooking and housekeeping, or lack thereof.

  If the women in my neighborhood went to work, it was usually as teachers, nurses, or secretaries. In local businesses, women made coffee, not policy. Otherwise, they volunteered at the blood bank, book-mobile, or their church. Buffalo was always slightly behind when it came to social progress. In fact, the cowboy comedian Will Rogers once said he wanted to be in Buffalo when the world ended because it would happen there five years later. Outside of my Unitarian church, few people I knew declared themselves to be women’s libbers.

  To me, Mary Tyler Moore’s career-girl life felt like a realistic possibility, whereas women my mom’s age saw her as a feminist, or part of a new generation, for better or worse. It was logical to assume that I’d work in a place like Mary’s newsroom, with male colleagues, and that in the managerial hierarchy some men would be above me and some below me. I imagined someday moving into an apartment like Mary’s, except with a big L on the wall instead of an M. I’d have entertaining and neurotic friends, and we’d have sitcom-worthy times together. Mary’s theme song constantly reassured me: “You’re gonna make it after all.”

  Designer jeans, along with disco, didn’t reach the Midwest until I was in junior high. In elementary school, kids wore Levi’s from the Gap if they were with it, and Toughskins from Sears if they weren’t. My Toughskins were a particularly vibrant purple. Cool or clueless, everyone carried a comb in his or her back pocket.

  For the hip crowd, the music of the moment was Swedish pop sensation ABBA, courageously sacrificing lyrics that plumbed the depths of sophistication for ones that rhymed in English. The nature lovers had “Rocky Mountain High” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver and “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, while teens sang and smooched to the Partridge Family’s greatest hits, including “I Think I Love You” and “Come On Get Happy,” and the entire Captain & Tennille oeuvre, which featured “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Muskrat Love.” Lyrics from the latter still sparkle like tiny jewels in the snowbanks of my mind: “They whirl and they twirl and they tango, singin’ and jinglin’ the jango.”

  If we wanted to make a mix tape of favorite songs, there was no Internet from which to download music. We had to call our request in to the radio station, wait an hour or three for it to be played, and then start the tape recorder at exactly the right second. The disc jockey usually talked over the first and last parts of the song, and because it wasn’t a direct feed, if the dog barked, our mothers yelled, or the phone rang, that was on the tape too.

  A favorite album of elementary school children was Free to Be…You and Me, which, through a variety of catchy songs and stories with generous

  banjo accompaniment, insisted that it was okay to be different. This meant everyone from the beleaguered William, who desperately wanted a doll (Grandma arrived and finally had the good sense to buy it for him), to the athletic Princess Atalanta, who recoiled in horror at the idea of Daddy selecting her husband; a race was organized to determine her mate, which she handily won, and she went on to marry her true love. The king eventually realized that the times were indeed a-changing.

  However, this album paled in popularity compared to Sonny and Cher’s hit song “I Got You Babe.” In the early seventies, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was the must-see TV of its day. Other popular variety shows were The Captain & Tennille and Donny and Marie (that would be Osmond).

  On school field trips we’d sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer,” “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” and “Bingo” until one of the drivers probably quit and went on to invent Prozac. Everyone’s favorite bus song (of which there are different versions) was:

  Miss Suzy had a tugboat,

  Her tugboat had a bell,

  Miss Suzy went to heaven,

  Her tugboat went to

  Hello, operator, please get me number nine,

  And if you disconnect me, I’ll kick you from

  Behind the ’frigerator, there was a piece of glass,

  Miss Suzy sat upon it

  And cut her little

  Ask me no more questions,

  I’ll tell you no more lies,

  The boys are in the bathroom

  Zipping up their

  Flies are in the park,

  Bees are in their hives

  The boys and girls are kissing

  In the D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, dark, dark, dark!

  When the teachers finished all the aspirin, we moved on to “I Met a Bear” and “On Top of Spaghetti.”

  A portion of almost every school day was dedicated to learning the metric system—converting back and forth between inches and centimeters, gallons and liters, miles and kilometers. Teachers warned us that a rude awakening was coming soon and we’d find that Fahrenheit, pounds, and acres would all be suddenly gone! Science teachers explained that our system of measurement was decidedly stupid to begin with—based on the length of someone’s body parts—and all truly modern countries used the metric system, which made sense since everything was divisible by ten. We sat there, day after day, bent over our desks dividing by five-ninths and multiplying by nine-fifths and subtracting thirty, or whatever it was. The Metric Conversion Act to change over the United States was passed in 1975, but it had about as much effect as Prohibition and Vatican II. President Reagan canceled funding for the Metric Board in 1982, and it was as if the whole thing had been a bad dream, like the idea of Americans learning how to speak foreign languages. It wouldn’t be until twenty years later, when NASA scientists (my age) started forgetting to convert English units into metric, and millions of dollars in equipment was lost or ruined, that people began saying, “Hey, what ever happened to that whole metric thing?” Otherwise, the United States stands proudly alongside Liberia and Myanmar, the only other nonmetric countries in the world.

  After school we rode banana-seat bikes, played by the creek (a paradise for budding botanists and pyromaniacs), and started impromptu games of kickball, dodgeball, street hockey, and freeze tag in neighborhood cul-de-sacs. Compared to nowadays, life moved at a tea-party tempo.

  Few kids had lessons or organized sporting events to attend. And no one had heard of a playdate or quality time with parents. The word parent was still regarded as a noun, and it was at least a decade before it would become firmly entrenched as a verb. We were responsible for making our own friends, and parents were viewed as an impediment to enjoying life’s finer things, such as homemade milk shakes, prank phone calls, and playing with matches. They were adversaries to be ditched as soon as possible. A day spent with Mom was a day spent in suburban purgatory—standing around the shoe-repair shop and the dry cleaner’s, returning something at the mall, and then being dragged through the supermarket. Not only that, we weren’t of much value to our parents, aside from doing typical chores like cleaning, taking out the trash, and bringing in the groceries; their lives weren’t loaded with complicated gadgetry that only young people knew how to operate.

  The girls played in many of the ball games with the boys, but also gyrated inside hula hoops, skated down sidewalks, played hopscotch, school, and house. Boys went to war us
ing toy soldiers or cap pistols and amused themselves with yo-yos, marbles, and slingshots. Many fine hours were devoted to shadow puppetry. However, we were the last generation to give these activities any serious consideration. The first primitive video game had arrived while I was in elementary school. And I mean primitive—a flashing dot that moved across a screen, pretending to be a Ping-Pong ball.

  In winter, we built snowmen and forts and had snowball wars. When I went to elementary school it was still the Woolen Age, and so we had to go inside when our mittens eventually became sopping wet and froze, along with our fingers.

  Some of the more expensive boots claimed to be waterproof—a bit like ads for mail-order sea monkeys promising hours of entertainment—

  but the technology hadn’t arrived yet, and they really weren’t. So we pulled plastic bags over our feet before placing them inside our boots. We mostly used Wonder Bread bags, and you could see the red, yellow, and blue polka dots sticking out above our shins. For this reason, no one ever threw out a bread bag. They were kept in a pile near the back door or in the mudroom. And if we planned to be out for a long time, we double-bagged to reduce the chance of leakage.

  When it was too rainy or snowy to go outside, we’d stay in and play board games such as Life, Stratego, Chutes and Ladders, Parcheesi, Candy Land, Monopoly, and Clue, work jigsaw puzzles, build strip malls out of Legos and cabins out of Lincoln Logs, or watch the hamsters

  scamper around in the Habitrail, a rodent terrarium. Card games were popular, and many a rainy afternoon was whiled away playing war, old maid, go fish, concentration, slapjack, crazy eights, and bloody knuckles. For the more imaginative (or friend challenged) there was the Spirograph (creating hallucinogenic curves on paper), the Slinky (a tension spring that went down the stairs, sort of), and Silly Putty (the result of a failed experiment in making artificial rubber). After it grew dark, we’d play blindman’s buff in Mary’s basement with her multitude of brothers and sisters and their friends. The blindfold was usually an itchy woolen scarf, and so there was an added incentive to find and identify someone else to be It.