Dumb Waiters

I was talking with Rainee this morning, an old friend of mine; not so much that we have known each other for such a long time, she’s 83 years old. I call her a couple of times a week to make sure she has things she needs or just to talk and put a smile on her face. Today Rainee was telling me about some man who gets home late at night to the apartment below hers and then puts on so much aftershave lotion as to make her wonder. “I could take it if he wanted to empty the trash…” she said, “… but that aftershave is just too much for me.” She reminded me of my grandmother and so I told her about the special relationship I had with that wonderful woman.

As a young boy I would be treated to a special weekend with my grandparents when they lived in New York City. I would take a train into the city, sleep over at their apartment and then go to the zoo, a show or whatever they had planned for my visit. At night I would sleep on the sofa and listen to the sounds of the city; trains as they moved along the tracks of the elevated a block or so away, traffic on the boulevard and things like that were all exciting sounds for a boy not familiar with them. There was one sound that startled me the first time, a loud banging and thumping that seemed to come from inside the wall. It would start up high and vanish into the lower levels only to be repeated half an hour or so later. “That’s the dumb waiter”, I was told; a fancy name for a garbage shoot. I found it amusing, so many people would empty their trash at all hours of the night, bouncing empty cans and bottles all the way to the trash bin in the basement. At one time it really had been a “dumb waiter”, a small platform where items could be placed and then hoisted up to a given floor where they could then be off loaded.

So, today I had a chance to revisit that old apartment in New York, look out the window into the night sky as trains stirred in the distance, cab drivers yelled at red lights that were taking too long to turn green and empty dog food cans that banged and thumped their way past my ears as they descended to oblivion in an ancient convenience known as a dumb waiter. I wonder what memories will be awakened the next time I call Rainee.