Threads

April 7, 2025

Greetings from the link,

Before I write anything, I want you to understand this is not meant to be a nostalgic meandering through my childhood.  It is a reminder, not simply of things past, but our part in them.

The house I grew up in had a front porch with a small portico. On the face of the overhang was an oval plate that featured an embossing of an old-fashioned water pumper, the kind pulled by horses when the firemen came to your house.  I never thought about it much; to me it was just some decoration.

It was known as a ‘fire mark’, a metal plate that was hung on the house to show the firemen which house was insured for fire.  By the time I was born, this kind of thing had been gone for nearly a hundred years, but the connection matters.

Our house had a milk chute, a little shelf in the house with small doors, one that opened on the outside and one inside the house. The milkman would bring glass bottles of milk to the house and put them in the milk chute, take away the empty bottles. By the time I was born, the ‘McDonald’s Man’, as we called him, drove a truck up and down the streets of Flint in the early hours, delivering milk and cheese, but hadn’t been that many years since he was behind a team of horses

We didn’t use this service, but I was linked to it, in part because of the chute.  We also had a coal chute, although it was boarded up and hadn’t been used in anyone’s memory.  Evidently, there was a coal man who would deliver coal and shovel it into the basement through the chute. In our years there, the house was heated by fuel oil, delivered by Flint Marathon Oil, a smelly process where a big tank truck would connect a large hose to a tank in our basement.

Even as I am writing this, it seems so foreign, so primitive.  This was a modern city, with electricity and indoor plumbing. And one blink away was a time when people had to chop wood to stay warm in the winter.

For some of the years on Chandler Street we had a party line, a phone line we shared with neighbors.  It was a real mark of progress when we got our own ‘private line’. Our phone number was on the Cedar exchange, because it started with ‘23’. So when told someone our number it was “Cedar two five four eight oh seven”.  We talked to phone ‘operators’ almost daily.

We got our first television set, which came in a huge wooden cabinet.  In order to get reception, we had to put tin foil on the antenna and then fine tune a dial on the channel selector of the TV.  We got newspapers delivered to our front porch.  We had a sidewalk in front of our house.  We burned our trash behind the garage.  We had laundry chutes in the house, so dirty clothes could be sent directly to the basement. All the kids in the neighborhood walked to school, just like in almost every other neighborhood.

My grandparents, people who were in my life, who lived while I lived, also had lived in a time when there were lamplighters and town criers and ice boxes with real ice. They lived in places where the wind blew through the gaps in the shiplap. They got water by pumping it from a well.  They had to start their car by putting a metal handle in the engine and cranking it.  These people breathed the same air I breathed.

They relied on telegrams and letters and gardens and canned fruit and vegetables from the root cellar.  Not a thousand years ago, not hundreds of years ago. These people were directly connected to me, and I felt that living.  Not like some history lesson, but just matter of fact living.  People who thought beer in a can was a luxury, who marveled at motion pictures and a flu vaccine.

There was a time that the fire fighters were often paid by the insurance companies, who were funded by policies paid for by the homeowners.  These homeowners were given a metal plaque to put on their house so the firemen would know you had paid for their protection.  It was a fascinating arrangement, in its day, one I would never have been aware of, if not for the fire mark. 

None of these things are significant on their own.  They are fragments of living that are almost forgotten, but not irrelevant.  These pieces, and many more, come to me, and to my children, through real people, real experiences, not history pages, but in the lives of people we know. 

These little threads, linking us to our past, matter for many reasons.  The first is to remind us how our civilization has progressed, and maybe to underscore what miracles we have in this day, and remind us to be grateful for them. Go to the sink and turn on the tap; if clean water comes out of it, give thanks.

The other reminder is to pay attention.  We are part of what will be history. The faster it passes, and it is screaming by now, the easier it is to miss some of what matters.  The blur of progress in our world is practically erasing the experiences.  We can barely be amazed at one life when it is replaced by something designed to make it better.

Our quality of life is not simply defined by conveniences and technological progress, those are easy to spot, but only tell part of the story.  We live longer, healthier lives, we have opportunities to learn, our knowledge expands, the possibilities mushroom for us.  But while all of that is happening we are living, and we should know, really know, how that feels.

We are also the connection to the people who come after us, we are the fire marks.  We are the lives that history mattered to.  Tell the stories, so they can feel what we knew. It is where perspective is born.

Hope this finds you remembering,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith