The Blue Bathrobe

Growing up I noticed that Carney didn’t have many restaurants. I remember a small diner in Woolworth’s where all the waitresses looked like Flo from the TV show Alice. Most of them were older than the cafeteria lady at my elementary school. There was a sub shop named Palmisano’s where I tasted my first chicken parmesan sub and burned the roof of my mouth on the melted cheese in the process. I only ordered cold cuts after that. Then there was the Carney Crab House. The sign had this huge, awesome crab hanging on it, and I always thought it looked menacing. I guess that is why you use a hammer when you eat crabs. Truth be told, we never ate out.

The place where everybody ate was at home. Nobody went out to dinner; there was no point. My mother was a great cook and all my friends’ mothers were too. If you needed a change you could just go over to one of your friend’s houses. I had meatloaf at Fitz’s house, liver and onions at the Miller's house, and Mrs. Chadman made a killer pot roast. I used to try those meals out at home, and that’s how I learned to cook.

Now on every blue moon, we would hit the Gino’s on Joppa Road at the top of Perring Parkway for a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Gino’s was owned by Baltimore Colt favorite, Gino Marchetti. He was a beast of a football player and worked out a deal with the Colonel to sell his chicken. Even though a 24-piece picnic tub only cost five dollars it was still was very, very rare for us. There were no Checkers or Taco Bells, and the term “fast food” wasn’t even in our vocabulary. We ate slow food.

At the corner of Joppa and Harford roads sat a diner called Hamburger Junction. When you sat at the counter and ordered your food, it was brought to you on a train. No kidding, a real moving train. It was awesome. The back of the counter had tracks on it, and this small train would come chugging out of the kitchen pulling flatbed cars, and then your plate would stop right in front of you. The cooks wore engineer garb and everything.

Service had a whole different meaning back then. When you pulled into a gas station you would ride over an air hose and a bell would go off. Out of nowhere five guys would jump on your car like sumo wrestlers on a box of doughnuts. One guy would be checking the tires, one cleaning the windshield, one putting in gas, or Ethel Mertz as they called it, and one guy would be handing drinks to you through the window.

There was even a guy with a red rag hanging out of the back pocket of his clean overalls passing out S&H Green Stamps or various kitchen implements. We still have a dinner glass with a big dinosaur on it from Sinclair, which later changed their name to British Petroleum or BP.

I used to love to look out the window and watch them spring into action. Our family car was a 1967 blue Chevrolet Impala, but my Dad drove a blue and white Volkswagen van. We referred to it as the Big Blue Bus, and you could hear it four miles away, limiting his stealth approach. Whenever I see one on the road I picture my father driving it. The steering wheel was horizontal, so he leaned over when he drove.     

When I was eleven years old, the musical group Apollo 100 came out with a great song called “Joy.” It was a rock version of “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven, and my father loved it. He would sit at the wheel of the Big Blue Bus and bang his high school ring on the steering wheel while we drove down the road. The song had no lyrics, so he would make noises like he was playing the organ. He wore such a pleasant smile when he was listening to it. Once during one of his drumming sessions, the stone flew right out of his ring, so he never wore it again. I think of him every time I hear it.

Contrary to everything I just said my parents would occasionally go out to dinner. It was a very rare treat for them, and I think it was a direct request from some sort of counselor who was helping them deal with their wacky children.

Jan, my older sister, was baby-sitting, which meant she was on the telephone. Karen, my younger sister was experiencing the joys of diaper rash, and I was playing with matches. That’s how it was presented in the incident report, but here is how it really happened…

It was January, and I was under the weather. I never really understood the term “under the weather” until I recently googled it, so I’ll just say I was sick as hell. My bedroom was upstairs, which meant if I opened a window I would be above the weather. I was stuffed to the rafters and currently on the freezing side of a fever, you know, when one minute you are sweating and the next you are shivering.

Nearing the teeth-rattling portion of my illness, I grabbed my brand new blue comfy nylon cotton blend bathrobe and pulled it under the covers to put it on. I had just received it a few weeks earlier for Christmas. Its interior was pure cotton and the exterior was a patchwork of blue, black and white nylon squares filled with cotton. It resembled a quilt. It had pockets on the front and a real cool tie that almost wrapped around me twice. I had just eased into a peaceful, deathlike slumber. It was darker than usual in my room, but that was only because I was under the covers.

Suddenly the door swung open and Jan yanked off my comfy covers and told me to come downstairs to help her. I was irrational and mildly insane but crawled out of bed, put on my slippers, squinted at the bright hall light and slowly walked down the stairs. There was no railing at the top of the stairs so I used the two walls straight-armed as support to help me down. Halfway down the stairs a railing opened up the view to the living room, so I quickly transferred my weight to that. I think my head weighed twenty-seven pounds.

Jan hadn’t even told me why she required my assistance. I blindly followed her into the kitchen as she stopped at the oven. She picked up a pack of matches and handed them to me. “Can you light the oven, it scares me?”

Had I been of sane mind and proper intelligence I would have turned and climbed the stairs back to my frozen lair. However, being deliriously lethargic and semi-comatose, I obliged.

By means of the Way Back Machine I have to explain how our oven worked. It was a GE brand unit, white with four burners on top and a pilot light hidden in the middle. The broiler, which lived below the oven, was a flame-thrower for charring meat. To light the oven you had to open the oven door, light a match, turn on the gas, and drop the match in a small hole where it would slide down a chute to light the burner below. I’ve seen my mother do it a thousand times. Sometimes you would hear it go whoosh when it lit. My sister backed up as I took the matches and bent down towards the hole. I shook my head at her, lit the match and prepared to turn on the gas when I noticed it was already on.

I remember feeling the heat of the fireball as it burned off my eyebrows and evaporated the sweat on my forehead. My crazy sister had turned the gas on before she came to get me. I immediately understood why my parents weren’t home. The blast blew me back into an upright position and pinned me against the wall. The good news was that my fever had broken and I was no longer shivering, the bad news was that I was currently on fire.

My sister screamed and started patting me down before realizing my brand new blue nylon cotton blend bathrobe had melted. Through the smoke, I could see patches of burnt and matted nylon all over my front. One of my pockets was gone and my cool tie system had totally changed from solid to a liquid. I was wearing a chemistry project.

Livid with my sister more for destroying my bathrobe then removing my eyebrows, I retreated to my room and crawled back into my bed. That was the last time we were allowed to light the oven. In the future when my parents went out, our dinner choices were limited to graham crackers and milk or Jell-O. Both are highly non-combustible.