I carefully lowered the stylus and dialed the volume
to recklessly high. The glorious opening chords of Thus Sprach Zarathustra filled the room with explosive unearthly beauty.
It was, thunderously overwhelming. It might have been heard throughout the block. There was every possibility police would soon be knocking at my door - I wouldn’t have been surprised.
They didn’t.
I did get a phone call.
Lowering the volume, I answered the call. It was Mrs. Easley, who lived in the apartment directly below. “What is that wonderful, amazing music”? I said it was a famous composition by Mr. Richard Strauss. She wanted to know more. I filled her in. “Well, it’s just magnificent. I don’t have a car. Could you drive me up to Severance Center so I can buy a copy”? Yes, I could. After we located a record she told me that she, unfortunately, didn’t have a record player. “Mmm . . . “I wondered”?
Oh well, never mind about that. I can get one later”.
I was curious about this remarkable middle-aged lady who took action with the reckless abandon of a teenager. She was sweetly ditzy, and intriguing. I invited her to my apartment so she could listen to the rest of the piece.
It was the beginning of a peculiar friendship.
Florence Easley had moved into our shared apartment building long ago - with her husband - at a time when the neighborhood was solidly respectable. The years that followed brought ever-increasing poverty and crime to the area. She had money. She could have moved. She didn’t. I’m old enough now to understand why she didn’t.
In the middle sixties, I was in my middle twenties.
I moved into that old building because the rent was cheap,
and the majority of the other tenants were occupied with serious, sometimes life-threatening problems. This kept them from worrying too much about minor problems, like loud music.
Mrs. Easley (I never called her Florence) told me it was pointless to complain to the police. They were busy. They only came when there was a body, or an active shooting underway.
She did worry a little about the lack of building
maintenance. Me too. Occasional minor electrical and plumbing problems were a certainly. We fixed them ourselves as well as we could. On one bad day, all the acoustic tile and framing above my dining room fell on me with one dusty massive
ka-boom. It took a couple of hours to clear the mess.
Ah well, at least the rent was cheap.
In any case, Mrs. Easley and I, had more important things to consider, such as Art, Music, and Cloisonné. Mrs. Easley was an artist of Cloisonné. She had been since the late 30’s when she was a fetching young ingénue in love with Art. The Art she fixed-on was the ancient Chinese art of Cloisonné. Colorful enamels, exotic jewels, copper, gold, silver, all delicately affixed to slender plate and wire – an enchantment for girls and full-grown women, alike. Young Florence wanted more than just looking, she wanted to know how to make these beautiful things.
She not only learned. She’s worked at it ever since.
Her apartment was overflowing with jars of topaz and turquoise, bits of gleaming metal, rolls of fine wire, powered glass, tins of flux, soldering irons, tiny tweezers, crimping devices. and a lot more I no longer can recall. Prominent in the midst of all this was her very own kiln.
How many people do you run into who have their
own kiln?
I like eccentric characters like Mrs. Easley. They enrich
common reality with compelling, entertaining oddness. Perhaps
I like them because certain individuals have suggested that I am one of them. Humph! Imagine that.
Mrs. Easley sometimes invited me to dinner. At one such time, her phone rang. Puzzled, she looked about for the phone. So did I. No phone was to be seen. She got up from the table, dropped to hands and knees, rummaged under a couch, and pulled out a cardboard box with chord and still-ringing phone inside. After speaking with her caller, she put phone and over-lapping chord back in the box. She returned to table, apologizing for the interruption, saying it was her friend so-and-so. I didn’t ask about the box because Mrs. Easley’s explanations were often as rambling and incomprehensible as Gracie Allen’s.
I’m sure she had her reasons. She always did.
I eventually met the person who called, but only one time. Can’t remember his name. He was a very tall thin homosexual, possibly only a few years older than me. The two had met a few years earlier at an every-now-and-then marketplace for jewelry. Mrs. Easley was selling, he was buying. They hit it off and remained Art-Friends since. Some, perhaps
a large part, of Mrs. Easley’s income came from these marketplaces. She’d been selling her artful jewelry at these fair-like markets for decades. People who knew about jewelry knew about Mrs. Easley.
Some of the older buyers probably knew her as Florence.
She was an artist.
I lived in that derelict old building for nearly seven years - long after I could afford higher rent. In the last years, as the crime got worse, I joked with visitors that I would cover them from the window while they tried to make it to their cars.
They didn’t laugh. Don’t know why I stayed so long. Sometimes I thought it was because a curse had been laid on me that that prevented my ever leaving.
Eventually, I did leave, for a better part of town. Sometime later, Mrs. Easley did the same. We promised to stay in touch. We did for a while, but everyone knows how that goes. You move away, and sooner or later, you don’t stay in touch.
I don’t know where she is now, whither some modern assisted-care facility, or maybe Heaven. Wherever she is, I wish her well.
I have no doubt she is as interesting as ever.
I think God watches over oddballs and children because they entertain Him.
They certainly entertain me.