Me&Mr.George

Hard to believe, but even this year we survived Thanksgiving. 

We spent it in our little cabin in Becket, in the Berkshires, with Dan’s family. It was great to finally hang out all of us together. I hadn’t seen my two nieces in a long time; Matt’s mother, my American stepmom, passed away in mid-November, and I couldn’t wait to give my brother-in-law a big hug. 

The bird was huge, made slightly heavier by the small pouch of turkey innards that Dan had left in its cavities before sticking it in the oven. Shit happens. As always, Shmoo spent the day in his room with an enormous bowl of pasta, no pants and with some stolen, stale goldfish he found, who knows where.

But, despite the nice day on Thursday, a few things happened during the vacation that made my heart a bit heavier than usual. 

Two days before Thanksgiving, for example, I hit a magnificent male deer in my car, when he decided to cross the empty, dark, and isolated road I happened to be driving on. Of course, I’m not blaming him (well, maybe a little): after all I was the one driving! Nonetheless, it was such a traumatic experience to see that poor deer lying on the road, first agonizing and then horribly motionless. I’m sure he was hunting for his wife and kids, who were most likely waiting for him, cold and hungry, in their little hut (wait, do they hunt, or live in huts?). 

I eventually called the local police, and the cop who answered yelled at me for having left the “scene of the crime”. She said it just like that. I felt like Hannibal Lecter, but eventually realized that “Ms. Sherlock” may have just gotten a bit carried away with her investigation. She was probably just bored. Not much happens in Dalton, Ma. I kept telling her that I’m just a city girl, and that we rarely see deer crossing the street. She didn’t buy it, got fed up with me fairly quickly, and handed the phone to the chief. At that point, I was crying like a baby and the nice chief took pity on me. She said it happens a lot, especially in the fall. She added: “Is your car ok? Go check, I’ll wait on the phone”. I got out of the car, and saw a piece of the deer stuck to the right side. I screamed, and the chief got alarmed. She told me to go home, take a nice hot shower, and relax. I drank wine instead.

Something not as traumatic, but just as upsetting, happened on Friday: Luca broke his glasses. 

Again. 

In the past six months, it’s probably the fifth pair he’s destroyed.

I knew that as soon as we got back to Cambridge, I would have to pay a visit to Mr. George at the Central Square Eye Care store. 

Again.

At this point, it is almost embarrassing to go to his store with the same plastic sandwich bag filled with whatever is left of Shmoo’s glasses. To me, Mr. George has been and will forever be a magician when it comes to fixing them. He has a room in the back, where he goes, spends about three or four minutes alone and in silence, before coming back with the glasses all fixed up as if they were new. Or else, he looks at the computer to see if by any chance they are still under warranty, in which case he opens a long and narrow drawer behind him, takes out a big box of new frames, and looks for a pair that will fit the shape of Luca’s lenses. If there are lenses: often, Shmoo breaks the frames and loses the lenses in some obscure place. We often find them months or even years later.

We started to go to Central Square Eye Care when we moved from Brooklyn, about fourteen years ago. In Brooklyn we had another “Mr. George”, a guy from Argentina but of Italian descent who enjoyed speaking broken Italian with me. He also did the same magic trick every time Luca broke his glasses, about every two to three weeks. We most likely paid for half of his eyeglass store’s rent in Brooklyn, and I’m pretty sure we put Mr. George’s son through college.

Mr. George and I have become friends: that’s how many times I’ve had to go to his store for repairs or to buy yet another pair. I know a lot about him: I know he grew up in Cambridge (his great grandma used to tell him about Inman square with horses!), he had long hair when I first met him, but now he cut it, and he looks very good; he divorced a long time ago; he has a son who graduated last year and is now studying to become an electrician. If he has his father’s abilities with his hands, he’ll be very wealthy very soon. I also know that Mr. George likes to ride his bike with very large wheels on the snow, and that he wrote a book about his punk rock years that he self-published. When I told him I write too, we became even closer: he showed me his book, I tell him about my fourth book, which is coming along very slowly; he and I bitch about how hard it is, at times, to just sit down and produce. 

Yesterday, when I came in with what was left of Shmoo’s glasses, I proposed a business to him: create a line of eyewear for people like Luca, meaning for those who live to destroy glasses. He seemed intrigued, but now that I think about it, they would have to eventually break, otherwise how would we make the money?

“There are no ‘Luca-proof’ glasses, there are only ‘let’s-hope-they-last-Luca-more-than-three-months’ glasses”, he said smiling. 

I was happy to hear that he had a great, and quiet Thanksgiving, and that he’s looking forward to going for a ride on the snow. Also, he made some changes to his book, which he now listed for sale on Amazon.

The glasses, two pairs actually, will be ready on Friday.