Pure Spring Read Free

about a lamp that was missing. Two of Grampa Rip’s huge brass floor lamps were stored in her basement because there was no room in the garage for them, but only one lamp came out of the basement.
    â€œWhere’s the second lamp?” Grampa was saying. “There were two lamps down there.”
    â€œNo,” she was saying,”You’re losing your marbles, Rip. There was only
one
lamp stored down there...”
    The moving guys, Frankie and Johnny, were standing there listening, their arms folded across their chests, their muscles bulging, smiling a little bit to themselves, wondering what was going to happen with Grampa Rip’s lamp.
    After Grampa and the Mud Pout argued back and forward for a while, Grampa suddenly says this: “All right then. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll be pullin’ out now. I’m moving into a decent place, and in the meantime you can take that brass floor lamp that you’re after just stealing from me in front of these witnesses here in broad daylight and you can shove it as far as it will go right up you know where!”
    Frankie and Johnny were holding their sides laughing.
    Then Grampa and I got on a streetcar and met the Bye Bye Moving truck over at his new place.
    On the streetcar Grampa said, “That’s the way
my
grampa, Grampa Hack Sawyer, used to talk. Crude but effective.”
    The new place had two rooms and a sink and toilet at the back of an old house on Preston Street not too far from where I was this morning at the Pure Spring Bottling Company on Aberdeen Street.
    By the time Frankie and Johnny got most of Grampa’s stuff into the rooms there was a little crowd of neighbors watching. By the time they wheeled Grampa’s secretariat down the laneway on a dolly the crowd was oohing and ahing. They were very excited about the size of Grampa Rip’s furniture.
    When we carried the holy pictures past there was some clapping.
    It took the four of us to lift the strongbox.
    â€œWhat’ve ya got in here, Mr. Sawyer?” says Johnny.
    â€œWouldn’t you like to know, eh?” says Grampa Rip and gives me a wink.
    But when we set down the box, the floor suddenly started to creak and we just got out the door in time, when the whole room caved in.
    Grampa Rip had to go and stay at the YMCA for a while until he found another place. And he did find one.
    And I was helping once again. Getting to know him.
    â€œHow much would you say one of these pictures weighs?” says Frankie as he and Johnny carried Jesus and his thorns up to the third floor of an apartment on King Edward Avenue near the synagogue.
    â€œI hope you can stay here in this one,” I said to Grampa Rip. I said that because of the two long rows of beautiful elm trees that could be so pretty in the winter and so cool making shade in the summer. What a beautiful street King Edward Avenue is! What a boulevard!
    Because the staircase was so narrow the secretariat got stuck and Frankie and Johnny had to take the banister off to get the big desk down again.
    They were shaking their heads.
    Maybe the Bye Bye Moving company would like to say bye bye to Grampa Rip.
    They got the secretariat back outside.
    They rigged a pulley on the balcony of the third floorand tried to pull her up with ropes but the pulley gave way and the whole thing crashed back down on the lawn. The secretariat now had a big crack in it.
    â€œYou’ll have to put this monster in storage, Mr. Sawyer,” says Frankie, or was it Johnny.
    â€œI’m not living without my secretariat,” says Grampa Rip.
    And so on to the next place a week or so later.
    â€œWe’re sure gettin’ to know your stuff real well, Mr. Sawyer,” says Frankie while we’re bolting together the brass bed in Grampa’s new place on York Street near York Street School.
    â€œI wonder,” says Johnny, “how the lady over at Clemow Avenue is doing tryin’ to put that brass lamp