As Tom walked along Richmond Terrace, he thought about Amon’s plan to fix up an abandoned old house on Simonson Avenue, right off the Terrace.
Tom had worked at a defunct appliance factory as a security guard near the run-down house years ago. The young science teacher was impressed by Amon’s philanthropic impulses. Tom occasionally donated money to charity, but he understood that giving one’s time and energy for a worthy cause was a much greater commitment.
As he approached the ramshackle Bethlehem Steel shipyard, Tom saw Amon grappling with some lumber and supplies to transport to the construction site on Simonson Avenue. He hurried over to help his friend. Stepping from a moored rowboat to Amon’s tugboat, Tom tumbled into the water as the rowboat broke free. The skinny young teacher panicked and thrashed about, desperately trying to grab the skittering rowboat.
Instantly, Amon ran over to the edge of his tugboat and dived into swirling gray water. With a strong arm, he grabbed the floundering science teacher and pulled him over to the rotting wharf. Dripping wet and shivering from the cold salty water of the Kill Van Kull, the skinny teacher climbed up to the rotting boards of the ancient wharf.
“You saved my life! I’m not a very good swimmer.” Tom gasped, realizing how tenuous the boundary between life and death is.
“That’s apparent. A person living on an island should be able to swim,” Amon commented.
“It was the one course at CCNY I was failing. Then I got an excuse note from Dr. Atlas to get me out of it. He wrote something about recurrent sinus infections.”
“Dr. Atlas, you say? I went to him recently for a checkup and a flu shot. He charged me five dollars—quite a bargain by today’s standards,” Amon said.
“Dr. Atlas is a rarity among doctors. He still makes house calls,” Tom added.
“By the way. When you stepped from the rowboat to my ship and it went backward, doesn’t that have something to do with action and reaction? I still remember that fact from my high school days.”
“You’re right about that also. You can’t move forward without pushing something back. It’s Newton’s third law of motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I was teaching Newton’s three laws of motion the other day but forgot to apply it to everyday life,” Tom said ruefully.
“It’s clear that you are a theoretician and not a pragmatist. But I’m guilty of the same flaw myself,” Amon remarked.
“Yeah, common sense has never been my strong point. I once painted a chair red and then sat on it before it dried. They called me Red Ass for months.”
Clearly, the house on Simonson Avenue needed a lot of work. The clapboards were bare in places where the paint had flaked off. The leaky roof was marked with missing shingles and a crumbling red brick chimney. The backyard was overgrown with weeds and crabgrass, and the unruly front hedge hadn’t been trimmed in years. Inside, the torn linoleum needed replacement, and the faded walls needed a paint job. The bathroom and kitchen sinks leaked, and the toilet dripped continually. Many of the windows were broken or cracked, and the locks on the front and back doors were broken.
Amon had roughly a dozen volunteers helping him. Mostly amateurs with regard to home repairs, they were a motley group of grizzled alcoholics, scruffy drug addicts, and down-and-out drifters. The charismatic young man called them “my posse of misfits.” Amon had them cleaning the interior of the house—picking up accumulated debris, sweeping and mopping the floors, sanding the walls, and washing the windows.
Tom offered to trim the formidable front hedge. It was a task for which he had ample experience, as a result of his years-long battle with the eight-foot-long, six-foot-high hedge fronting his white stucco house on Pulaski Avenue. Martha’s friend Mary was at the Simonson Avenue house on weekends and some weekday nights, cleaning and scrubbing with the fervor of a fanatic. Her loyalty and devotion to Amon was remarkable. Martha was annoyed by her fellow teacher’s compliance with the young stranger’s pronouncements and endeavors. She also resented the time Tom was spending on Amon’s reclamation project.
“Martha’s on my case because of my helping you here,” Tom said to Amon as they sat on the front porch of the Simonson Avenue house.
“I’m not the person you should be talking to about such matters. I don’t have extensive experience in those types of relationships. Do you love her, Tom?”
“I guess so, but things have been rocky lately. She’s temperamental and dogmatic. The word ‘compromise’ is not part of her vocabulary.”
“As with most things in life, let your heart be your guide,” Amon said as he examined the rotting front steps of the old house, which needed repair.
“That sounds like something Ann Landers would say,” Tom replied, thinking about some of the girls he had dated before Martha.
There was a woman named Madeline, with politically conservative views, who lived in Manhattan. Despite their political differences, Tom would have continued to date her were it not for the burden of running back and forth to the city. In those halcyon days, women like Madeline were classified as “GU”—geographically undesirable. On the other hand, Martha could be classified as “TU”—temperamentally undesirable. Of course, the worse classification for a women was “PU”—physically undesirable.