the furnace on Homan Avenue

 It was like an octopus. It stood fat and squat in the back side of the basement where upstairs were the kitchen and the bathroom while way in front was of course the front room.  It's tentacles reached even there and when we got our television and all sat around the front room watching the blue tinged hypnotist, I would sidle down to the floor and across it and plant myself right against the register until Mom noticed and called out, "Kenny, stop hogging the heat."  This was followed by some admonition that I would ruin my kidneys.

It was fed on coal.  I don't know how many times a day Dad had to go down there and shovel coal, but I'm sure to him it was way too many, until one day we got that modern miracle, the stoker, probably a happier day for Dad than when we got our first tv.

The coal was kept in the coal bin maybe ten full shovel steps from the furnace.  The stoker erased that from Dad's daily routine.  There was a little window on the gangway side of the bin which was actually a coal chute.  In the summertime, I 'm thinking of those broiling mid fifties Julys and Augusts, massive rumbling trucks would thread their way through the tidy-lawned streets of the bungalows and one would stop in front of our house and out of the cab would come big burly black guys.

The only other time we say black guys was taking the fifty-fifth street bus downtown, which after maybe two miles entered the black neighborhood, and they would begin to board the bus.  Their neighborhoods were shabby compared to our neat rows of bungalows.  The word on the street was that these had all once been neat and tidy white neighborhoods until they moved in.  The whites kind of huddled together as the blacks boarded, but I can't remember that there was ever any kind of disturbance.  Mom had warned us kids that they all carried knives and if you called them a nigger they would use it on us.

I don't remember how they got the coal into the wheelbarrows, I suspect there was some kind of raised-bed chute, but once filled it would be rumbled down the gangway and upended at the chute. We kids would watch wide-eyed, but from a little distance because we were a little afraid, though the guys seemed moderately friendly.

They would be sweating up a storm, and then my tiny little mother, the one who told us they all carried knives.  Would walk down the back porch step with tall glasses of cold lemonade for the guys.  Made me happy to see that.

The bin would be filled and ready for winter and used up in the winter ready to be replenished again.  Eventually some of the neighbors switched to gas and then more.  One summer I came back from college and the old octopus was gone and in its place was a slim new gadget.  A vast improvement I am sure, but progress always makes us a little sad.

I know carburetors are long gone.  That is part of the joke.  I have always felt a little unmanly by my lack of knowledge and disinterest in the internal combustion engine and machinery in general.  That's why I bring it up.