Grizzly Grzybowski, Amy, & the Price of Milk

by Eric Chaet

Eileen called me, while I was trying to shake sleep off. There was a mouse in one of the traps, & she didn't want to handle it. So I picked it up, & went out & tossed the mouse into the frosty ditch, & came back in, & put the trap into a sink full of soapy water.

"Where's Mighty Mouse now?" I said, & strutted a couple of steps.

"You the man!" Eileen laughed.

Then I resumed putting myself together for my day, trying not to get in Eileen's way, as she was doing the same thing—she had an actual deadline, for punching in.

Driving to the Farmer's Friend, I noticed that the corn in the field on one side had been harvested, but that the corn on the other hadn't been harvested yet. The unharvested corn had lost almost all its greenness, curvature, & luminosity. It was yellow, & shriveled, & seemed to have become shorter than the last time I had looked at it—as tho its sap had been drained from ears, leaves, & stalks. A couple of long chevrons of geese flew overhead, north to south, honking.

In response to some headline I read aloud about USA-Iraq relations from the local newspaper, which was lying in front of me as I sat down at the counter next to him, Grizzly Grzybowski began telling me about a dog he had had—that would snarl & bark & try to get at his daughter. The dog was scaring the daughter, & Grizzly thought that the dog meant it, too.

So, Grizzly shot the dog, he told me. "Now the dog is in a hole in the ground, where he can't hurt anyone," Grizzly said, with satisfaction.

During the same conversation, Grizzly told me about how his father left the family, when Grizzly was 5. (That had to be during the Depression of the 1930s.) The father never sent the family a nickel, Grizzly said.

Grizzly started work at 11, he said. "If I made $20, I gave $10 to my mother. My brothers did the same. I can remember many days, eating cornflakes 3 times a day."

When Grizzly's father died, in one of the adjacent counties, the authorities contacted Grizzly & his 2 brothers, to pay for the funeral. But, fortunately, someone in authority—I didn't get clear who it was, & didn't want to interrupt—was aware of the situation, & said, "Why should they pay? He never did nothin' for them."

"The county paid for the funeral," Grizzly said.

Recently, Grizzly's wife, Amy, has been saying hello to me when I come into the Farmer's Friend. I noticed her sitting alone now, as Grizzly turned to talk to one of his only-recently-retired friends from the mill, on Grizzly's other side. So I took my coffee & went over to the booth where Amy—I had asked her what her name was, the last time I saw her—was sitting, where her friend had just left her, & talked with her.

She said that she worked for a while in a place making men's dress pants.

I said that my grandfather came from Byelorus. It was part of Russia, then. He made men's dress pants in a factory, then opened up a tailor shop, & cleaned & pressed & repaired them. So they were in the same business.

Amy said that she liked history, but not ancient history—she watched history shows on PBS.

I said that ancient history didn't make much sense, because we didn't know about what came between what was happening now, & what happened then—but that it was all one thing. Everything now was affected by what happened in ancient history, as well as more recent history.

She said that one side of her family was from Germany—only it wasn't Germany, then, it was connected with Austria—& the other side was from Denmark. The Denmark side came just before the Civil War.

"This place was a frontier, then," I said.

She said that her father had a farm over where the highway goes by the car-auction place, now. She has a brother, who still lives there—but there's no farm now.

She said she worked 5 years, too, in a place operating machinery that knit mittens. Long strands of yarn came down a moving belt toward her, & she had to separate right from left, by pulling out a strand between them.

"Ugh," she said, making a face, remembering.

Then, for 29 years, she worked in a cheese factory. Then, she said, she retired from there, & worked 5 years operating a dishwashing machine at St. Urban College. She said that she also worked in one of the department stores in Fort Harrison, every Christmas season, from October on.

"I'd still be working," she said, "if my back hadn't gone out."

She said she couldn't tell if she remembered, or if it was something she'd been told, & had come to think of it as a memory—about her great grandmother:

Her great grandmother's family lived at Leadville. On Sundays, they walked to church in Manitou.

I don't know how far that is—at least 10 miles.

I went back to the counter, & sat down between Grizzly & Edgar Petersen, who was drinking a cup of coffee, & I said to Edgar, "You said, the last time we were talking, that you thought that it was an additive from Europe, that was being used in cheese, that was bringing the price of milk down."

Edgar nodded. He remembered.

"You know, that may be a factor, but this part of the country was opened up for dairy farming during the Civil War. It was kind of marginal land—but whatever anyone could produce, then, the government would buy for the troops. And the government was giving the land away then. So, the new dairy farms did fine. But after the war, prices started going down, & farmers were protesting against the rates the railroads were charging, wanting the government to regulate them. But then all the other prices went down, too, & farmers were doing relatively well—& they stopped complaining. By about 1910, they were doing very well. But after World War I, farm prices suddenly dropped, & farmers started calling for the government to get them the 1910 prices—parity."

"Parity's what everyone wants, all right," Edgar said.

"And they've been calling for it ever since. But if the farmers are going to get more money, who are they going to get it from?"

"I see what you mean," Edgar said. "But if they give the farmer more money, he'll spend it, & the whole economy will benefit."

"But that's what I think, too!" I said. "Let them tax you more, & give the money to me, & I'll spend it, & the whole economy will benefit."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," said Edgar. "But a lot of farmers will fail, if they don't get enough for the milk to pay for costs."

"Either a lot of inefficient farmers will fail, & you efficient farmers will finally get what you deserve for the milk—or it'll go on the way it's going on now, with the politicians bribing you every two years for your votes—or we ought to go all the way to socialism."

Grizzly wanted to put in his two cents worth.

"You know," he said, "the price of milk has been going down ever since the Cheese Board moved from Fort Harrison to Chicago. And you know what denomination is in charge of it, down there—you know who sets the price of cheese."

"Denomination?" I asked, thinking of the dead mouse. "You mean nationality?"

"Yeah."

"Well, which nationality?"

"The Italians—they're always in the middle of the cheese business."

"Pizza—" I started, but Grizzly had up a full head of steam, & kept right on going.

"And you know what the Italians do?—Mafia."

"You know," I said, "I've known a lot of Italians, & none of them ... Well, I met one guy once who was Mafia. He showed me his gun. But I've known a lot of Italians, & most of them weren't Mafia. The ones who suffer most from the Mafia are other Italians."

"Well," said Grizzly, "what you've got to do is eliminate the middlemen."

"How?" I asked. "Shoot them?"

"Wouldn't hurt," Grizzly said.

"If you eliminate the middlemen, how is the milk going to get to market, or the cheese?" I asked.

"You notice that, while the price of milk goes down, the price of cheese never goes down," Grizzly said.

"Don't buy cheese, then," I said.

"They wouldn't lower the price, even so," Grizzly said.

"They would if enough people didn't buy it at the high price. They'd have to change the terms of their selling & buying. Everything would re-adjust. But, you know, I hate to hear you talk about the Italians that way. People used to talk about the Jews that way, then they killed most of them. I'm Jewish. They say Jewish people are a certain way, but I'm not...."

Grizzly jumped in, smiling. "You know, if the Jews like you, they'll do anything for you."

I was putting down my tip, then getting up to go pay the bill for my oatmeal & coffee, at the cash register.

"They must not have liked me," I said.

Edgar & a couple of other guys were laughing. Jack, who deals in used cars, & is a landlord, too—& a retired prison guard, with a pension—said, "Eric's got to go make some money, so he can pay taxes, so we can get our checks!"

"If you're going to live off me," I said, "you're not going to live very well."

Laughter.

Grizzly was talking about lining up & shooting all the pricks—while I paid, & left.

On the drive back from the Farmer's Friend, I saw a pheasant—standing perfectly still—brown body, shining blue-black eye unblinking in a red face—by the side of the road. It didn't even flinch as I drove by, in my car that had been assembled in Korea.

I had a couple of tricky phone calls to make. I had to gather some information (for an expert witness in a lawsuit) about a machine that drilled horizontally, like when you want to put a pipe in under a road—similar to another machine that had been involved in an accident. Someone had got hurt, & it was to be decided whether the machine's design had been at fault, & if so, to what extent. The machine I would be asking about—the industry standard—was the one that the machine involved in the accident had been built in exact imitation of—at least that was claimed. It would be hard to get the information, as I wasn't in the market to buy anything from those I needed to get information from.

Also, I had some reading I hoped to do—a history of the international chemical industry. And a number of repairs—sometimes it seemed that the decomposition of the old house would suddenly accelerate—that I reluctantly began listing—to be prioritized when I could bear it. And, hopefully, I'd write something, or sell a book, or both.

And, of course, hopefully, the new, better, great situation I'd been trying all my life to achieve or enter, would arrive or start—I won't know how to put it unless & until I have some experience of it, beyond mere preludes.

Copyright © Eric Chaet 2003