A light drizzle doesn't stop a Seattle kid from riding his bicycle, dribbling the basketball around puddles or running through the woods, pretending to be Chingachgook, the Indian guide in The Last of the Mohicans. You adapt. Moist air becomes the norm. It makes you appreciate the warm Chinook winds that blow off the Pacific and moderate the climate at such a northern latitude. You get up early. You chop fragrant cedar into kindling for the fire. You drink coffee.
I can't remember when i started drinking coffee. It will stunt your growth I was told and that seemed true, but I didn't care. Men drank coffee and at thirteen I was a man.
I worked for a janitorial service. My boss, George Pringle, ran his business out of a '47 Dodge with fluid drive.(Fluid drive is actually a standard shift but you can take your foot off the clutch with the car in gear, still idling). The back seat was taken out and the buffer and mop buckets, mops, waxes, etc filled the cavity all the way to the trunk. George would be considered bi-polar today. Back then he was called manic-depressive, occasionally undergoing electroshock therapy. In his down moods he would play boogie woogie on the piano for hours. In his manic moods he would cure cancer or invent something. He was always looking for "the answer".
One of our cleaning accounts was Shaw Brothers Drugs in Renton. It had narrow aisles and long glass cases that went to nearly to the floor. My boss didn't trust himself running the scrubber, so that job fell to me. George had fabricated a floor cleaning machine using a 1/3 horse washing machine motor bolted onto a metal plate. It was geared down with a pully wheel that attached directly to the round floor brush. The buffer still ran too fast, a bit off center, so it was a bear to control. I got the knack of it, being especially careful not to get the long yellow power cord entangled.
When I wouldn't hear from George for a while I would always find him at the magazine rack usually reading fictionally gory "True Detective" style stories. He was three times my age, but I was the adult of the team and had to remind him of the work at hand. George always looked for a labor saving gimmick or an easy way of doing a hard job. Usually, that made jobs actually harder. One late night we were futilely trying to strip years of yellow wax buildup from a tavern floor when a drunk walked in through the front door we had neglected to lock. He told us we were doing it all wrong. "If you boys get a few cans of lye, this old wax will strip off like butter, " he told us.
George immediately sped off to an all-night Safeway to buy the toxic chemical. We emptied several cans into our mop bucket, slopped the solution on thickly, then stood back to watch the magic unfold. To our horror, floor tiles began to separate from the floor, floating in the chemical solution. We panicked! We quickly mopped up. I gathered up our equipment and threw it into the Dodge. George endorsed the tavern owner's check on the back, gently laying it on the cash register. He noticed one of his business cards and pocketed it. We hoped the owner would never remember the two idiots who ruined his floor.
My last job with George was the night of the JFK assassination. We cleaned a radio station. I was fascinated with the Reuter's teletype machine typewritten sheets folding one way and then the next underneath the machine. I could read condolences coming in from all over the world.
I almost forgot to mention the name of the company: ABC Maintenance. ABC stood for "Always Be Clean" according to George, but in private he told me he picked the name to be first in the phonebook. Oh yes, he also told me when pressed I should say we used universal solvent as our cleaning agent. Most chemists recognize that as a euphemism for water.
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