A Summer Day

In Their Own Words

An Eternity
by Archibald MacLeish

There is no dusk to be,
   There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
   And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
   Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
   White peach bough.

Dying shall never be
   Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
   Death never was.

Advice

Everything is true, and its opposite is true as well. People give advice. I give advice. Nothing is so much fun to give as advice. People do not always like to give money or food or sex, but they are always willing to give advice. Advice costs nothing and it has the added benefit of allowing the giver to feel much wiser than he or she in fact is. Nothing is more fun than to sit back, stroke one’s chin, and lay it down for others: what life really is; what needs to be done; how it needs to be done. It is axiomatic that few people ever really take their own advice. But of course Advice is the one area in life where it is way more fun to give than to receive. Now the thing that always strikes me about advice is this: Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well. Now how’s that for an axiom: “Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well.”---Gene Schmidt. If you want to be a writer, sit down at the typewriter every day and bang out a prescribed number of words: Discipline is the thing. If you want to be a writer, sit down at the typewriter and above all else do not force yourself to write. Sit…wait…’don’t’ go searching for a subject, your subject will come to you.’ Patience is the thing. Discipline or Patience? Well, I’m sure both of these methods have worked for different people at different times. So once again…Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well. For every three people who get there faster by taking a short cut up Green Street, you will surely find another three people who have gotten their faster by taking a short cut up Bagel Street. Cut out carbs from your diet. No, don’t cut out carbs, cut out fat. Don’t cut out anything, just count those calories. Haste makes waste. He who hesitates is lost. So the question becomes, ‘is anything true at all?’. Well, in the realm of advice, it is all true: “Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well.” Of course, the opposite of Everything is Nothing. “Everything is true. Nothing is true.” At least nothing on this mundane level. The search for Eternal and Transcendent Truth continues apace, without doubt the most important of all human endeavors.

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise to balance it."---George Santayana 

In Their Own Words

“Last night somebody sang a song…’Come back to Erin…come back around to the land of thy birth. Come back with the shamrock in the springtime…’

“This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection, and I certainly will come back in the springtime.”

---John F. Kennedy, at Dublin Airport, June 1963

A Small Brooklyn Memory

So in Brooklyn when I was a kid we used to make prank calls, and some of them were mean, and I am not saying I am proud of that. Others weren't very bad at all:

“Hello?”

“Good Evening, Ma’am. We’re calling from Con Edison. We are sorry to trouble you but we've had a report that the streetlight directly outside your window is not functioning properly. Is there any way you can just quickly check to see if the light is on?”

“Certainly. Just one moment….Yes, the light is still on.”

“Good. Then blow it out.”

Disconnect.

Silly. Dumb. But fun. Of course you needed an older kid for that one, or at least a kid who could sound a bit older.

Then there were the other tricks designed for the people you really hated. The one’s who complained to the police about you and your friends playing stickball in the street just because a red rubber Spaulding ball (red---they should have seen it coming!) smacked them in the face and broke their eyeglasses. The old Italian lady we called Signora was one for that. And we didn't even break her glasses, all she got was a good whack and a bit of a bloody nose. What did she expect, it was a foul ball. So for a week a so in the high hot days of summer the cops kept cruising by and threatening us with life in prison (if not the electric chair) if they ever caught us so much as bouncing a ball on the sidewalk again. We were terrified. Then after a few weeks, in the normal way that these things go, the cops forgot to come around and hassle us, and we forgot to be afraid, and so soon we were back at stickball and punchball in the streets again.

We drew First and Third base and Home Plate with chalk, but the sewer plate halfway up the street was Second Base. But that’s all beside the point. The point is we couldn't let the Signora’s attack upon us go unanswered. So one morning a small Maytag truck from all the way out on Long Island pulled up in front of her apartment building and two burly repairmen got out and rang the old lady’s bell. We of course were watching from a distance. What ensued as Signora stepped out onto the stoop to confront her visitors was as fearful a battle---and as rewarding a payoff!---as you’d ever want to see. The old lady denied any knowledge whatsoever of the call, while the repairmen showed her a piece of paper with her name and address and insisted they were going to come inside. Italian swear words echoed down the Brooklyn street, and even from where we were standing we could see the infuriated Signora’s face turning as bright red as a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. Moochie started taking bets that the old girl was going to pop her cork and drop dead right there on her own front stoop, but then Moochie had no father and his mother never took him to church at St. Mary’s on Sunday mornings, so he didn’t have the natural fear of going to hell for his sins that the rest of us had. We were starting to think we’d maybe gone too far this time when Signora finally allowed the two repairmen to enter her apartment and see with their own stupid eyes that in fact she didn't even own a washing machine, and therefore had no possible reason on earth to call for their services. Only then did the unhappy repairmen climb back into their truck for the long drive back to Long Island. We breathed a sigh of relief as watched the old Signora shaking her fist at the departing truck and cursing in both Italian and English the stupidity of washing machine companies who sent men all the way from Long Island to harass a poor old lady who had spent a lifetime washing her dishes by hand over a hot sink for the benefit of her lazy husband and ungrateful kids.

After that, we mostly confined ourselves to innocuous pranks like ordering a large anchovy pizza or a box of diapers for our specially selected victim. And after a while the local merchants got to know our voices and would merely hang up on us whenever we called. And as the summers marched along we became older and other things occupied our minds, and so our phone pranks went the way of spinning tops and toy soldiers.

Oddly enough, I myself was brought down when I pulled the mildest and most harmless prank imaginable. And in the process I learned that the one person in the world you couldn't play tricks on was the telephone operator. In those days you dialed “O” instead of “411” to get information.

“Do you have the number of the Rainbow Theater?”

“Certainly.”

“Well call them up and let me know what’s playing.”

I was maybe eight at this time, and thought I had reached the heights of wit and hilarity. I would have considered myself the Noel Coward of Maujer Street  if I’d had any idea at the time who Noel Coward was. I hung up the phone walked away convulsed with laughter. But a few seconds later the phone rang and my mother answered it and it was the operator wanting to know who had made the prank called. I hadn't known that they could see the number that was calling. So I got yelled at. But at the same time I had been given one of the most precious gifts one can receive in life: the gift of paranoia. The knowledge that Those in Authority might be watching you even as you think you're watching them is perhaps the greatest incentive for staying on the straight and narrow path that has ever been devised.

Writers in Their Youth (faux)

"The classroom was large and clean and well-lighted. It was a good classroom. There was the smell of new books and pencil shavings and an early September breeze coming in through the half-open window. The teacher's name was Miss Barkley and she had fine legs and a good face. I wondered if she would let me stay to clap the erasers after class. I wondered if she would call on me to ask me if I knew the answer to this question or that. I hoped she would. I hoped she would pull me out of line and tell me what a fine looking boy I was. But the whole morning long she called on the other kids and never once looked in my direction. 'The hell with her', I thought."

-----From the lost childhood journals of Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway, age 6, with his sisters Ursula and Marcelline on their first day of grammar school, 1905.

In Their Own Words:

“I don't know who I am or who I was…I know it less than ever…everything is totally contradictory…but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
-Alberto Giacometti

Spider's Awakening

"Can't you just go like this"---Louis extended his forefinger straight out and held his thumb bolt-upright---"bang! bang! bang!"

Spider shook his head. "I need a gun," he declared flatly. "If we're going to play guns, then I need a real gun".

"You shoulda brought one then."

"Well I didn’t."

"Stupid."

"Moron."

The game of ‘guns’ came to a standstill. 

“I’m not the moron" Louis insisted. "If you need a gun so bad, why don’t you run home and get one?"

Both boys looked up. A downpour of rain darkened the skylight over their heads. Some great Saturday morning, Spider thought. Out loud he said: "Why don’t you just give me one of your guns? What do you need two guns for? You don’t need to have two guns."

"Yes I do" Louis insisted. "They’re a set. If I give you one I’ll have one empty holster. I’ll look stupid."

"You are stupid, so what does it matter if you look stupid? No one’s gonna see you except me. And I already know you’re stupid so it don’t matter."

"Yeah? Well, you’re a retard for not bringing a gun in the first place."

The door of Louis’s apartment opened slightly and Louis’s sister, Francesca, slipped out into the hallway. She took a few steps toward the boys and stopped, staring at some point in the distance.

"What do you want?" Louis snapped at her.

"Nothing."

"Then go back inside," he ordered.

"I don’t have to," Francesca told him.

"We’re playing out here."

"Who’s stopping you?"

Francesca turned to Spider for the first time and smiled.

"Hello, Matthew," she said.

Spider felt the rims of his ears start to burn. No one ever called him Matthew. His mother and father called him either Matt or Matty. The nuns at Holy Cross called him Mr. Gladwaller, which was just one more thing about the nuns that he hated. Everyone else called him Spider.

Louis thought the name hilarious.

"Hello Matthh…yooou" he mimicked. "Oh, Matthh-YOOOU…Matthh…YOOOU…"

"What’s so funny?" Francesca wanted to know. "Matthew is his name."

"Oh, get lost, will ya?" Louis told his sister. "We’re playing out here."

"I can play too if I want."

"We’re not playing some dumb girl game. Go back inside."

"Why don’t you just shut up and leave her alone?" Spider heard himself say.

Louis’ head snapped back as if he’d been slapped. Spider himself seemed to recoil at his own words. The boys were silent for a time. Francesca took it as an opening.

"Would you like to come inside for a while, Matthew?" she asked.

"Inside?"

"I can show you my tank, if you’d like."

"Ah, go away" Louis told her. He’d recovered from his shock, but his words didn’t carry much force.

"You can look at my tank" Francesca said. "I got some new guppies this week."

"No one cares about your dumb fish" Louis informed her.

"Come on" Francesca insisted.

Spider felt he had no choice in the matter but to follow her inside the apartment.

"You’re morons, the both of ya’s" Louis called after them.

Like everyone else Spider knew, Louis’ family lived in a ‘railroad’ apartment. The rooms were laid out one after the other, from the kitchen to the front room. Spider followed Francesca across the living room and through a doorway, into what he knew was Louis’ room.

"You better not touch anything in there" Louis shouted behind them. He was standing in the kitchen now. Francesca opened another door and Spider passed into a section of the apartment he had never seen before.

This was Francesca’s room. It was a girl’s room, but not quite like Spider’s sisters’ room. Spider’s two older sisters shared a bedroom, and it was usually messy with stockings and hair rollers and jars of creams with their caps off. Franceca’s room wasn’t like that at all. The bed was neatly made with a fluffy pink spread. There were shelves on the walls, lined with a collection of dolls and teddy bears of different sizes. A pink-and-white dresser, and next to that a writing table. There was a door beyond which was surely a grown-up room, where Louis and Francesca’s parents slept.

Francesca snapped on a lamp that stood on her dresser. "Over here" she told Spider.

In front of the window there was a low table that held a large, rectangular fish tank. The tank was packed with small fish of different colors that swam its length, back and forth. Spider and Francesca sat down on the edge of her bed and watched the fish. They were red and black and silvery-yellow, with large fan-like tails that shimmered in the clear water.

"Aren’t they pretty" Francesca asked.

Spider shrugged. "I guess" he said.

"Guppies are my favorite fish" Francesca told him.

Time began moving very slowly for Spider. He felt he was supposed to say something. He couldn't imagine what it might be. They were both quiet for what seemed a very long time.

Francesca extended her arms out in front of her and examined her fingernails for some reason.

"I’m already nine," she told Spider. "I’ll be ten in eight months."

"Oh." Spider said.

Francesca turned and smiled at him "Do you think I’m pretty?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"Do you think I’m pretty?"

In all his eight years of life, only his mother had ever asked him that question. Spider had responded then by throwing his arms around her neck and assuring his mother that she was beautiful and promising that he would marry her when he grew up. This did not now seem like the appropriate thing to do with Francesca.

But if he could have formulated the thought, he would have said that Francesca was prettier even than pretty Deborah Montello, who sat behind him in third grade and, excepting Francesca, was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. And if he’d thought some more about it he might have said that Francesca was  prettier than the electric red fire truck he’d owned when he was four, or  the porcelain face of his mother’s Victorian doll, though they were pretty in a different way than girls were pretty, so maybe they didn't count.

For no particular reason, Spider stood up. Francesca stood up too. She leaned in close to Spider and kissed him on the mouth. Spider responded by plunging his hands into his pockets and looking up at the ceiling.

Time, it seemed to Spider, had pretty much stopped for good. He know that now he had to say something, *anything*, or else they might remain stuck here in this room for all eternity. He forced his gaze down from the ceiling and focused it on Francesca's forehead.

"I have the new Superman and Green Lantern" he told her. "But I haven't read them yet."

Francesca looked at Spider very solemnly for a moment, then suddenly burst out laughing. It was a loud laugh, the way kids sometimes laughed at you if you tripped and fell in the schoolyard or dropped your lunch. The kind of laugh that made your face burn, as if you’d been slapped on both cheeks. Francesca laughed in that way, and it filled the small room.

"Ah, why don’t ya shut up, ya moron" Louis said. He was standing in the doorway of Francesca’s room now. "Told ya she was a real moron, " he said to Spider.

"Oh, go outside and play your dumb games" Francesca said. She sat down at her writing desk and picked up a book that was lying there and started to read. "Stupid little boys," she added.

"Shut up, you jerk," Louis told his sister. She ignored him. To Spider he said, "Here, you can take one of my guns. Let’s go outside"

Spider looked at the gun in Louis’ hand.

"Here—take it. You can play with it," Louis insisted.

Spider took the gun, and followed Louis without looking back.

They went out into the hall and played ‘guns’ for the rest of the morning, but the game had lost its flavor. Spider went home early and told his mother he felt hot, feverish. She felt his head and gave him half an aspirin just to be on the safe side. She had him lie down and take a nap. Spider dreamed he was trapped in the bedroom of a burning building holding a tank of brightly colored fish as the floor collapsed under his feet and plunged him down into the flames below.

In Their Own Words:

Halley's Comet

When in your middle years
The great comet comes again
Remember me, a child,
Awake in the summer night,
Standing in my crib and
Watching that long-haired star
So many years ago.
Go out in the dark and see
Its plume over water
Dribbling on the liquid night,
And think that life and glory
Flickered on the rushing
Bloodstream for me once,
and for
All who have gone before me,
Vessels of the billion-year-long
River that flows now in your veins.

---Kenneth Rexroth

Grandparents

I never knew my mother's parents. Neither did my youngest sister. This was a natural consequence of being last to arrive in an already crowded family.

My maternal grandfather, Vincent Zita, seems to have disappeared behind a curtain of mystery around the time my own parents were married. The story I had later was that he had gone into a state of severe depression after losing his powers of 'manhood'---i.e., becoming impotent---which was generally considered the worst of all possible catastrophes by Italian men of his generation.

“He wasn’t a man anymore,” is the way I heard my older cousin Helen say it over coffee and cake one afternoon. I was maybe four or five at this time, and my tender imagination could only translate these puzzling words into a disconcerting image of my grandfather suddenly changed into one of the sleek, feral cats that haunted our backyard.

“What was he then?” I demanded. “What was he if he wasn’t a man anymore? A cat?”

But the assembled company only laughed at my youthful ignorance in that way that is always so infuriating to children, so I just put it down to adult stupidity and dropped the subject for the time being, though the cat image troubled me for a long time after.

My grandfather had worked at a number of jobs, most notably as a ‘fur puller’, which as near I can make out (I had to look it up) involved ‘pulling’ or skinning the fur off of rabbits so that the skins could be used to line coats and jackets. It doesn’t sound like very pleasant or lucrative work, but he supplemented this income selling plaster-cast animal figurines he turned out at his basement work bench, and a second job as a bank night watchman. My Aunt Carmela, who lived in the apartment next to ours, still kept a couple of his old clubs hanging in her closet, and I recall many fond childhood hours whiled away playing 'policeman' with my cousin Joseph from upstairs. Vincent Zita fathered nine children, eight of whom survived, made jugs of red wine from grapes in the cellar, and was by all accounts a hard working and sober-minded gentleman. But the loss of his manly powers was not to be borne. He became increasingly detached from things, made some kind of attempt on his own life, and was thereafter consigned to---a tuberculosis sanitarium! Evidently he was not crazy enough for a mental institution, or else the care was better in the sanitarium, and so there he went and there he remained. Who's to know how much he suffered? In these days of Viagra it seems a thing to snigger and joke about. It was a tragedy for my grandfather.

My grandmother, Rosa Pegano Zita, known to make the greatest Italian sauce and meatballs anyone in Brooklyn had ever tasted, and who had been strong enough to chop wood for the stove and lug it up two flights of city stairs when she was no longer a young woman, succumbed to a heart attack during the closing days of World War II. Somewhere in a pile of papers I have a photocopy of the passenger manifest for the Anchor Line of steam packet ships arriving in NYC on June 21st, 1882, that carried my grandmother Rosa to America when she was one year old. Seeing her name penned in a florid hand by a harried immigration officer on a fading but still legible ‘official’ document, Rosa seems somehow more alive to me than ever. Starting with pretty much nothing, she somehow managed to buy the four-story apartment building where all of her children and their families would live, the building I grew up in. My father used to brag that he was her favorite son-in-law. He would go down to the basement and chop the wood for her when he was home, then shovel coal into the furnace. As a reward he was allowed to sit at her kitchen table as she poured him glasses of red wine and fed him meatballs fresh from her frying pan and drenched in homemade tomato sauce. My father told me that the hallway was always filled with my grandmother’s cooking, an aroma richer than the lushest garden, fragrant with tomatoes and garlic and olives and spices from distant provinces. I’ve often wished I could have been around to bite into one of those meatballs, but Grandma Rosa is gone and no one now knows how to make them.

A story my father told over the years was how on the night my grandmother died, he had been dreaming for some reason of a sailor frantically running back and forth on the deck of his ship searching for a life preserver to toss to a drowning woman in the sea, and how he was awakened by shouting and looked out the window to see my Uncle Frankie, home on leave from the Navy, running toward the house, but my grandmother was already gone by the time they all reached her.

All of these things occurred long before I was born. My maternal grandparents exist for me today in a handful of creased and fading sepia and black-and-white photos. And yet, they are no less real to me for all of that.

I was a bit luckier with my father's parents. I can remember my paternal grandmother, though only vaguely. We were pure Italian on my mother's side, and German-French on my father's side. My one real memory of my grandmother was from a Saturday afternoon (It must have been a Saturday, that was the day my father and I would visit) when I was no more than six or seven. I had received permission to go to the little grocery store down the block to buy some candy or something, and I must have been a long time about it (then, as now, I spent most of my day walking around in a daydream), because I have a strong memory of my grandmother coming after me to see what was taking me so long. I don't recall my grandmother as being particularly affectionate or 'huggy', though of course as a general rule these are not particularly 'German' attributes.

My only other strong memory of my grandmother was when she was dying. I might have been eight. It was near Christmas and my father had taken my sister and I as usual to the big holiday blowout at the Knights of Columbus Hall, which was really an excuse for my father and his brothers to drink a lot of beer an eat a lot of German sausages and sauerkraut, while we kids were bought off with ice cream and candy and cake and gifts. The highlight of this occasion was when we got to sit on Santa's lap and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. My sister and I had been coached beforehand to request, on this pivotal occasion, that "My grandmother gets better for Christmas." I was up first, and for some reason I had all along flatly refused to make this request. I am no longer sure why. It surely wasn't that I wanted something more important. I think it was that I understood even at that tender age that this response to Santa's eternal question would bring a chorus of 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from all the adults present, and a spotlight of unwanted attention oh my head. I suppose I was born with a reticent personality. I went up to Santa indignantly shaking my head 'no' to my father's continued pleading. And yet when Santa popped his big question, "And what would you like for Christmas, young man," I responded without hesitation, "I want my grandmother to get better." And sure enough, Santa felt called upon to repeat my answer for those grownups too busy eating or chugging beer to hear, and they predictably 'oohed' and 'ahhed' and applauded, and I just as predictably hated it. When my sister's turn came she dutifully said her piece, but by then no one cared. That kind of 'cute' trick only works once.

Finally, I remember the night my grandmother died, my parents coming home from the hospital, my father, with many beers and shots of whiskey boiling over along with grief inside of him, crying as he staggered to bed, and my mother, whom I loved but who could be pretty heartless at times (and who had never much cared for her in-laws anyway) telling him to shut up and go to sleep. And those are the things I remember about my paternal grandmother, Eva Schmidt.

My strongest memories are of my father’s father, Gustave Schmidt. Along with the ties of blood I shared something special with my grandfather: our birthdays fell on the same day, June 27^th. On that day every year my father and I would take the bus to my grandfather’s house, and because the place was always full of relatives who’d come to celebrate his birthday, I was always sure of getting a little something from each of them as well, these distant, distant cousins I hardly knew. Then we’d take the bus back home and after supper that night there’d be a cake (made by my mother) or maybe some lemon meringue pies (always my favorite) and vanilla ice cream, and I’d have some of my friends up. For kids today a birthday is sort of a personal national holiday, but when I was growing up it was a much more private and quiet affair; there were no theme parties, no clowns hired for the afternoon, no bouquet of helium balloons, no back room at Chuck-E-Cheese. But it was a great day just the same. Since my birthday was in the summer I could always stay up late, there was no worry about school the next day. In summer, school is always a distant ogre you don’t believe will ever really return. I didn’t really like when they sang Happy Birthday because everyone would stare at me, but otherwise I enjoyed this day of days, which I shared in common with my grandfather.

I was twelve when my grandfather died. But he was ill for much of this time, an invalid who needed to be carried from the bed to the toilet to the kitchen to his easy chair. He could eat, but after a while he needed to be fed by hand. Five days a week he was minded by his eldest daughter, my Aunt Emmy, and her husband, Herman, a quiet and dignified man who wore a Masonic ring and who had made enough money in some business or other to retire very early, and whose one interest in life now seemed to be following his wife around and wordlessly attending to her every utterance. Saturdays and Sundays, my father and his brothers would take turns watching the old man while Aunt Emmy and Uncle Herman returned to their own apartment in Queens. Most weekends when it was my father’s turn I would go with him. We’d take the bus to his house and stop off at the little candy store along the way and I would load up on comic books for the weekend, or I would bring my own copies of Famous Monsters Magazine, or a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Books for me have always been the ultimate aim and end of life; buying them, reading then, owning them. Books are the reason the world was created. Stretched out on my grandfather’s sofa I would climb the scaffold with Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and I would revel again the story of my great childhood hero, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Though I have a vivid image of my grandfather in my mind, I cannot recall his ever speaking to me directly. I don’t think that this was a matter of coldness or indifference. My grandfather simply didn’t talk much. What words were spoken were to my father. He had evidently lost much of his interest in life after my grandmother died. And yet he was not only aware of my presence but solicitous of my comfort as well, though I was to forever remain in the third person.

“Did the boy have enough to eat?” he would ask my father. “Does the boy want to watch something on television?” “Did the boy sleep well on the couch?” The boy was well taken care of.

My grandfather lived in one of those old-fashioned apartments that you could still find in Brooklyn in those days; basically a long dark hallway, with doors leading off the sides into bedrooms, anchored by the dining room and small kitchen at one end, and the living room at the other end. There was an old-fashioned toilet with the water tank overhead and a pull chain hanging down from it, and I have to admit it was fun to flush. All of the furniture was dark wood, and there were heavy white lace drapes that effectively kept the sun out, so the rooms were always dark and cool, even in summer. When I sat on the couch to read, which was pretty much all I ever did, I had to put the lamplight on even in the daytime. And that's the way I've liked rooms to be, ever since; cool, dark, and quiet, with just enough light to illuminate the printed word. Sometimes when we were staying there for the weekend my uncles would come to keep my father company on Saturday afternoon, and they would sit around the dining room table drinking beer and playing pinochle or discussing baseball or world events. All I ever wanted to do was read, though occasionally if the weather was mild I would go and play in the empty, weed-strewn lot next to my grandfather's house. That was like my woods, my private forest, and I could freely run around like a wild boy, acting out the Saturday morning Tarzan movie I’d watched earlier, or leap about with a plastic bow-and-arrow set pretending I was Robin Hood. There is something about the wilderness, even an empty lot’s worth of wilderness, that brings out the repressed savage in a boy.

One Sunday afternoon, it must have been in spring, I was sitting on the front stoop reading and waiting for my father to call me in for a dinner of pork chops, or maybe it was roast chicken and mashed potatoes (my father was an excellent cook). The day had the kind of oppressive slowness Sundays often have. I did not know that it was a moment that would stay with me my entire life, but as I sat there a young girl in a red coat walked by me. She was a few years older than me, a teenager to my gangly boy, and she had the blondest hair I had ever seen in my life. She was walking slowly, looking down at her shoes, kind of singing or humming to herself, the way you sometimes do when you’re young and you are sure no one is watching. When she was almost directly in front of me she turned her head up sharply, startled by her awareness of my presence, and stopped short as our eyes met. As I remember it, she smiled, or almost smiled, then frowned, then quickly moved on out of my line of vision forever.

This was about a year before my grandfather died, and when we returned to his house every third or fourth week thereafter I set myself up on the front stoop almost all of Saturday and Sunday afternoon waiting for her to pass by again. If the weather was too cold or it was raining I sat on a hassock by the front window and watched. Once, for what reason I no longer remember, I even spent an entire afternoon perched on an upturned paint bucket hidden by weeds in my empty lot, and was rewarded with numerous mosquito bites for my trouble. And even on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when the entire family came back to his house for a lunch and the place was filled with the post-funeral conviviality of distant cousins and relatives laughing and shouting with each other for the first time in years, I took up my station by the window and waited for her to pass by, but I never saw her again.

And on that last afternoon, the afternoon of the funeral, I remember my mother and my aunts washing all the dishes after the guests had left, sweeping the floor and leaving the kitchen immaculate. And I remember my father and my Uncle Freddy sitting smoking by the parlor window, discussing all that needed to be done in the coming weeks, the detritus of official busywork always engendered by death. As we turned out the lights and locked the door for the last time that day, it doesn’t seemed to have occurred to me that I would never be coming back here, or if it did, the fact did not mean much to me. What can the concept of vanished time ever mean to a child?

And this is all I can tell you of my grandparents, who are gone from this world and will never return.

"The houses are all gone under the sea"-T. S. Elliot

The Knish Man

For Proust, it was the delicate and poetic Madeleine.

With me, it was the far less exalted potato knish.

The sign over the cooler in Wegman’s refrigerated food section read: The original Coney Island Square Knish. Microwaveable. Delicious! Potato, Mushroom, or Red Cabbage. Low in saturated fat. Cholesterol free. Source of dietary fiber.

I bought one, took it home and popped it in the microwave, and hoped for the best.

Do you recall the taste of a Knish? Perhaps you're not really sure what a Knish is? Some foods are known in one part of the country but not in others. My friend in Minnesota had to tell me what lefsa was. I filled her in on the egg cream, kielbasa, and, of course, the Knish.

To begin with...it's pronounced ka-Nish. Stress is on the second syllable.

Knish: According to my dictionary, the Origin is Yiddish, from Russian knish, denoting a kind of bun or dumpling.

I didn't need the dictionary to tell me all that.

When I was a boy there were guys who would come around on the streets of Brooklyn selling knishes from a pushcart, the same way they still sell hot dogs today. The "Knish Man", however, is no more. These days fancy stores like Wegman's stuff them full of mushrooms and cheese and red cabbage, but back then a Knish was the simplest of simple foods: mashed potatoes wrapped in fried dough. Maybe they don't sound like much, but they were truly delicious. The Knish Man would slice the Knish open sideways and spread thick spicy brown mustard on each side, then hand it to you wrapped in wax paper. There was a small door on the side of the puschcart and inside there was a fire that kept the knishes warm. I don't remember how much they cost. Seven Cents? Ten? Certainly no more than Twelve.

We loved them, my sister and I. These days high-minded know-it-alls admonish us to avoid potato-y, starchy, high carb foods and feast ourselves on broccoli and lettuce instead, but back then no one gave a damn what they or anyone else ate. Whether we are better or worse off nowadays I leave for others to decide. I only say that on the streets of Brooklyn in the days of my boyhood the Knish Man was a welcome sight.

But if I follow him down those streets after all these years on the dimming horizon of memory, I find that there is a whole world standing behind that pushcart peddler, a world sad and tragic beyond words. These were real men who dispensed this exotic treats. Men who sometimes had numbers tattooed in blue ink along the sides of their arms, men who had lost their families and loved ones and every single possession that could be called their own, who had escaped from hell and survived to sell potato dumplings to kids in Brooklyn for twelve cents a shot.

In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Williamsburg, Brooklyn became home for thousands of Hasidic Jews. By the time I was growing up in the early nineteen-sixties, our neighbors included hundreds of refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe. In the summer they would sit out on beach chairs in front of their apartment buildings as the world moved past them. They would watch us wild American city kids playing stickball or punchball in the street, and when you passed by them they never smiled, nor do I recall ever hearing the sound of laughter coming from where they sat. They just sat there and sat there, day after day, with the cloud of death hanging over their heads. Perhaps they were still trying to work out how they had been ripped from their homeland and exiled to this strange and alien place.

Sam and his brother Phil, who ran the little superette up the block, both had numbers stamped on their arms at Auschwitz. Sam, the swarthy, perennial bachelor, flirted with all the women in the neighborhood, but I remember being told that Phil had been forced to watch his wife and children murdered in front of his eyes. Whether or not this was strictly true or just a story people told, I had no way of knowing. Certainly it could have been true, especially from the way Phil seemed to always be staring off into the distance with his face empty of all expression. And if it wasn’t true for Phil, it was true for so many others. The brothers were an indelible part of the neighborhood. My Italian Catholic mother and all of my aunts shopped there several times a week. And for years after the brothers were long gone and the store had changed hands numerous times, had gone from superette to bodega, there were people in the neighborhood who would still insist they were going to Sam's when it was another place entirely.

It may seem strange to go from the humble Knish to a subject as vast and fraught with peril as the Holocaust. But growing up in Brooklyn, we knew about these things. The war had been over less than twenty years at this time. It was still fresh in our parents’ memories. And there were our neighbors, living evidence of the great atrocity. We had heard the stories. I seem to have known from an early age that Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were gassed and cremated at places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz. We even heard stories of body parts used to make soap and lampshades. And I can remember watching the trial of Adolph Eichmann on television when I was eight or nine. I don’t know how much I understood of it at the time, probably not much, and yet I remember watching it on my aunt’s TV in the apartment next to ours. Eichmann was a top Nazi (I knew that much) and he had organized the deportation of five million Jews and others to the ghettoes and concentration camps. He was one of those responsible for their sufferings and their deaths (I knew that too). After the war he had escaped to South America, but the Israeli police were on this trail for years, and they finally captured the bastard in Argentina, and brought him back to Jerusalem for trial. One of the iconic images of that time was of Eichmann sitting in a glass booth (for his own protection) listening to an interpreter through headphones as the evidence mounted up against him. There was even a play written about it later, The Man in the Glass Booth.

The trial is famous today for Eichmann's notorious "I was only following orders" defense, which of course began the legend of good Germans always marching along doing just as they are told. But orders or no orders, Adolph Eichmann was found to be as guilty as his better-known namesake, and he finished his days dangling from the business end of a long, sturdy rope. Good riddance.

I don’t know if I ever made any connection at the time, but my father’s family was German: beer, sauerbraten, pigs-knuckle German. Of course, once he married my mother, that kind of food was pretty much banned from the house forever. Today I am eternally grateful today that I grew up on lasagna and sausage-and-peppers and not hasenpfeffer and bratwurst. But my father still drank foaming mugs of beer as he played pinochle with his brothers every Friday night. Did they feel any guilt or embarrassment over what Germany had put the world through in the Twentieth Century? I don’t think so. The family had been in America since way back in the eighteen-seventies. There was no connection with the other side. And my grandfather’s parents had come from France, so there was a little French in the mix. I am sure they never felt any connection at all with the Germany that had given rise to Hitler and the Nazis. For myself, we were closer to my mother’s side of the family, so growing up I always felt more Italian than German. And I might mention that both of my mother’s brothers married Jewish women. So, in terms of extended family, we were a pretty varied group. Nor was that so unique those days in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

And there is this: one cold winter day I stopped at the knish cart on my way home from school for my regular treat with extra mustard down the middle. Perhaps the knishes weren’t hot enough because Knish Man leaned over and opened the side door of the cart and began stoking the fire with a metal rod. As he did so huge licks of flame came shooting out, nearly catching the edges of his dirty apron. I must have jumped back and shouted an inane warning to ‘watch out!’ or something of the sort, because down through all the years I still recall the man’s casual shrug as he continued to stoke the fire, indifferent to the flames.

“So?” I recall him saying, not necessarily to me, “If I burn, I burn. What of it?”

Looking back, the man was probably in no real danger, but I remember to this day that I was profoundly shocked and disturbed, not so much by his words as by the absolute flatness and despair (though I probably didn’t know that word back then) in his voice. That anyone could be so uncaring of their own life was too much for my child mind to wrap itself around. That night I told my father what happened.

“Sometimes people can become very unhappy,” he told me, “and then they don’t care much anymore.” I vowed that no matter what happened to me in life, I would never allow myself to slide down into such indifference and sadness. Of course, it helped that I was growing up in the United States of America, and not Eastern Europe in the murderous time of Adolph Hitler.

And now the years have passed and the Knish Man is long gone from the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Just another memory in the vast storehouse of memories that make up our lives.

Postscript: I tried the Wegman’s knish. It wasn’t bad. But of course some things never taste as good as they do when you’re a kid on the streets of Brooklyn.