Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
On the Way Home from School
I should have been home for lunch no later than five minutes past twelve, but I yielded to temptation and made a stop at the Grand Book Center. It was nearly twenty to one when I finally climbed the stairs up to our small apartment. My mother was furious.
"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.
Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.
Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.
“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.
"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.
“Let me have it,” she said.
I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.
"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.
"Wash your hands and sit down."
Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"
It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.
"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."
"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."
"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."
"Just this once?"
"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.
But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.
A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."
"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.
"OK," I said.
"No later than three-fifteen. Please."
"I'll be home on time," I assured her.
I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.
We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.
Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:
“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”
This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.
I was late to the office.
Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.
"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.
Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.
Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.
“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.
"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.
“Let me have it,” she said.
I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.
"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.
"Wash your hands and sit down."
Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"
It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.
"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."
"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."
"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."
"Just this once?"
"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.
But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.
A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."
"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.
"OK," I said.
"No later than three-fifteen. Please."
"I'll be home on time," I assured her.
I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.
We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.
Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:
“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”
This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.
I was late to the office.
Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.
A Story (sort of) About Soup
My father loved pea soup; he could eat two-three-four bowls in rapid succession on a Saturday night --- provided it had first been boiled to the approximate thermal reading of molten lead.
“Hotter,” was his continual refrain. “It's supposed to burn when it goes down.”
My mother tried to oblige, but somehow the soup was never scalding enough. He would spoon down several mouthfuls then hand the bowl back to her.
“I want it to burn,” he’d tell her, “I want it to feel fire inside my guts.”
So my mother would pour the soup back into to the pot and boil it up again. On and on it went. I was no great fan of pea soup in those days, but I had begun to wonder if maybe the extreme heating process didn't bring about the release of some hitherto unsuspected flavor element that was impossible to resist. One night when my mother placed the soup bowl on the table I grabbed a small tea spoon from the kitchen drawer and skimmed a taste off the top. My howls of agony still echo down the Brooklyn streets to this day.
“Hold this against your tongue,” my mother said, handing me an ice cube from the freezer. My father merely glanced at me and shrugged. Someday when you're a man you will understand, his look seemed to say. Then he went back to his soup. It had been boiled and re-boiled to the point where it could have melted chrome steel, but it still didn't satisfy my father.
“Hotter," he decreed. I don’t know how he did it, except that he chased the soup down with a cold beer, so maybe that helped.
My father wasn’t ordinarily a fussy or demanding man when it came to his food. Normally he ate whatever my mother placed in front of him. Nor was he given to eccentricities of any kind. Weeknights he didn't get home until after seven, long after the rest of us had already had our supper, and he ate fast and alone (and without re-heating instructions) at the kitchen table so he’d have time to relax and watch television. But on a Saturday night with a couple of beers under his belt he grew expansive, and he’d occasionally call for a special dish, super-hot pea soup or maybe a plate of sauerbraten, a German specialty he remembered from his childhood. My mother, being a full-blooded Italian, was naturally aghast at the very idea and concept of sauerbraten. She made it for him all the same, of course, but was determined to shield her children from such gastronomical horrors. So there was laid down a strict law that I could not have so much as a taste of this strange dish until I was over twenty-one and living on my own. Having gotten a look and a whiff of my father’s plate, I was certainly in no hurry for that day to arrive. In fact it wasn’t until a great many years later that I tasted sauerbraten for the first time. On the afternoon following my father’s funeral we took the family to a well-known German restaurant called Niederstein’s, which stood for over one-hundred-and-fifty years on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, and there I had sauerbraten for the first time in my father’s honor. My mother had some too. It wasn't half bad at that. But on those long ago Saturday nights sauerbraten was strictly off-limits.
As for pea soup, I can take it or leave it, but once when I had it in a restaurant it came out lukewarm and I asked the waiter if he could take it back and heat it up.
"We can't do that," the waiter told me. "If it's too hot, and someone gets burned, they're looking to sue us."
I'm not sure what my father would have made of that, though as far as I know he only ever ate my mother's pea soup. And it was only in later years that I gained any insight into his odd culinary preference.
I had come into the house after midnight. My mother was already in bed but my father was sitting at the kitchen table having a bowl of soup he'd obviously reheated from that night's supper. I could see the steam rising out of the pot on the stove.
"Pop," I asked him. "Why do you eat your soup so hot? Aren't you afraid of burning your throat?"
The question seemed to startle him. "I like it this way," he said.
"It's not good for you too hot," I lectured him. "You can damage your insides that way."
He only shrugged. "But I like it hot."
It went back and forth that way for a while, but eventually he told me a little bit more:
"My mother used to make a big pot of pea soup on a Saturday night," he said. "In the wintertime. It's how we kept warm. There was no oil furnace in those days, just the wood stove. The soup would warm us up at night."
I thought about that for a while. I wasn't sure how much it explained.
Finally I said, "But we have heat now, Pop."
Again he shrugged. "I just like it hot."
That was all a long time ago, and now my mom and dad are both gone, and the rooms we lived in belong to someone else. Even Neiderstein's is no longer there, having closed its doors permanently a few years back, after an unbelievable run of a century and a half.
So we grow older and older, and my father's soup preference is no great matter, just another small mystery in the great warehouse of mysteries we will never solve in our lifetimes.
“Hotter,” was his continual refrain. “It's supposed to burn when it goes down.”
My mother tried to oblige, but somehow the soup was never scalding enough. He would spoon down several mouthfuls then hand the bowl back to her.
“I want it to burn,” he’d tell her, “I want it to feel fire inside my guts.”
So my mother would pour the soup back into to the pot and boil it up again. On and on it went. I was no great fan of pea soup in those days, but I had begun to wonder if maybe the extreme heating process didn't bring about the release of some hitherto unsuspected flavor element that was impossible to resist. One night when my mother placed the soup bowl on the table I grabbed a small tea spoon from the kitchen drawer and skimmed a taste off the top. My howls of agony still echo down the Brooklyn streets to this day.
“Hold this against your tongue,” my mother said, handing me an ice cube from the freezer. My father merely glanced at me and shrugged. Someday when you're a man you will understand, his look seemed to say. Then he went back to his soup. It had been boiled and re-boiled to the point where it could have melted chrome steel, but it still didn't satisfy my father.
“Hotter," he decreed. I don’t know how he did it, except that he chased the soup down with a cold beer, so maybe that helped.
My father wasn’t ordinarily a fussy or demanding man when it came to his food. Normally he ate whatever my mother placed in front of him. Nor was he given to eccentricities of any kind. Weeknights he didn't get home until after seven, long after the rest of us had already had our supper, and he ate fast and alone (and without re-heating instructions) at the kitchen table so he’d have time to relax and watch television. But on a Saturday night with a couple of beers under his belt he grew expansive, and he’d occasionally call for a special dish, super-hot pea soup or maybe a plate of sauerbraten, a German specialty he remembered from his childhood. My mother, being a full-blooded Italian, was naturally aghast at the very idea and concept of sauerbraten. She made it for him all the same, of course, but was determined to shield her children from such gastronomical horrors. So there was laid down a strict law that I could not have so much as a taste of this strange dish until I was over twenty-one and living on my own. Having gotten a look and a whiff of my father’s plate, I was certainly in no hurry for that day to arrive. In fact it wasn’t until a great many years later that I tasted sauerbraten for the first time. On the afternoon following my father’s funeral we took the family to a well-known German restaurant called Niederstein’s, which stood for over one-hundred-and-fifty years on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, and there I had sauerbraten for the first time in my father’s honor. My mother had some too. It wasn't half bad at that. But on those long ago Saturday nights sauerbraten was strictly off-limits.
As for pea soup, I can take it or leave it, but once when I had it in a restaurant it came out lukewarm and I asked the waiter if he could take it back and heat it up.
"We can't do that," the waiter told me. "If it's too hot, and someone gets burned, they're looking to sue us."
I'm not sure what my father would have made of that, though as far as I know he only ever ate my mother's pea soup. And it was only in later years that I gained any insight into his odd culinary preference.
I had come into the house after midnight. My mother was already in bed but my father was sitting at the kitchen table having a bowl of soup he'd obviously reheated from that night's supper. I could see the steam rising out of the pot on the stove.
"Pop," I asked him. "Why do you eat your soup so hot? Aren't you afraid of burning your throat?"
The question seemed to startle him. "I like it this way," he said.
"It's not good for you too hot," I lectured him. "You can damage your insides that way."
He only shrugged. "But I like it hot."
It went back and forth that way for a while, but eventually he told me a little bit more:
"My mother used to make a big pot of pea soup on a Saturday night," he said. "In the wintertime. It's how we kept warm. There was no oil furnace in those days, just the wood stove. The soup would warm us up at night."
I thought about that for a while. I wasn't sure how much it explained.
Finally I said, "But we have heat now, Pop."
Again he shrugged. "I just like it hot."
That was all a long time ago, and now my mom and dad are both gone, and the rooms we lived in belong to someone else. Even Neiderstein's is no longer there, having closed its doors permanently a few years back, after an unbelievable run of a century and a half.
So we grow older and older, and my father's soup preference is no great matter, just another small mystery in the great warehouse of mysteries we will never solve in our lifetimes.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
In Their Own Words:
"In the recurrent dream I had of the little street {I used to dream so frequently while in Paris} the scene always faded at the moment when I came upon the bridge that crossed the little canal, neither the bridge nor the canal having any existence actually.
"This evening, after passing beyond the frontier of my childhood explorations, I suddenly came upon the very street I had been longing to find for so many years...I remember distinctly the premonition I had of approaching {an}other world when, passing a certain house, I caught sight of a young girl, obviously of foreign descent, poring over a book at the dining room table.
"There is nothing unique, to be sure, in such a sight. Yet the moment my eyes fell upon the girl I felt a thrill beyond description, a premonition, to be more accurate, that important revelations were to follow. It was as if the girl, her pose, the glow of the room falling upon the book she was reading, the impressive silence in which the whole neighborhood was enveloped, combined to produce a moment of such acuity that for an incalculably brief, almost meteoric flash I had the deep and quiet conviction that everything had been ordained, that there was justice in the world, and that the image which I caught and vainly tried to hold was the expression of the splendor and the holiness of life as it would always reveal itself to be in moments of utter stillness.
"I realized as I pushed ecstatically forward that the joy and bliss we experience in the profound depths of the dream---a joy and bliss which surpasses anything known in waking life---comes indubitably from the miraculous accord between desire and reality.
"As I walked past the rows of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth, I saw what man is seldom given to see---the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world....As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same; the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive.
"Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only I have known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth?"
---Henry Miller, Reunion in Brooklyn
"This evening, after passing beyond the frontier of my childhood explorations, I suddenly came upon the very street I had been longing to find for so many years...I remember distinctly the premonition I had of approaching {an}other world when, passing a certain house, I caught sight of a young girl, obviously of foreign descent, poring over a book at the dining room table.
"There is nothing unique, to be sure, in such a sight. Yet the moment my eyes fell upon the girl I felt a thrill beyond description, a premonition, to be more accurate, that important revelations were to follow. It was as if the girl, her pose, the glow of the room falling upon the book she was reading, the impressive silence in which the whole neighborhood was enveloped, combined to produce a moment of such acuity that for an incalculably brief, almost meteoric flash I had the deep and quiet conviction that everything had been ordained, that there was justice in the world, and that the image which I caught and vainly tried to hold was the expression of the splendor and the holiness of life as it would always reveal itself to be in moments of utter stillness.
"I realized as I pushed ecstatically forward that the joy and bliss we experience in the profound depths of the dream---a joy and bliss which surpasses anything known in waking life---comes indubitably from the miraculous accord between desire and reality.
"As I walked past the rows of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth, I saw what man is seldom given to see---the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world....As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same; the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive.
"Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only I have known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth?"
---Henry Miller, Reunion in Brooklyn
Friday, August 20, 2010
Yesterday's Papers
Growing up in the early sixties, the daily newspaper was an indelible part of our everyday lives. In our house we read the Brooklyn edition of the Daily News ("New York's Picture Newspaper) and the Daily Mirror (equally photocentric). My father brought 'the papers' home from work at night and we kept them on the kitchen table so anyone could read them whenever they had a free moment. The News and the Mirror were New York's two great 'tabloid' papers, which meant that they were to be found mostly in working-class households. The New York Post was also a sort of tabloid, but back then it was considered a 'communist' paper on account of its invariable liberal/left agenda. And the New York Times, which labored under the twin handicaps (as we saw it) of having few pictures and NO comics was just too intellectual and high-falutin' for us. There were other papers as well-the Herald Tribune and the Journal American-but for some reason we didn't much read these. Saturday mornings I would go down to the newsstand on the corner and asked for copies of the News and the Mirror. The papers cost five cents each on weekdays and Saturdays, and fifteen cents on Sunday when they were both thick with color-comics and the magazine section and the TV supplement for the week. The Mirror went out of business sometime in the mid-sixties, and thereafter the Daily News stood unchallenged as our family newspaper. My father read it every morning of his life, almost to the morning he died.
In those days my father came home in the evening after everyone had already eaten, placed the papers on the table, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down to supper. My older brother was the first to pounce on the papers.
"Those Mets..." he would shake his head after cursory glance at the back page told him what he already knew. It was one thing to hear it on the radio; it wasn't really real until you saw it in the News.
Oh, yes...The Back Page. That was the way you read the paper in my neighborhood. You started on the back page which gave the baseball scores, then opened to the second-from-last page, where they printed the racing results. On the racing page you found the 'total mutual handle'...which meant all the money that was bet at all the state tracks on the previous day...and the last three digits of which comprised...The Number...yes, The Number.
In the days before legal lotteries and off-track betting, every neighborhood bar came replete with its own house bookie. Falco's bar, where my father used to hoist a few lazy Saturday afternoon beers, was somewhat upscale in that it had two bookies on hand; there was Charlie the Bookie for betting horses (more respectable) and an individual I knew only as Apples for The Number (less respectable, but cheaper and more popular).
The Number: The way it worked was you gave your bookie fifty cents or a dollar and picked three digits---your house number, telephone exchange, the first three numbers of the licence plate on the taxicab that ran over and killed your Uncle Herman on his way to church last Sunday morning; superstition on this head was inexhaustible and often ran to the bizarre and the esoteric---and if those three digits 'came out' that week, then you Hit the Number and your bookie paid you a pile of money. Exactly how much he paid I never knew because I was too young to play the number. I knew where to find it, though.
Having ascertained that his team had lost and his number hadn't hit, my brother settled down across the table from my father and the two discussed the next day's racing schedule.
My father and my brother held opposing points-of-view on life, or at least that portion of life which concerned itself with rising from bed in the morning and going out to earn one's way in the world. Briefly stated, my father favored this course and practiced it faithfully and unselfishly every day of his working life. My brother, who had long dropped out of school and was more than old enough to hold down a full-time job, avoided work as if he were in possession of irrefutable scientific evidence that it the chief cause of leprosy in the civilized world. But one point they did have in common was a love of horse racing.
"Says this filly Escapade goes good on a wet track." my brother reported the handicappers line. "Supposed to rain tomorrow."
I didn't know much about rain and tracks and fillies, but it didn't matter anyway. Between the two of them my father and my brother could not have picked the winning horse in a field of ten if you shot the other nine horses before the race began. Charlie the Bookie was always happy to see them coming. But they were nothing if not stoics:
"What do you think of this Spicy Bones in the third at Belmont," my brother asked.
On and on it went.
On Saturday mornings my father would spread open the paper and explain the world to us. My sisters and I would dig into a traditional Brooklyn breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, bagels and cream cheese, and other delicacies, But we were always listening.
"China has a billion people. What do they care about a war? China could lose a couple of million and never know they were gone."
And there were questions of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, the role of NATO, the presence of Fidel Castro ninety miles from our American shores, the battle for civil rights. I learned more about the contemporary state of the world while chomping down on a Kaiser role stacked high with liverwurst and onion slices topped with Guldens spicy brown mustard, then I ever did from the nuns at St. Mary's School.
The Sunday paper was an event in itself. It cost fifteen cents and must have weighed five pounds. There was the regular section, the movie and entertainment section, the color magazine and of course the comics. Sometimes we bought the 'early edition' on Saturday night, and it was still hot from the presses when we got it upstairs. The ink was still wet enough to stain your hands when you opened it it up and the smell was delicious and beyond description; better then the bakery or even the pizzeria, though not quite as good (to me) as the used bookstore over on Grand Street. Of course I went for the comics first. Those were the days of the great adventure serial strips with story lines that ran for months at a time. My favorites were Steve Canyon and Smilin' Jack. I used to clip them from the paper and paste them into 81/2 x 11 notebooks which I kept stacked under my bed. My mother liked to clip stuff too: coupons, recipes, and anything having to do with the Pope or the Vatican. But recipes mostly. I can still remember mouth-watering glossy photos of great orange-glazed ducks and deserts so rich and chocolate and satiny, lemon-colored creams it made your teeth hurt just to look at them.
"Are you ever going to make any of this stuff?" I would occasionally ask.
"Someday," was all she'd say.
But she never did. My mother excelled at her native Italian dishes and such American staples as fresh ham, roast turkey, and Yankee pot roast. Perhaps her nerve failed her on this point. And in any event she had no need to stray beyond her tried and true repertoire. In a way that draw full or recipes represented a glittering walled kingdom she could never dare to enter but only gaze upon from afar. And yet I am certain that if she would have remained to become its Queen.
When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, my mother wrapped the papers from that week in plastic food wrap and saved them for many years. I still have the Daily News for Saturday, November 23rd: President is Slain; Johnson Sworn In on Plane; Suspect Kills Cop, Seized.
When I first read that headline an idea occured to me. I picked the paper from the day before off of the pile of old papers next to the stove and found a small item in the back pages: President Kennedy to be in Dallas Friday.
I placed the two papers side-by-side. I was beginning to understand something: Here was yesterday's paper, and within it's pages 'yesterday'---the time before anyone had even considered the possibility of the President being shot down like a dog on a Dallas street---still existed. And next to it was today's paper where Kennedy's death was an established and accepted fact, already a matter of history. In a few hours the early edition of tomorrow's paper would hit the stands, bringing more news that no one could guess at now but soon would be settled fact and common knowledge. I was beginning to understand something: all points of time exist simultaneously. Past, Present, and Future are not separate entities, but instead are woven of one lacy fabric spread out over the table of eternity before time even began. All Time is One Time. And I learned it from the newspapers.
These days I don't read the newspapers. I don't even buy a newspaper. Lots of people still read their morning paper, but they way I feel, who's got the time? Besides, the pages are getting thinner and the comics ain't what they used to be. At work, we have the Cable News Network going full-blast all day, and if anything happens I'm the first to know it. And there's the Internet. Still, I feel bad about it. For the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who lined up outside the newspaper plants during the seventeen day driver's strike in 1944, the paper was an indelible part of their lives. For my father it was a constant, a given. A day that started without the paper---and there weren't many---was a day that never really began at all, a day that somehow wasn't 'official.' And if my some miracle he were to suddenly return to us today, I have no doubt that the first thing he'd do, even before he gulped down his coffee, would be to look around for his copy of the New York Daily News so he could catch up with how the world had been going while he was away.
In those days my father came home in the evening after everyone had already eaten, placed the papers on the table, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down to supper. My older brother was the first to pounce on the papers.
"Those Mets..." he would shake his head after cursory glance at the back page told him what he already knew. It was one thing to hear it on the radio; it wasn't really real until you saw it in the News.
Oh, yes...The Back Page. That was the way you read the paper in my neighborhood. You started on the back page which gave the baseball scores, then opened to the second-from-last page, where they printed the racing results. On the racing page you found the 'total mutual handle'...which meant all the money that was bet at all the state tracks on the previous day...and the last three digits of which comprised...The Number...yes, The Number.
In the days before legal lotteries and off-track betting, every neighborhood bar came replete with its own house bookie. Falco's bar, where my father used to hoist a few lazy Saturday afternoon beers, was somewhat upscale in that it had two bookies on hand; there was Charlie the Bookie for betting horses (more respectable) and an individual I knew only as Apples for The Number (less respectable, but cheaper and more popular).
The Number: The way it worked was you gave your bookie fifty cents or a dollar and picked three digits---your house number, telephone exchange, the first three numbers of the licence plate on the taxicab that ran over and killed your Uncle Herman on his way to church last Sunday morning; superstition on this head was inexhaustible and often ran to the bizarre and the esoteric---and if those three digits 'came out' that week, then you Hit the Number and your bookie paid you a pile of money. Exactly how much he paid I never knew because I was too young to play the number. I knew where to find it, though.
Having ascertained that his team had lost and his number hadn't hit, my brother settled down across the table from my father and the two discussed the next day's racing schedule.
My father and my brother held opposing points-of-view on life, or at least that portion of life which concerned itself with rising from bed in the morning and going out to earn one's way in the world. Briefly stated, my father favored this course and practiced it faithfully and unselfishly every day of his working life. My brother, who had long dropped out of school and was more than old enough to hold down a full-time job, avoided work as if he were in possession of irrefutable scientific evidence that it the chief cause of leprosy in the civilized world. But one point they did have in common was a love of horse racing.
"Says this filly Escapade goes good on a wet track." my brother reported the handicappers line. "Supposed to rain tomorrow."
I didn't know much about rain and tracks and fillies, but it didn't matter anyway. Between the two of them my father and my brother could not have picked the winning horse in a field of ten if you shot the other nine horses before the race began. Charlie the Bookie was always happy to see them coming. But they were nothing if not stoics:
"What do you think of this Spicy Bones in the third at Belmont," my brother asked.
On and on it went.
On Saturday mornings my father would spread open the paper and explain the world to us. My sisters and I would dig into a traditional Brooklyn breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, bagels and cream cheese, and other delicacies, But we were always listening.
"China has a billion people. What do they care about a war? China could lose a couple of million and never know they were gone."
And there were questions of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, the role of NATO, the presence of Fidel Castro ninety miles from our American shores, the battle for civil rights. I learned more about the contemporary state of the world while chomping down on a Kaiser role stacked high with liverwurst and onion slices topped with Guldens spicy brown mustard, then I ever did from the nuns at St. Mary's School.
The Sunday paper was an event in itself. It cost fifteen cents and must have weighed five pounds. There was the regular section, the movie and entertainment section, the color magazine and of course the comics. Sometimes we bought the 'early edition' on Saturday night, and it was still hot from the presses when we got it upstairs. The ink was still wet enough to stain your hands when you opened it it up and the smell was delicious and beyond description; better then the bakery or even the pizzeria, though not quite as good (to me) as the used bookstore over on Grand Street. Of course I went for the comics first. Those were the days of the great adventure serial strips with story lines that ran for months at a time. My favorites were Steve Canyon and Smilin' Jack. I used to clip them from the paper and paste them into 81/2 x 11 notebooks which I kept stacked under my bed. My mother liked to clip stuff too: coupons, recipes, and anything having to do with the Pope or the Vatican. But recipes mostly. I can still remember mouth-watering glossy photos of great orange-glazed ducks and deserts so rich and chocolate and satiny, lemon-colored creams it made your teeth hurt just to look at them.
"Are you ever going to make any of this stuff?" I would occasionally ask.
"Someday," was all she'd say.
But she never did. My mother excelled at her native Italian dishes and such American staples as fresh ham, roast turkey, and Yankee pot roast. Perhaps her nerve failed her on this point. And in any event she had no need to stray beyond her tried and true repertoire. In a way that draw full or recipes represented a glittering walled kingdom she could never dare to enter but only gaze upon from afar. And yet I am certain that if she would have remained to become its Queen.
When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, my mother wrapped the papers from that week in plastic food wrap and saved them for many years. I still have the Daily News for Saturday, November 23rd: President is Slain; Johnson Sworn In on Plane; Suspect Kills Cop, Seized.
When I first read that headline an idea occured to me. I picked the paper from the day before off of the pile of old papers next to the stove and found a small item in the back pages: President Kennedy to be in Dallas Friday.
I placed the two papers side-by-side. I was beginning to understand something: Here was yesterday's paper, and within it's pages 'yesterday'---the time before anyone had even considered the possibility of the President being shot down like a dog on a Dallas street---still existed. And next to it was today's paper where Kennedy's death was an established and accepted fact, already a matter of history. In a few hours the early edition of tomorrow's paper would hit the stands, bringing more news that no one could guess at now but soon would be settled fact and common knowledge. I was beginning to understand something: all points of time exist simultaneously. Past, Present, and Future are not separate entities, but instead are woven of one lacy fabric spread out over the table of eternity before time even began. All Time is One Time. And I learned it from the newspapers.
These days I don't read the newspapers. I don't even buy a newspaper. Lots of people still read their morning paper, but they way I feel, who's got the time? Besides, the pages are getting thinner and the comics ain't what they used to be. At work, we have the Cable News Network going full-blast all day, and if anything happens I'm the first to know it. And there's the Internet. Still, I feel bad about it. For the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who lined up outside the newspaper plants during the seventeen day driver's strike in 1944, the paper was an indelible part of their lives. For my father it was a constant, a given. A day that started without the paper---and there weren't many---was a day that never really began at all, a day that somehow wasn't 'official.' And if my some miracle he were to suddenly return to us today, I have no doubt that the first thing he'd do, even before he gulped down his coffee, would be to look around for his copy of the New York Daily News so he could catch up with how the world had been going while he was away.
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