Brooklyn on My Mind and Everyone Else's

Brooklyn is enjoying another moment in the sun, not that it was ever truly dark. Lately, however, the cognoscente have seemingly rediscovered my native borough, driving up real estate prices, populating the byways with flavorful, exotic fare, building skyscraper apartment houses, even turning the once tallest structure in the county—the Williamsburg Savings Bank on Flatbush Avenue—into a co-op with multi-million dollar penthouse units.   

The latest enchantment to illuminate Brooklyn is a film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. The movie opened Wednesday (http://nyti.ms/1iBkP1T); the book was published in 2009. I didn’t read the book, haven’t yet seen the film. But I did grow up in the time and place the heroine of Tóibín’s tale emigrated to from Ireland in the 1950s.

There’s a lot of nostalgia surrounding Brooklyn these days, an emotion that has engulfed me as well. Perhaps it is pushed forward by Bernie Sanders’ quixotic campaign for the presidency as evidenced by an article a few months ago chronicling his Kings County roots (http://nyti.ms/1VFhZZi).

A few weeks earlier The New York Times ran a story about ex- Brooklynites returning to live in, or at least visit, the borough (http://nyti.ms/1JXIeno). 

Truth be told, the parts of Brooklyn mostly and longingly portrayed in film and print—areas such as Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights—are far removed from the Brooklyn of my childhood, the northern part of Sheepshead Bay along Avenue W between East 18th and East 19th Streets, a block west of Ocean Avenue. It was on the southern side of this treelined street of attached single-family row houses with the occasional (to my knowledge, illegal) ground floor tenant where I enjoyed a pleasant, if not idyllic, upbringing.

Small things now evoke long-cached memories. 

The other day I spotted a tennis ball atop a grated storm sewer cover. I was transported back to the street stickball games I played. The leafy maple and sycamore trees along Avenue W posed one type of hazard to be overcome—if you caught a ball on its way down from a tree you recorded an out, but if it fell to the ground you would call “hindoo,” and a do-over was in order. 

The trees, however, were not the biggest obstacle. Balls, usually pink Spaldeens, falling into storm drains could wash out any game. Unless, unless you had a wire clothes hanger you could stretch out and, lowering the hook end into the sewer basin, fish the ball up from the murky bottom.  

Our grandson Finley loves playing with toy trucks, usually in his home’s carpeted basement or living room. I, on the other hand, played “dump truck” outside, on the dirt edge of the grass of our front lawn. 

As we got older, my friends and I shifted our play spot to the dirt under the trees between the street and the sidewalk. Our choice of “toy” also “matured” into pen knives. We’d play a game called “Territory.” You would start off with equal plots of land. By throwing your knife into your adversary’s dirt adjacent to your plot, you could claim more territory, but only if the blade stood the knife upright with at least two fingers’ worth of clearance from the ground. 

Oh, I neglected to mention an important part of the game. When your foe threw his knife you were required to stand astride your territory, an act of courage made all the more challenging as your territory diminished in size. I don’t recall any foot injuries, though I would not be surprised to know I am repressing memories of mishaps. 

One doesn’t see any yellow Checker cabs anymore, but they were the preferred and common conveyance when our mother took us to the beach back in the 1950s. Their back seats were deep enough to accommodate two round jump seats that folded into the floorboard when not used. We’d go to Brighton Beach, eat cold meatloaf or hamburger sandwiches our mother made and buy cool orange drinks in short, cardboard containers from vendors who pushed through the sand with hot ice boxes slung over their shoulders while wearing safari hats to shield the burning rays of the sun. 

Sometimes, Saturday nights during the summer, our whole family would go to Coney Island. My favorite ride was a train ride on a track that circumvented the entire kiddie park. When darkness veiled the night, we would sit on the sand and take in the weekly fireworks display. Afterward we’d bundle back into the car and as we approached home our father would sing one of the few American western songs he knew, “Home, home on the range/ where the deer and the antelope play/ where seldom is heard, a discouraging word/ and the sky is not cloudy all day.”

I Never Really Liked Halloween

Just five kids braved our cul de sac to trick or treat last night. Can’t really blame them or their parents who tagged along. I wouldn’t have gone out last night, either. Then again, I never really liked Halloween. I don't remember dressing up in a costume to go trick or treating as a youngster. My antipathy toward Halloween carried over to my parenting. I reasoned that since Halloween really was All Saints Day it was a Christian holiday, one good Jewish children shouldn't celebrate. Besides Gilda and I didn't want Dan and Ellie eating candy. I'm also not into scary movies, especially ones wherein a haunted house plays a central role. 

Perhaps my aversion to haunted houses goes back to my early childhood. Across the street from our brick row house on Avenue W in Brooklyn in the early 1950s stood a dirty grey, two or three story clapboard structure recessed back from the road. I say dirty grey, but in truth the house started off white. Years of neglect turned it dirty grey. The small plot of lawn in front of the house was overgrown with weeds.

No children lived there. The only person we ever saw going into and out of the house was a wizened geezer. He walked stooped over, his grey suit jacket draping a skeletal body. His cheeks appeared sallow and shallow, as if he had no teeth to keep them from caving in on his gums. A stub of a cigarette dangled from his lips. His grey hair ran wild. He was, to a young boy and his friends with furtive imaginations, a most scary fellow, the type of shadowy figure Scout and Jem envisioned of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Even his name made us squirm—Pupkis. 

My friends, Lenny and Richie, and I weren’t old enough to cross Avenue W by ourselves, so we never threw rocks or fuzz balls at Mr. Pupkis or his home. One day, maybe when I was eight or nine, Pupkis and his home were gone. In short order they were replaced by side-by-side adjoining brick homes. Into one of them moved a family with a daughter, Sherry, who became one of my sister’s best friends. The most memorable aspect of Sherry’s home was her living room furniture. Her mother encased the sofa and chairs in protective plastic. People did that back in the 1950s and early 1960s. 

One other noteworthy event occurred on Avenue W between East 18th and East 19th Street. A few years later on a Friday evening in the spring, just as our family was sitting down to Sabbath dinner, we heard sharp popping sounds—gunfire— from across the street, followed by a man’s anguished cry. We looked out the dinette window to see police detectives stuff a portly man handcuffed from behind into an unmarked car. Turned out he was a drug dealer. The detectives had pursued him down his driveway into his back yard, firing their pistols in the air to get him to stop fleeing. We didn’t know the family. I don’t think they would have been the type of folks my parents would have had as friends. 

More Sandy Fallout: Wednesday’s NY Times carried a letter from Joseph McCaffrey of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., arguing for early voting legislation in all 50 states so that future disasters, wherever they may occur, don’t limit suffrage opportunities. “Mother Nature is nonpartisan and could take out red or blue states in the future and severely affect national elections,” he wrote.

McCaffrey must be a Democrat as he tagged Mother Nature (another euphemism for God) as being nonpartisan. No self-respecting Republican, at least in this time of Akins, Santorum, Bachmann and Mourdock, would declare God to be anything but a card carrying member of the Grand Old Party. 

My Mistake: Another example of why it’s very hard to copy edit yourself. In Wednesday’s post I wrote Hurricane “Sally,” not Sandy (since corrected). My apologies. To those who wrote in, thank you. To everyone else, this is another example of seeing what you want to see, not what the reality is. 

Snow Dog Memories

The almost never-ending snow and a recent article in the NY Times on the intelligence of border collies took me back 50 years to the year we had one of the breed as our pet (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18dog.html?_r=1&ref=science).

Dusty was a handsome, golden-haired dog. Just a puppy when we brought him home in June, he grew to be around 70 pounds by the end of the year. His owner told us he was a border collie, though my siblings and I believe because of his size and color he probably had some golden retriever in his genes, as well.

I can’t say he was the most intelligent of four-footed friends, but he was among the most playful and fun dogs I’ve ever come across. In this winter of incessant snow, it’s enjoyable to recall the winter of 1960-61, when 54.7 inches of snow fell in New York City, the 7th snowiest before this season.

By winter, Dusty had grown to almost his full weight, and I, as stated in a previous blog, I was skin and bones growing up. Average weight for an 11-year-old boy is 77 pounds. I was lucky if I weighed 50. It was comforting and reassuring to have Dusty around. No one would bother me when I walked him. Or rather, when he walked me. He’d go into typical border collie mode, circling back and forth on the leash as he corralled me to walk where he wanted to go, just as his ancestors would do when herding sheep.

He never tugged on the leash, except in extreme conditions, like when he saw a squirrel across the street.

Our row house in Brooklyn had a front porch eight steps above the ground. After one deep snowfall, it was my turn to walk Dusty in the morning. We went out onto the porch and as I carefully prepared to negotiate the steps covered in about a foot of snow, Dusty spotted a squirrel across Avenue W. He leaped at the chance to make a new friend. I landed spread-eagled, face down at the base of the steps. I didn’t hold onto the leash. It was a good hour before Dusty harkened to my call to come back inside.

A few days later it was my sister Lee’s turn to walk Dusty. Lee always claimed Dusty was her dog, that we got him as an elementary school graduation present for her to make up for the absence of our father who was on a round-the-world trip at the time. This particular morning Lee had to be at school by 9 am to take a mid-term exam. Dusty was not informed, however. So when he slipped his leash from her wrist to romp in the snow, Lee was beside herself. No amount of entreaty could coax Dusty back home. Finally, Lee called out she was leaving four Oreos on the steps of the porch and that she’d come back for him after her test.

As should be obvious by now, Dusty loved frolicking in the snow. One evening during another blizzard we decided that rather than subject one of us to trying to walk him in the driving snow, we’d just let him loose on the street. When he got tired, hungry or cold, he’d come back home, bark loudly and we’d let him in. We didn’t think he’d bother anyone, nor would he be in danger from any passing car, as no one in their right mind would be outside in the middle of a blizzard.

We didn’t count, however, on “Uncle” Bernie and “Aunt” Ruth Schwartz showing up for an appointment to sell us on attending Camp Dellwood in Honesdale, Pa., that summer. As it was their first year operating the camp, they were eager to scrounge up as many campers as possible. For the past five summers we had attended Camp Massad Aleph, but Lee had so ingratiated herself with Massad’s owners that only my brother and I were invited back. Our parents, however, considered us a package deal; we had to find a new summer stomping ground. The prospect of signing up three campers in one sitting was too much for Uncle Bernie and Aunt Ruth to resist, blizzard be damned.

About an hour after letting Dusty patrol in front of our house we heard his barking. Not his usual barking, more a bark that signified danger, the type of bark a border collie would emit when he saw a wolf or fox near the sheep. As we approached the front door we noticed two figures on the porch, a man and a woman, shivering. They were not only wet and cold, they were downright petrified this huge dog was going to tear them to pieces.

We laughed apologetically as we let them inside, told them Dusty wouldn’t hurt a fly. After they thawed out, they showed us slides of the camp, told us their camping philosophy and pitched us on Dellwood.

We attended Dellwood the summer of 1961. During that summer our parents gave Dusty away. My brother, sister and I never got over it. We never went back to Dellwood.

Father's Day Present, and Past

For Father’s Day, my daughter Ellie gave me a present that reminded me of my mother.

Ellie spent Saturday night preparing kreplach and chicken soup with lots of thick, sweet carrots and thin lokshen (noodles). Kreplach are Jewish wontons. Jewish meat ravioli. Jewish stuffed dumplings. Triangular in shape, at least the way my mother used to make them and Ellie did as well, kreplach are among my favorite foods. Alas, they are also among the foods I rarely get to enjoy, as they are labor intensive and messy to make.

One of the most enduring memories of childhood in Brooklyn is my mother cooking for the holidays. Each Jewish holiday brought different treats. For the night before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the signature culinary delight were kreplach. Mom would painstakingly hand-shred well-cooked brisket. With flour dusting up the kitchen and adjacent dinette, she’d roll dough until wafer thin, cut it into squares, place a dollop of shredded meat in the center and fold the edges over into perfectly shaped right angle triangles. Like a general preparing troops for battle, mom would array the boiled kreplach in lines worthy of military precision on the dinette table. It was my job to deliver some of her handiwork to the neighbors. I hated that job, not because as a young boy I’d be embarrassed. Rather, it pained me to part with any of my favorite food.

Ellie’s kreplach easily were two, or even three, times the size of my mother’s, and just as tasty. When I ate them Sunday afternoon in her apartment in Brooklyn I was instantly transported back to the 1950s and 1960s. We couldn’t finish them all, so naturally I took home the leftovers for lunch today. And that’s when the kreplach shifted my memories back to my father.

In keeping with the nostalgia moment, during lunch I turned on I love Lucy. The episodes I watched (yes, episodes; watching I Love Lucy is like eating potato chips—you can’t watch just one) conveyed the continuing story of Little Ricky getting a dog despite Lucy and Ricky’s objections and the Ricardos’ decision to move to the suburbs, to Westport, Conn.

I’ve already chronicled our father’s antipathy to the two dogs we had, each for one year (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2010/06/no-time-for-pets.html).

Around the time I joined our family in March 1949, we moved from an apartment on Tehama Street in Brooklyn to an attached two-floor row house on Avenue W in the Sheepshead Bay section. “Modest” would be a kind description of its architecture, layout and, most cuttingly, interior decoration, considering the resources available to our father and mother. Yet, I was content there. I think my brother was, as well. Our sister was not. She lobbied long and hard for a move to the suburbs, a move to Long Island. Her friend Pauline’s family moved to Woodmere, if memory serves, right after they both graduated from elementary school. It was the perfect time to transplant the family, right before she would be starting high school, Lee said. Pauline’s dad was no more successful than ours, so why couldn’t we move as well, Lee argued.

Dad had no desire to play the game of “keeping up with the Joneses” (in this case, the Lipsons). He continuously resisted our mother’s entreaties to shed his Buicks and buy a Cadillac (he did so once, then reverted back to form). He had no desire to ride the rails to his factory in downtown Manhattan, and since commuting by car from Long Island had less appeal than hearing Lee kvetch and moan, he chose to stay put, no doubt reasoning that Lee’s tenure at home was maybe four or eight years more, but a move to the suburbs was a life sentence.

So we stayed at 1810 Avenue W, building up memories that to this day can be evoked by the aroma and taste of simple foods made with love by a younger generation, and eaten, maybe, with a tear forming in the corner of an eye.