THE BEGINNING HISTORY OF MY MOST IMPORTANT QUOTATION…

“…A certain heathen came to Shammai and said to him, ‘Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Thereupon he repulsed him with the rod which was in his hand. When he went to Hillel, he said to him, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; all the rest of it is commentary; go and learn."

12. Judaism. Talmud, Shabbat 31a

This all started for me in a very personal way. There I was kinda bored like a kid of about 3 almost 4 or so can be. “I gots nothing to do”, I would say to my Mother, and if it was a nice day she would promptly send me outside to play. So on this particular Fall day, there I am at my Grandma and Grandpa’s Goody’s Fine Tailor Shop in Coney Island, Brooklyn New York, and I had nothing to do, so she my grandma Goody my Mother’s mother, was just about to send me outside to play...

Going outside to play on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, in 1939 was a whole different world then going outside to play in Sea Gate, where I lived with my Father and Mother, Susie and Sussie, in 1939. In Sea Gate, I could go across the street to the empty lot and hide in the tall grass, or climb up the acorn tree…I could lay on my back and watch the clouds become animals and see them change into different kinds of animals some kind of drippy all very floaty if the wind was high like it was today. I could run next door and see if Harry who was a year older then me could come out to play, or if he wasn’t home run to see if Arnie who lived right next door to Harry and was born on the same day and the same year as me (only I was a whole hour older) could. His Grandma, Mrs. Katz, might let him come out and play with me. She liked him to stay inside and tried to get me to stay there, too and sometimes I would. But mostly I wanted to be outside.

Or if I promised to look ‘both ways’ I could cross the big street at the end of the corner where my house was and walk another block and a half to Maple Avenue and find my big cousins L, and ML and see if they would play with me. If they weren’t home I would cross the street to my aunt Fannie’s and uncle Joe's house, Florie the maid would always be there if everyone else was out, and she was one of my must favorite people in the world anyway. But on this day just before Halloween I was stuck in Coney Island and if I got lucky Joey Brady would show up at the front of the tailor shop and we could go outside and play together.

He lived around the corner from the tailor shop and I was never allowed to go there on that street by myself. I could play in front of the shop, and I could walk passed the shop in both directions, in front of the bakery, and the grocery store, passed the Palumbos house and into their big and open vegetable store on that corner or past the barber shop to that other end of the sidewalk, but I couldn’t go around any of the corners by myself or go across any of the streets by myself, ever.

Joey Brady was a little older than I was and he was a tough kid. He was blond haired and had freckles way more then I had on his round face. He was Irish, and I was Jewish, and he had lots of brothers and sisters, and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters yet. But I had just been told that my Mother was going to have a little baby sister for me soon. I wanted a big brother, I mostly hated girls!

This day he was right there. He had a little toy pumpkin in his dirty hand which I bet would be sticky if he made me touch it. He had dried snot under his nose and he had a loose tooth that was kind of dangly. He would try to push his face into mine and make me look at the bloody loose thing in his mouth, uuggghhh!. He was different then Harry and Arnie and anyone else that I knew or played with. But he could talk to me and sometimes he could think up good things to do, and I mostly wasn’t supposed to play with him, and so it was fun when I could do that.

“Heeey, I had candy in this pumpkin did you ever have anything like this?!” He yelled. I didn’t. I thought maybe it was one of those Jewish-Christmas things, little Jewish kids didn’t get toys once again…I said, “Who cares!!”…He said, “My Dad brung it home and gave it to me last night, I hadda wait to eat the candy until this morning…Betcha wish you was me!” Nope, food wasn’t my thing, not even that kind of candy…Now the little toy pumpkin, it was small and you could put other little things into it…I liked toys that looked like real things. I hated things like baby dolls, which didn’t look like any real babies that I had ever seen! But this looked like a little jack o’ lantern!

I loved little things that looked like big things that were like real things. My favorite toy right then was this teeny calendar like thing that had a teensy thermometer thing on it. It looked like the temperature thing that hung outside the barber shop with the beauty shop behind it that was next door to my grandma and grandpa’s tailor shop. My grandma had her hair done there every Friday morning and I would sometimes go with her. Betty was the lady who owned that shop. She was married to Fred the Barber who had red hair and gave Arnie his haircuts which I sometimes got to go with him to watch and sometimes I would go and visit in the barber shop where he worked especially when he gave my grandpa or my uncle Lester or uncle Manny a shave. I had known all these people from when I was a baby, and they would all look after me out their shop windows when I played in front of their places and give me special treats if I came inside.

On summer nights when it was too hot to be inside, everyone on that side of Mermaid Avenue who owned a store or shop would sit outside my grandparent’s tailor shop, when I was sleeping over especially, so that my grandparents could leave the door of the shop open, and I would be supposed to be sleeping but would be listening as hard as I could to the sounds of their voices as they all talked together until it got cooler when the breeze finally started to blow in from the ocean, and then as it got cool enough they picked up their chairs and went inside to go to sleep, too. I knew when that would happen, because my grandma would come into the bedroom very quietly and climb into the bed with me. I would always sleep in her bed and she and my grandpa had separate rooms. She would snuggle close to me and put her arm around me. I would pretend that I was sleeping and listen to her breathing as she would fall asleep, and then the next thing I knew it was morning.

My grandparents would bring the wire backed chairs from the store outside and the grocer Mr. K, would bring big heavy milk cartons, and the barber would bring some wire back chairs too, and mostly the Palumbo brothers and the baker’s would “just drop by”, and everyone would hang around and talk. Mostly, about the German’s, and business, and Roosevelt, and a woman who lived across the street.

I “dassn’t talk to her”, my Grandma said, about that woman. I dassn’t even look at certain other things, too – like the dumb funny looking kids that lived around the corner across the street, and rode their trikes in the alley of their house. When they came by the shop she did what was called in English the “poo-poo-poo”, it had a sound and it looked like spitting, and it wasn’t, and only grownups like Grandma’s and their sisters and friends were allowed to do it. Kids weren’t supposed to spit.

I wasn’t allowed to look at anything that could harm me with something called the “you shouldn’t know from it”… If she were close by, my Grandma, would pull me into her body shielding my eyes with her hand so as not to let me see or be seen. I knew that she thought that she was protecting me but it felt funny anyway. It wasn’t anything that anyone else but she would do anyway…

Across the street there were no stores. There were just 2 family houses that were in a row and some shade trees. Right across the street from that on the barber shop side was P.S. 188, where I would soon go to school. The tailor shop was a natural parking place for my Mother, to drop me off for her mother to take care of between home, which was “in the Gate”, which was only about 3 blocks away from that part of Coney Island. Later on when I went to school, it was easy for me to walk to my grandparent’s shop and wait for her or my father to pick me up and take me home later.

My mother had a very busy social life with her friends most of whom didn’t have children or had just one kid who was about my age and was supposed to be my friend when our mommies were together. One of my mommy’s best friends was also my Aunt Evelyn on my father’s side, who was my Cousin Diane’s mommy who was just a year younger then me but that’s another story.

It was just around Halloween time and I knew all about witches and ghosts and something called goblins which didn’t really seem to count. I knew about this mostly because my big cousin’s or my friends Harry and Arnie’s older brother or sister told us about it in scary voices. But it was the witches that were the most important of all because they were around you for real sometimes. Sometimes my grandma and her friends would talk in quiet voices heads close together about witches, poo-poo-poo!

I was scared about ghosts; there was a haunted house across the street from my house in Sea Gate, and the dark basement of the house that I lived in was a place where we would have secret meetings just of our Laurel Avenue gang and it was our special place because there were supposed to be ghosts down there, too. Daniel the big boy who played with us was the gang leader. He was the big boy who was my baby sitter and was the landlady’s son. I had no idea what a goblin looked like but I knew it made me feel real scary, and I was on the lookout for witches because that was another thing that my grandma knew about that she said “I dassn’t look at either!”

Joey and I watched from the sidewalk as the rag man come by down Mermaid Avenue on his funny looking wagon with the half dead horse dragging it and the bells around his head calling, “I buy rags, rags for sale”…and we ran down the sidewalk yelling at him, “Rag picker, rag picker”, and he shook his fist at us and yelled, “Just you wait!”

Right after he said that the sun went behind a cloud, the fog started to come in from the ocean and the wind picked up, and it felt very chilly; and then this very old woman wearing all black in a cape that came down to the sidewalk leaning over a cane came hunching down the street right in front of me and Joey!

He started it I think, “Witch, witch, fly away home”, and we chased behind her yelling that together and laughing and hollering, and she sorta dragged herself more quickly in front of us, and as she got to the end of the street on the barber shops side she turned around and looked at me. Her face was very, very old, and full of wrinkles, and she did, (she did) have a wart on her chin, and her eyes were stormy, and she looked straight into my eyes. Then she went around the forbidden corner, and my grandma called me to come inside for supper, and Joey ran on home. (To be continued)…