Then and still
My grandparents’ house was on 77th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. They owned the house and lived upstairs, rented the downstairs. The layout was a typical townhouse: a long series of connected rooms until it got to the bedrooms and bathroom in the back of the house. My primary memory is of my two-year old self on Sunday mornings, running back and forth through those rooms, from the front of the house to the back, listening to the radio as Ed Herlihy introduced the talent on the Horn & Hardart’s Children’s Hour. Each room had a different radio, and the different tones of the same sounds as I ran from room to room were my great weekly thrill. I ran through a universe of sound.
The sunroom overlooked the street where the trees really did grow in Brooklyn. Connected to it was a tiny room that had been my father’s room until he married. I was not allowed in there alone: fastidious to a fault, my grandmother enshrined that teeny space after Daddy married and moved out. I had to be content with the rest of the house as my domain, and I was. The Venetian blinds created dappled sunlight and the shadows that in turn created pictures in my mind. The sunroom sofa was covered in fashionable heavy silk awning stripes. I think they were coral, green and beige, though truly, I remember that time and place in muted gold tones of unspecified colors, highlighted with those beams of sun. There were pillows on the sofa in a ‘30’s banana leaf floral print.
Next came the living room. The curtains were always drawn. It was a dark, only-pass-through room, until the day I glimpsed a covered crystal candy dish, removed the lead crystal top and beheld my grandmother’s secret stash of licorice from Barracini’s. Once I discovered it, she allowed me to help myself to the soft chewy, fruit-shaped candy. I had inherited her sweet tooth and she had no problem satisfying both of our yens. That is how I learned that indulging is what grandparents like to do: I was duly and fully indulged right down to licorice fruits.
Next in the railroad car configuration of rooms was the dining room. I remember playing under the table, crawling between the chair legs during meals, looking at everyone’s shoes, discovering the varicose veins in my grandmother’s legs, receiving desserts handed under the table by my grandfather, who called me “Kahkenflasch”. This was also the room where, from the age of two, I lay on my stomach on the dark floral-patterned rug, licked the forefinger of my right hand and turned the huge pages of the Sunday New York Times.
It was my first romance.
The kitchen was large and open. On the right side was the table where Grandpa drank his morning coffee, reading the paper he had folded in quarters vertically, tapping his foot in time to the radio music. My father did the same in our apartment on Adelphi Street, where the blue kitchen radio was always tuned to big bands and jazz. I would sit on Daddy’s lap bouncing to the “A-Train” and Jan Savit. Sometimes Daddy would accompany Benny Goodman by blowing through the cardboard cylinder from an emptied roll of toilet paper. Music to my ears.
In the 77th Street kitchen there was an ice box. The ice man would haul the ice up the outside back steps, balancing it on his shoulder, stomp into the little glass paned porch, knock on the door frame and announce, “ICE!” He’d let himself in, walk over to the box, open the top lid and plunk in the huge cube. Grandma would empty the bottom tray of melted water, give him a coin, close the glass paned door behind him and wipe up where his shoes had marred her immaculate floor. Eventually, they got a refrigerator. But FIRST, they had an ice box and I remember it.
These days I live in a place I had never heard of in the 77th Street days of yore. But those early pleasures are still with me: now I listen to the radio on Saturday afternoons, rather than on Sunday mornings. I listen in my car, then in the living room, then in my home office as Garrison Keillor, not Ed Herlihy, introduces talent and talks about Lake Wobegon. Now as I listen to the different transmissions, I move more slowly through rooms of sound than had my two year old self. Yet I still feel golden and graced as my universe is filled with deep familiarity and memories of those other walls, floors and light, and filled with the faces that I’ll never see again or forget.
—Written April 20, 1996 Portland, Oregon