Major League Baseball 1
In 1952 we moved into the first and only house my parents owned. It was in Bath Beach, near Gravesend Bay, Fort Hamilton, and the Belt Parkway. The sounds of the highway and the sounds of the sea were indistinguishable.
Bath Beach is a sort of subdivision of Bensonhurst. There must have been a beach there once, but it had been developed. The houses were postwar, mainly brick row houses, some single or two family, some “garden apartments.” Similar houses made Donald Trump’s father rich.
Our house was separated from the neighbors’ by thin walls. In front, a purposeless lawn and some shrubs, in back, a tiny yard. A cinder block garage opened onto a private alley that cut through the middle of the whole block.
A rhododendron, an azalea, a forsythia, an evergreen—hemlock, I think—and a pink and orange rose with a brisk brewed scent. Before my father, like nearly all of our neighbors, had it cemented over, the backyard had other roses and a tiny crabapple, beneath which I buried my dead Angel fish.
Our living room seemed bigger than it was because the previous owners had installed a large mirror on one wall. There were two rooms in the basement, a laundry room and small bathroom in the rear and a large room in front with green and brown tiles in a shuffleboard pattern. Walls were yellowish knotty pine. There were acoustic tiles and a couple of buzzing fluorescent light fixtures on the low ceiling.
Independence Avenue is short. Before its latest incarnation it had been Warehouse Avenue. It wasn’t completely developed however. When we got there—on February 29, Leap Year Day, which is why I remember it—there was an empty lot a couple of houses away. To me, it seemed bigger and wilder than it actually was. Playing there by myself one day, I snuck up behind a praying mantis, which suddenly swiveled its triangular head and bit my finger.
A dog, a collie with dirty long hair, went on its rounds, unleashed.
We moved there, I think, because friends of my father’s lived one street over. Fritzi and Milton and him had emigrated from Banila Rus in Bukovina. Unlike my politically moderate father, Milton was a communist, and had returned to Europe when, to him, the revolution still seemed viable. Ultimately, he settled in Brooklyn, worked as a furrier, and owned a mandolin that fascinated me.
There were few Jewish families in the predominantly Italian neighborhood. Nevertheless, there were a couple of synagogues and, among automobile showrooms and repair shops on 18th Avenue, a ritual poultry slaughterhouse. The man who slaughtered the chickens (I don’t know the technical term for such a person) seemed plucked unaltered from the shtetl. I saw necks severed, blood running, smelled raw chicken smell.
Bordering 18th Avenue, between Bath and Benson, there was a tiny, totally self-contained black enclave, half a dozen square blocks or so. Only decades later did I learn that it was one of the small communities established in northern cities in the nineteenth century by freed slaves.
The single token of continuity linking our old neighborhood—only a couple of miles away at the edge of Borough Park—with our new one was Ted, the Good Humor Man. Ted was a school teacher. Being a Good Humor Man was his summer job. A major recurring event from my earlier life was watching Ted buy a quart glass bottle of milk at the Kelber’s grocery store across the street from our apartment, then draining it in a single gulp. Ted was a Unitarian, which doesn’t adequately explain it.
Bath Beach is a sort of subdivision of Bensonhurst. There must have been a beach there once, but it had been developed. The houses were postwar, mainly brick row houses, some single or two family, some “garden apartments.” Similar houses made Donald Trump’s father rich.
Our house was separated from the neighbors’ by thin walls. In front, a purposeless lawn and some shrubs, in back, a tiny yard. A cinder block garage opened onto a private alley that cut through the middle of the whole block.
A rhododendron, an azalea, a forsythia, an evergreen—hemlock, I think—and a pink and orange rose with a brisk brewed scent. Before my father, like nearly all of our neighbors, had it cemented over, the backyard had other roses and a tiny crabapple, beneath which I buried my dead Angel fish.
Our living room seemed bigger than it was because the previous owners had installed a large mirror on one wall. There were two rooms in the basement, a laundry room and small bathroom in the rear and a large room in front with green and brown tiles in a shuffleboard pattern. Walls were yellowish knotty pine. There were acoustic tiles and a couple of buzzing fluorescent light fixtures on the low ceiling.
Independence Avenue is short. Before its latest incarnation it had been Warehouse Avenue. It wasn’t completely developed however. When we got there—on February 29, Leap Year Day, which is why I remember it—there was an empty lot a couple of houses away. To me, it seemed bigger and wilder than it actually was. Playing there by myself one day, I snuck up behind a praying mantis, which suddenly swiveled its triangular head and bit my finger.
A dog, a collie with dirty long hair, went on its rounds, unleashed.
We moved there, I think, because friends of my father’s lived one street over. Fritzi and Milton and him had emigrated from Banila Rus in Bukovina. Unlike my politically moderate father, Milton was a communist, and had returned to Europe when, to him, the revolution still seemed viable. Ultimately, he settled in Brooklyn, worked as a furrier, and owned a mandolin that fascinated me.
There were few Jewish families in the predominantly Italian neighborhood. Nevertheless, there were a couple of synagogues and, among automobile showrooms and repair shops on 18th Avenue, a ritual poultry slaughterhouse. The man who slaughtered the chickens (I don’t know the technical term for such a person) seemed plucked unaltered from the shtetl. I saw necks severed, blood running, smelled raw chicken smell.
Bordering 18th Avenue, between Bath and Benson, there was a tiny, totally self-contained black enclave, half a dozen square blocks or so. Only decades later did I learn that it was one of the small communities established in northern cities in the nineteenth century by freed slaves.
The single token of continuity linking our old neighborhood—only a couple of miles away at the edge of Borough Park—with our new one was Ted, the Good Humor Man. Ted was a school teacher. Being a Good Humor Man was his summer job. A major recurring event from my earlier life was watching Ted buy a quart glass bottle of milk at the Kelber’s grocery store across the street from our apartment, then draining it in a single gulp. Ted was a Unitarian, which doesn’t adequately explain it.
posted by Joel at 12:31 PM
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