Memories anchored in life’s sea changes
By Alan Lupo
Saturday, August 12, 2006
news.bostonherald.com
The sun splays light across the Atlantic. It is still early enough in the day so that an old guy hanging out at the wall on Winthrop’s Shore Drive is not, uh, distracted by bikini babes.
The familiarity of the landscape is comforting rather than boring. The streets and houses behind you are not that radically different from what they were when you played ball and outlaws in the 1940s and hung around for much of the 1950s.
What changes not at all, of course, is the water. The ebb and flow of tides endure through the millennia. Its rhythm soothes the soul and prompts the mind to recall the details of growing up in urban America by the shore.
There was Bill Brown, for example, he of the perpetual tan and the mighty handshake. He was Dad’s uncle, married to Jenny Krupnick, sister to Dad’s mother. They lived in a duplex off Shore Drive, around the corner from an apartment where Dad’s mother spent her last years, four streets away from your own apartment and 11 streets away from Dad’s twin brother and his family.
Neighborhood, you see, was more than neighbors, be they friends or enemies. It was also family, which meant that even as a kid, you had roots in a community founded long ago by people who bore no resemblance to the ethnic groups that followed.
Bill Brown had come from the Jewish community of England; Jenny, from the ghettoes of Belarus, where too many people stayed too long and never survived the Holocaust.
Bill was a World War I vet, a big guy, and like so many his size, never bullied. He was a gregarious fellow with a canyon-grin and a booming laugh. When young, Bill could swim from Winthrop to Nahant and back. That’s a lot of swimming, you remind yourself as you shade your eyes from the sun and look across the water to Nahant.
One teenage day, as you were walking home, you spotted Bill and Jenny on their porch. You dropped by to say hello, and Jenny, in a Yiddish accent, said, “So, I hear you’re seeing someone.”
It was one of those rare occasions when you were able to get a date, and, indeed, you and the young woman had dated maybe twice. She wasn’t even from your community, but there was Jenny, out of Belarus, already informed of your social life.
In those days, you and your pals used to call this phenomenon, “Jewish radar.” Somehow, some way, immigrants, their offspring and even your crowd could spot a landsman half a football field in the distance. More to the point, somehow, the older people got news of your business faster than the Western Union could send telegraphs.
You shrugged, acknowledged the reality of a couple of dates and head back to the apartment for supper. “Dinner” was for rich people.
Now, a half-century later, you sport a simpy, sentimental smile as you recall those times and those people. When you are young, you generally have neither the instinct nor the ability to tell such people how much they mean to you.
Too often, it’s only when it’s too late, and you are close to their age when you knew them, and you are staring across the water to a place where one of them, then younger than you are now, challenged the ebb and flow of the waters and won.
Talk back to Alan Lupo at alupo@comcast.net |
