Читать книгу A Hill of Beans - Joyce Putnam Eblen - Страница 3

THE LIE: "You were trouble from the very day you were born."

THE TRUTH: " … You created my inmost being;

You knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

Your works are wonderful,

I know that full well." Psalm 139: 13-14

Just as many babies do, I arrived in the middle of the night. The way my mother told the story, I came into the world at the most inconvenient time possible—during a terrible blizzard when the streets were covered with snow and ice. That's to be expected in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in late February. It could hardly be seen as my fault. Yet somehow, it was.

My mother often told me how my father returned home from the hospital after my birth and could only manage the raging wind and thick coat of ice on the front stoop by getting down on his hands and knees to crawl into the house. Of course, one of the neighbors saw this and immediately spread the story around town that my father had come home so drunk from the local tap room (bar) that he couldn't even get up the front step. I had ruined my family's reputation before I even got home from the hospital!

From the beginning, I was the "different" one. "We don't know how you got into this family," Mother would say. "You're not anything like the rest of the family." Everyone else in my immediate family was far-sighted. I would turn out to be near-sighted. It was just the first of many signs that I didn't really belong.

Another early theme of my childhood was a sense of constant confinement. In fact, my earliest memory is of sitting in my high chair, wanting to get out. I was old enough to sit up well, but not yet talking. Trapped behind that aluminum tray and unable to move very much, I amused myself with looking at my reflection in the tray. I can still remember what I looked like as I gazed at myself, fascinated by my ability to change the image as I alternately smiled and frowned.

My first home was a row house on George Street in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Although my brother often said that Norristown is a good place to be from, I have mostly good memories of my years on George Street. We lived next door to an eccentric, but kindly old gentleman whom I knew only as Mr. Hallman. Mr. Hallman always seemed to enjoy spending time with me, telling me stories and showing me all the interesting objets d'art in his house. When he died, he left my parents some very nice pieces of furniture. Among them was a beautiful bookcase with glass windows and numerous hidden drawers. According to family lore, Mr. Hallman had told my parents that inside many of those drawers was money that he had put aside for our family. Of course, by the time the bookshelf actually came to us, there was no money to be found. My father was sure that someone had found out about the money and taken it before he could get the furniture. I, for one, have never been sure that there was ever any money in those hidden drawers. Mr. Hallman was always full of good stories (many of them apocryphal) and this may have been one of them. No matter, the windfall that was supposed to come to our family never materialized. My father talked about it for years. To him, this was the way things always worked out. Our family never had any money and we never would!

The 1950s were the heyday for small towns like Norristown. There was the Norris Theatre, where children could see two or three cartoons, the current newsreel, and the feature film as many times as they showed it that day—all for one price! I could walk with my mother to the local five-and-dime store, Spillane's, just a few blocks away on Marshall Street.

When the family needed to do some serious shopping, we headed "downtown" to Main Street.

As far as I was concerned, Main Street in Norristown was the center of the universe. One of my grandmothers bought everything she needed at Friedman's New York Store. (That was its name, even though it was located in Norristown. Nobody ever referred to it simply as Friedman's. Everybody always used the full name, Friedman's New York Store.) My father and brother got their good clothes from Gilbert's Men's Store. There was a Woolworth's, complete with a lunch counter serving comfort food all through the day. My personal favorite, however, was Chatlin's, one of those wonderful old time department stores which carried everything from clothing, jewelry, accessories, shoes and toys as well as scout uniforms and supplies. I loved walking on the old creaking floor boards and can still remember that distinctive smell of freshly-oiled hardwood floors of Chatlin's Department Store.

Although the shopping was good, the best part of growing up in Norristown was the food. The entire Philadelphia area is a treasure trove of good eating and Norristown was no exception.

This was long before strict food labeling and health-conscious choices became standard fare. Our only concern back in those days was taste, and judged only by that criterion, Norristown led the world! My personal favorite was the "zep"—short for zeppelin—a sandwich resembling that dirigible airship commonly known as a blimp. Zeps are known by many other names: hoagies, grinders, hero or sub sandwiches. They contain a variety of ingredients such as meats, cheese, tomatoes, pickles, olives, onions, etc. They come in a long, oval-shaped bun. Back then, one could get a zep at any deli, lunch counter, or family restaurant in Norristown, but I remember one place in particular where we usually got ours. That was Borzillo's on Main Street. Borzillo's was a well-known Italian bakery which had absolutely heavenly bread. I have ordered hoagies from many other places since then, but I have never found any even approaching those delicious ones we used to pick up from Borzillo's. There were also delicious smells always emanating from the Wonder Bread Bakery off of Main Street. It was a treat just to drive by it.

Best of all the Norristown family restaurant options were its diners. My family frequented two during my early childhood years. Most of the time we went to the Gateway Diner in nearby Jeffersonville. The Gateway Diner was commonly called Joe's, because of its owner, Joe Gulyas. I always ordered the same dinner, chicken croquettes with mashed potatoes. The chicken croquettes came in the form of two little mountains beside a valley of mashed potatoes with a lake of tasty gravy in the middle. (Even as a small child, I saw my platter of food at the diner as the setting of a story. As my mother would often say, I had a vivid imagination.)

The other diner we patronized was Danny's in Bridgeport. Danny's was special because it was located on the water. As a child, I thought that eating at a table overlooking the water at Danny's Diner was just like being in paradise. To me, that was the most gorgeous view ever. Years later, returning to the area as a jaded adult, I wondered whatever I could have been thinking. The beautiful waterfront view was just a dirty little creek. Nevertheless, the memory lives on.

The diners of the fifties had one other attraction besides great food. At every table there was a jukebox. One could put in a nickel and play one of the latest popular songs. One could hear "Volare" or "Rock Around the Clock". Jukeboxes always had the latest songs by Perry Como, Dean Martin, or Bobby Darin. That kind of music was not played in my home. I was never allowed to actually put a nickel in the jukebox to play a favorite song, but other patrons usually played enough songs that we always had plenty of music to eat by.

I remember how thrilled I was when my parents gave me the gift of my own little 45rpm record player. I could stack up my little pile of records, place them on the spindle and play my favorite songs one after another. Records I played over and over again were "How much is that Doggie in the Window?" and "Mr. Sandman". (Years later, when I was in my early 60's, "Mr. Sandman" became a hit all over again and was routinely played in my Jazzercise® class. Most of the women in the class were younger than I was and were amazed that I knew this song. I told them that originally it had been done by another group and I had played that record over and over again on my record player. They had no idea what I was talking about.)

I was glad to have that little record player because I spent most of my early childhood indoors and alone. Confinement was the key word of those years. Much of this was simply due to the weather. Norristown was simply cold and rainy from October through May, with an occasional blizzard thrown in for good measure anytime from November through April.

The other reason that I was kept indoors and alone was "to keep me out of trouble," as my mother phrased it. George Street, in my parents' eyes, was populated by unusual amount of assorted zanies, of whom dear old Mr. Hallman was the least dangerous. The iron fence around the backyard was another means of protecting us from the outside world. It was probably originally intended for decorative purposes, but I saw it only as a huge, forbidding structure meant to keep me imprisoned forever. (There's that vivid imagination again.) I longed to get over that fence and be free. Freedom, not climbing, was the goal. I was not one of those children who had the urge to climb everything in sight. (My husband and I later had one of those children and I immediately could tell the difference between him and me.) I was about four years old and had had one experience of climbing which ended in success. I remember my older brother teaching me how to climb out of my crib. I remember doing it, but not much else. The only consequence for me was getting my own bed. I don't know what consequences, if any, my brother got.

The iron fence, however, was a different matter. I never tried to get over it. I believe that it had a latch on it that enabled adults to come and go at will. Presumably, my parents had told my brother not to teach me how to get out of the backyard, if indeed he knew how to himself. But a girl from the neighborhood, whose face and name I no longer remember, somehow found a way to beat the fence. One afternoon, she enticed me to break out of my backyard and accompany her to a local drugstore to buy an ice cream soda. Apparently she was about my age and not yet able to read because we wound up at a nearby beauty shop. When we walked in and said we wanted two ice cream sodas, the perfect crime quickly unraveled. Not to mention the fact that neither one of us had any idea of how to pay for these treats had we managed to find the right establishment. Of course, the women in the beauty shop recognized us and immediately contacted the proper local authorities—our mothers. We were picked up and returned to "prison" (our homes) immediately.

I do remember thinking that my mother did not seem all that glad to find me. Even though we had been gone quite a while, there were no cries of joy, no warm hugs, and no words telling me how worried she had been and how glad she was to find me. She may have thought that this was a ploy on my part to get some attention and that the best way to deal with it was to show complete nonchalance. The modus operandi of that era was never to show one's true feelings in public and never was that more applicable than in the case of adults in front of their children. In any event, this first great foray into the world beyond my backyard fence was to be the last in that neighborhood. We were about to move from George Street and on to new adventures.