Reprint: "Shopping for Memories"

(Memory brought back by hunting up stationery items today.)

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve taking the bus downtown. We’d do it at least once during Christmas, winter, and Easter vacation, and at least twice during the summer, and it was always something to look forward to, despite declining fortunes (as a cynical teenager I used to refer to taking “the bus UP Cranston Street to watch the neighborhood run DOWN”). In the early sixties there was a chirpy radio jingle about Providence being “Southern New England’s largest shopping center”; by the late seventies “downcity” looked like a once proud dowager gone to seed.

These excursions always started the same way; we’d be up to have breakfast with Dad, who rose at six and left the house by twenty past, after gulping a homemade eggnog and hot coffee. I drag myself out of bed at six these days, but on those downtown days was dressed, washed, and into the kitchen in a flash. I usually had an eggnog, too (it was the only way I would eat eggs willingly), for breakfast on other mornings, but not on these. We would hustle to get dressed, make the bed (heaven forbid we left the house without making the bed!), and walked the three blocks past Berkeley, Doane, and Clarendon Streets, on the corner of the last which was Tom's Superette, crossed the WPA-era concrete railroad bridge past the junkyard, walked past Harold Crook’s garage, the Hideaway Inn, and Cleary’s Dry Goods to wait for the bus on Cranston Street. On winter mornings the bus was invariably late and you’d stand there stamping your feet and sticking gloved hands deep in the pockets of your winter coat, the wind always finding a way down your coat collar despite a scarf. Later we had a bus stop across the street, and if we didn’t hustle we had to make the walk. This is how I learned to make a bed, complete with tucked sheets and rolled pillows, with no wrinkles under the spread, in 2 minutes and 14 seconds!

The bus chugged its way into Providence with many starts and stops, past the looming dirty brick walls of the old trolley barn on one side and the Narragansett Brewery on the other (trolley barns seem to have proliferated in Cranston; the Taco company was also located in an old trolley barn and my dad remembered another on Webster Avenue); under the overpass which was Route 10, through an old neighborhood of peeling triple-deckers and beer-sign dotted taps with their round brick windows, and the only A&P nearby; past the crenellated, fantasy-inspiring structure of the Cranston Armory and the sprawl of Central High School where Mom had gone back in the 1930s; and finally taking a sharp left at the Saints Peter and Paul Auditorium (I still recall a heart-stopping hard left there when they were building the auditorium, riding on a school bus going to the annual Rhode Island Philharmonic concert for the schoolchildren, where we were all certain we were going to be tossed into the maw of the building excavation), before trundling into downtown and getting off at Weybosset Street.

We hadn’t eaten breakfast because we were going to confession at St. Francis Chapel, then in an old brick building owned by Johnson & Wales business school. I preferred confession at St. Francis because they still let you do it the old way, where you said “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” rather than the new way we had learned in Catechism class where the priests asked you questions. We didn’t usually stay for the 7 a.m. Mass, but it was comfortable when we did, only a half-hour service in the small chapel downstairs, the air pleasant with the scents of incense and candles (in the winter wet wool coats and mothballs tended to be added to the mixture), older people who attended Mass daily around you, murmuring silently to themselves as they knelt with deeply bowed heads under kerchiefs or trilbys as they fingered beads while saying their Rosary.

Now that the solemn part of the day was over, we were free to have a rare treat: breakfast out. Today when I eat out each weekend it is hard to remember how very special this really was. Dad worked in a factory; later Mom went back to work, also in a factory—there wasn’t much money for dinners out. Big formal dinners at a restaurant where you dressed up in Sunday clothes, the kind with white tablecloths, wine glasses, and cloth napkins, were confined to holidays: Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, Mom’s birthday. Occasionally on a Sunday we might grab a hot dog from a truck at the beach, get a burger at Burger Chef or go to Aunt Carrie’s or Rocky Point for clam cakes, or Gus’s at Oakland Beach for doughboys, but this was chiefly confined to summer. (Later Mom tired of lingering fish scent and she and my dad started getting fish sandwiches at McDonald’s on Friday. I despised fish, especially battered and fried, and would either have “rice and gravy”—white rice with Mom’s tomato sauce on it—or pork fried rice from Empress of China.)

But our special downtown breakfasts were always at the Crown Coffee Shop, in the lobby of the Crown Hotel. The waitresses wore little white caps and starched white aprons, and I had toast with real butter instead of the margarine at home. The seats were revolving stools which Mom would have to admonish me to stop spinning on. We’d be among mostly businessmen having a coffee and some eggs and toast before going to work, and professional women with their alligator purses and high heels. In the wintertime all would be hunched in woven overcoats, the ladies with fur collars, everyone with some sort of a hat. You might even see someone in a mink collar or a fox stole.

Breakfast was almost too leisurely, since we had to wait for the Outlet Company to open; they were the first store available, at 8:45 on the button, not a minute earlier, to my chagrin. If it wasn’t cold, we would go stand at the brass-and-glass doors with the other early shoppers, and I would press my nose on the glass like a kid in a candy store.

Once in the store I’d make a beeline to the book department while Mom did her shopping. Mom did something that would horrify parents today: she left me alone, at first in the toy department, then when I got older and had no interest in toys, in the book department, of department stores. I was not to move out of that department, nor talk to strangers, nor go anyplace with anyone unless it was a policeman. I didn’t move and didn’t talk, and it suited me just fine. I despised tagging after Mom as she shopped for clothes or shoes; I despised shopping for clothes and shoes for myself, even as a teenager, and did it only under duress—watching someone shopping for clothes or shoes was even more coma-inducing. Better in the book department at the Outlet, which was on the first floor next to the café, running caressing hands over hardback books we couldn’t afford, or spending three weeks squirreled allowance on a Get Smart book.

We had a regular route worked out. From the Outlet we would go to the Paperback Book store across the street. I can close my eyes and see the store exactly as it was—like Ebenezer Scrooge in the town he went to school in, I could “walk it blindfolded”—dark brown shelves tall enough to be over my reach, posters of everything from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to psychedelic Peter Max rainbows and glowing unicorns papering the ceiling end-to-end, books being sunned in the display window, the clerk in an elevated booth on the left, the mystery books in the far back right corner and the media-based books to the left under the clerk’s nose, the scent of bookprint everywhere. It was there I saw my first fanzine, out for sale with the regular books; it was pretty obvious the clerk was fannish.

We might stop at Read-All, a narrow bookstore/card shop , or later at Strawberries, the record store, on Union Street on the way to Westminster Street, which, during most of my teenage years, was a no-traffic mall area, and here there were riches indeed. Until it closed in 1968, my favorite venue there was J.J. Newberry. The main level had a coffee shop, sundries, and stationery, and there was an upper level with clothes, but I made a beeline for the basement: toyland, children’s books, and hardware. Newberry’s main appeal was the Whitman books, cheap (29 cents in the 1960s) hardbacks with glossy covers that were either classic children’s books like Heidi, Call of the Wild, Little Women, etc. , serial books like Donna Parker, Ginny Gordon, the Timber Trail Riders, Trixie Belden, and more, or media-based tie-ins. All my Lassie books came from Newberry’s. (It was not the eldest of the “dime stores” downtown: a very shadowy, almost sepia recollection of the downtown Kresges, which closed when I was small, remains: a dim interior, with the old-fashioned wood-and-glass display cases and the shelves upon shelves behind the counters. If you wanted to see something, you asked the salesperson to get it down for you. The “toy department” was a collection of windup tin painted toys and rigid dolls and teddy bears.)

Two other “five and tens” were on Westminster Street, Woolworth and W.T. Grant. Woolworth I can remember as if it were yesterday, as it was the first thing I saw after walking down the stairs of the Alice Building wearing my new glasses at age nine. I looked at the classic brilliant red sign and exclaimed to my mother “Mommy, I didn’t know the world was so bright!” (I had been living in a watercolor nearsighted haze for some years and didn’t realize it, until my best friend spilled the beans: “Linda can’t read the blackboard at school!”) Woolworth’s was a sensory experience at any time of year—the scent of coffee and tuna sandwiches from the lunch counter at left, the wonderful odor of fresh popcorn, the bright candy in bins right up front, the shrill chirping of the parakeets from the rear of the store, bright seasonal geegaws from sand pails and plastic sunglasses to Easter baskets and stuffed rabbits to Hallowe’en pumpkins and noisemakers—but came into glory at Christmas with tinsel swags, ornament boxes, candy canes and multicolor “Christmas candy,” peppermint scent and sample perfumes, inexpensive toys, tissue-paper honeycomb bells, and Christmas carols playing in the background. Each of the five and tens at Christmas, especially Grant’s, had bins in the seasonal area where you could pick out individual figures for your nativity set: start with a base of the Holy Family, add the ox and the ass, some shepherds, the Three Kings, and then more figures: sheep, others offering gifts, the shepherd boy, the camels, the camel driver, a sheepdog…the possibilities and arrangements were endless.

At Grant’s, another lunch counter—all the stores had them at this time—and cosmetics, cream rinses, hair dye, toiletries, first aid. They had the best price on Crayola crayons, and each year I bought myself a fresh box with the distinctive Crayola odor paired with a Woolworth’s blank calendar pad to make and illustrate my own calendar for the year.

Westminster Street held more boring stores that I was obliged to tag into occasionally (clothing stores, of course)—Gladdings, Peerless, Cherry and Webb, Kennedys when dad needed a shirt—but there was one place I was never reluctant to go: Shepards. The big Shepard’s clock on Westminster Street was a meeting place to many, and Mom went to Shepards when she couldn’t find it anywhere else, a “dressy dress” for a wedding, pretty lingerie, stockings, a new purse, whatnot. Their book department was a nook on the first floor where I could peruse all the Marguerite Henry hardbacks to my heart’s content, wishing we could afford them, while I waited for Mom.

Invariably we would need to make a “pit stop,” and we did that in Shepard’s, for they had, not a tiny rest room perpetually out of toilet paper with stalls puddled with water, but a big ladies’ room that must have been something spectacular when the store was built, and was still impressive, especially to a kid from a tiny house in the suburbs. It even had an attendant. The dividing walls were made of glass bricks, and there were long counters with mirrors behind them where you could put your shopping bags down and fix your hair instead of at the sinks where you would get everything wet. People still “dressed up” to go downtown back then and you might even find older ladies adjusting fur stoles and replacing hatpins in big picture hats that you only saw in old magazines, checking their stocking seams.

We might go into Richleys, the little card shop that also sold gift items and small stuffed animals, or Pier Linen, where Mom coveted the cut crystal but never bought any, or Garr’s Fabrics. Garr’s was another place that had not changed in years; the walls were hung with satin drapery and formally dressed women helped you select thread and cut cloth for you. At Christmas I would go to Garr’s to buy ribbons as gifts for my stuffed animals.

One of my too-brief discoveries was a bookstore called Dana’s, which was very close to one of my other favorite stores, E.L. Freeman’s, the stationery shop. I used to wander Freeman’s in a happy daze, imagining all the stories that could be written on their different composition books, and I bought my diary, a red date-book, there every year. Dana’s was a basement shop quartered in the 1920s (or earlier) Wilcox Building with the lovely smoke-smutched white cornices and façade of that era. Once inside, the store smelled delightfully of old books. These were not simply old paperbacks as you would find in a used bookstore now, but vintage books, many of them dating back to the 19th century. These books were always fascinating, with their small size, colorful leather covers, and inlaid, curving fonts in gold. There was one corner where all of Lucy Fitch Perkins’ “Twins” books were lined up in a row; also glimpsed were bound issues of St. Nicholas and other children’s magazines. Alas, not a year after I discovered it, a fire in the top story of the Wilcox Building ruined Paradise. The books were untouched by fire, but the water and smoke ruined them. Soon after the blaze I stood at the iron railing at the sidewalk level, looking down into the bleak, locked, dark bookstore where the books lay smeared across the floor of the shop. I could never walk by there for years afterwards without wanting to cry.

One occasional treat, at least until 1970, would be a movie. There were still four movie theatres downtown during my elementary years, the big Lowes State which got the blockbuster films like Lawrence of Arabia and Cleopatra, the Strand which showed more controversial flicks like Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the RKO Albee which had things like Jerry Lewis movies, Westerns, comedies, and my favorite of all, the Majestic, which showed all the Disney films. The Majestic was a big white marble-like building that had started life as a vaudeville theatre; it still had the bathrooms downstairs as in a stage theatre, with a small box office and vending machines replacing most of the once-large lobby, but popcorn and candy was still available at a small stand, and you went through curtained arches to get to velvet-plush seats. A big red curtain opened just as the movie started, giving the old blue Disney “Buena Vista” logo a rippling, purplish cast. I saw Mary Poppins there, and Old Yeller, and Three Lives of Thomasina, and other wonderful Disney classics. Eventually the Loews became the Providence Performing Arts Center, the Strand turned into a “dirty movie” house and then died, the Albee became a parking lot; only the Majestic survives as the Trinity Repertory Theatre playhouse.

The final stop involved going past the Planters Peanut shop. I have forgotten in what small corner of what side street it was in, but all you had to do to find it was take a big sniff, as the roasting peanuts—yes, they did it right in the store!—could be smelled for blocks and led you directly there. Mom always bought peanut clusters for Dad and herself; I preferred my peanuts directly from the shell.

We would wait for the bus on the corner of Washington and Mathewson Streets, where my godfather Armand Azzoli had his shoe shop. This was a long, narrow store quite typical of the shoe stores of the time, smelling of fresh leather and shoe polish, a cozy place especially on a winter day, with a small room at the back where Armand could have his lunch or use the facilities. Tall ashtray stands were at either end of the leather seats with metal arms, since smoking was still popular in those days, and the shoeboxes went on shelves all the way to the ceiling. We’d go in to say hi, and sometimes to have Armand put taps on the heels of my shoes, since I tended to turn my ankle and wear them down on the sides. If it were very cold. Mom would stay inside, and I'd stand at the door craning my neck at the buses lining up outside.

I remember that we always crossed fingers for a certain bus. Before they instituted the Arlington #31 bus that went directly past our house, there were three buses, 31-A, -B, and –C, Oaklawn/Old Spring, one I’ve forgotten, and the Meshanicut bus. We would try to catch the 31-C Meshanicut bus because occasionally, instead of making the sharp right turn onto Cranston Street toward Dyer Avenue when it reached Gansett Avenue, it would go straight up Gansett instead and we could ask the driver to stop at Appleton Street. I think the direction had to do with the time of day, but we never figured it out. If it turned the corner, we just got out at the bus stop near DePrete’s hardware and trudged back the way we came. We were hungry and footsore—but it had been a glorious day nonetheless.

"I Say It's Spinach..."

Otherwise known as "the Mom story" and always worth repeating at this time of year.

I don't think I fall into the "picky eater" category, but I do have a list of foods I don't like. Cooked green vegetables are at the top. I'll eat salad veggies any day, but boil those suckers and turn 'em limp and you insult my digestion.

In any case, I tell people I was the only kid in school who hated weekends. Religiously obeying my pediatrician, Mom fed me the three foods I hated most in the world on Friday and Saturday (always those days because my dad loved routine and we ate the same kind of food on the same day of the week all the time).

Friday night was fish. Now, I'm not totally adverse to fish. Shellfish make me swoon. Crab I'll eat until I'm stuffed. I love steamers, clam chowder, scallops broiled in butter, shrimp scampi, the rare bit of lobster (I was 54 before I ate my first lobster roll—that stuff is just too expensive!), and tuna fish. I've even been known to eat a few bites of salmon steak if it's been cooked nicely and has a fruity sauce upon it to kill the fish taste. But I hate your run-of-the-mill freshwater and especially saltwater fish. Mom bought what she could afford at the little cinderblock fish market once on Park Avenue, and this usually ended up being haddock or halibut. Worse, the only way my parents would eat fish was breaded and fried. I hate foods with coatings, whether it's battered or bread crumbed: fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried appetizers, etc. When I eat a food, I want to taste the food, not this noxious grainy coating that too often has that even more noxious condiment, pepper, in it. (The one exception to this rule is onion rings.)

I'd sit there on Friday nights and try to pick the middle out of the breaded fish, but Mom had always breaded 'em too well. The bread crumbs were well mixed into the flaky fish flesh and I'd end up disgustedly digesting fishy flesh and flaky fried bits.

Saturday afternoon was scrambled eggs. Remember, this was the 1960s, back in the days when no one worried about cholesterol and eggs were "good for you." You were supposed to eat one or two every day.

As far as I'm concerned, eggs belong in cake batters. Mom got around this dislike by having me drink an eggnog every morning. This was also back in the days when no one made a fuss about salmonella in chicken eggs—we got our eggs fresh from Stamps Farm out on Scituate Avenue, where you could hear the chickens from where you stood buying the eggs—and she could make me a real eggnog, not those gloppy, thick, oversweetened concoctions that show up in cans and bottles before Christmas. She beat one egg, one cup of whole milk, and a teaspoon of sugar, and I drank the delicious beverage without a quibble. On frigid winter mornings when the thermometer barely rose to double digits, totally supported by the same pediatrician mentioned earlier, she would put a tablespoonful of brandy into it—can you imagine a doctor recommending this today for an elementary school kid? My pediatrician did; in fact when Mom told him about the brandy and the amount, he teased her: "Cheapskate!"

Now, granted, if you have to eat an egg, scrambled is the way to go. But even that she got down me only forkful by desperate forkful for Saturday lunch.

Saturday supper was the worst. If the spinach I had to eat wasn't bad enough, she cooked it Italian style. This mean you sauteed the wretched stuff in olive oil until it was limp and saturated with this greasy warm coating. Even with the oil poured off it was slimy and nasty. But this was the way she had been brought up to cook spinach and the way my dad enjoyed it.

(Many years later I figured it might have been the oil that I hated, not the spinach, so one day when a salad bar was offering spinach salad, I gave it a try. No dice. As far as I'm concerned, the taste of spinach is as bad as sucking on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.)

Anyway, I ate this wretched concoction for years, through three schools, several best friends, three presidencies, hippies, Vietnam, changing mores on TV, bellbottom pants, the maxi skirt, the decline of Downtown Providence—you get the idea. (Cue nostalgic film montage...)

One Saturday evening when I had just turned seventeen I was sitting at the table. Mom had just started to get the utensils out for dinner and I was considering setting the table; it was a little early but I might as well get it over with. And we were talking.

She took out the smallest, tiniest saucepan she used for the spinach (and boiling water for tea) and I said, "You know what? I can't wait until I turn eighteen."

She laughed. "Are you going to go out on your own and leave us?"

My parents and I got along very well 99 percent of the time and I shook my head. "Of course not. But at eighteen I'll be an adult and be able to make some of my own decisions." Now, mind you, I tried not to swear in front of my mother. Like Ralphie from A Christmas Story I still lived in everlasting dread of getting my mouth washed out with soap. But I had to make my point. "And then I won't ever have to eat that goddamned spinach ever again."

She put the saucepan down and blinked at me, not even scolding me for "that word." "You really don't like it that much?"

Heavens, parents can be so dense sometimes. "I hate it, Mom. It tastes awful and greasy and nasty and it makes me sick to the stomach."

At that time I took vitamin supplements. So she sighed and said, "Well, you're healthy enough. Okay, you don't have to eat it anymore."

If I wasn't flabbergasted enough by that, she added, "Good, then I won't have to eat it any more either. I hate spinach."

Blink. "You what?"

"I hate spinach. I've always hated it, but the doctor said it was good for you, so I ate it, too, to show you a good example."

My mother ate something she hated for sixteen years every Saturday night just to show me a good example.

If that ain't Mother Love, I don't know what is.

Tea

For Mom's birthday:

I confess: I hate tea. At least of the tea bag variety, and especially iced tea. How does one drink something that smells that bad? Coffee was my favorite. Mom bought the local brand, Autocrat, with the little bird on the tin and the legend "A swallow will tell you..." and at breakfast the rich, full scent was as good as reveille. Even today I sniff the coffee aisles of the supermarket with delight.

On cold winter nights when the wind would have whistled through the north-facing front door if we did not have it blocked up for the season, though, Mom loved tea. And I loved the ritual.

I was usually in bed, at the center of a wooly cocoon that consisted of a sheet, two blankets, and a light summerweight blanket doubled up on top of me, pillowed on two feather pillows and clad in flannel "feetie" pajamas with socks on underneath. In radiator versus cold winter wind, the latter won most of the time. My bedroom was right off the kitchen and by lying on my left side I could look directly at the gas stove. Back in those days I walked in my sleep, had nightmares, and woke up screaming. If I was in the dark I would awaken not knowing where I was, so in my bedroom on the dresser there was a little plaster nightlight base, putty-color and oval shaped and strewn with tiny seashells. At one end a large seashell half stood on end, and inside in the grotto the shell made was a small statue of the Virgin Mary. The nightlight flooded her with light and was a warm beacon in the dark. There was also a less prosaic, grocery-story type of nightlight in the kitchen. Between them I slept comforted.

On chilly nights Mom would pad out from the living room, taking care not to wake me although I usually was still awake anyway. She'd be bundled in a quilted bathrobe and slippers over her pajamas, with a pink hairnet on, and she would go to the cupboard where the pots and pans were kept and extract the littlest saucepan, wider than it was tall and bright aluminum silver, so small only a couple cups of water would fill it. Mom saw no need to keep a teakettle; it was easier just to boil water in the saucepan and then just pour it over the teabag slumped inside the jade green coffee mug.

From the bed with drowsy eyes, I would see Mom's silhouette bowed over the stove, the bit of steam lit by the nightlight bulb, and the flickering blue gas flame, which was like a small hearth burning just for me, and quiet and safe, I fell asleep.