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.

A Sideboard Always Full

When I turned to page 64 I literally yelped.

I call them my "Christmas porn," the magazines I buy over the holidays just to look at the lush, colorful decorations. Each of the seasons have their colors, but I love the festive hues and the sparkle of Christmas most of all. I usually skip the "Better Homes & Gardens" type periodicals and go in for the glam: a lot for the British magazines, but also things like the "cottage journals." The particular magazine I was looking through was "Holiday Home," filled with marvelous expensive things I could never afford in a lifetime (many which I wouldn't want anyway), lush homes, and even more plush furnishings.

And then I saw this, and it all came flooding back.

My grandfather's (Dad's father) house was built in 1920, when Dad was seven years old, so it was middle-aged when I first knew it and venerable the last time I saw it ten years ago, a Dutch Colonial with a steeply pitched roof to each side interrupted by long gables. It underwent very little redecorating over the years; oh, some wallpaper vanished and the candle wall sconces with it, and somewhere along the line the original kitchen cabinets were replaced with trendy 50s metal ones. The sole bathroom in the house had the original fixtures: black-and-white floor tiles, X-shaped white ceramic faucet handles, a showerless tub. The hardwood floors were scuffed and bowed; the wallpaper up to the second story grimy where numerous hands had reached for assistance on the walls; the stair treads hollowed from footfalls. But it never mattered to me because it was a place where the past intersected with the present, an effect I wrote about in "The Magic House." It was never more so evident on Christmas, when the tree was hung with vintage clear ornaments from World War II, bubble lights, "big bulbs," and waterfalls of tinsel, but even on ordinary days the passage to the past was a very thin veil through which I hungrily peered, trying to make my way to that other side.

So when I turned the page and saw the selfsame sideboard that sat in Grandpa's cellar, covered with a large grey Nativity set, you can imagine how my memories went spiraling back. I have deliberately mirror imaged the illustration to show you the sideboard just the way it would have looked when we entered the house through the outside cellar door, on the left against the wall. It was the first thing you saw when you entered, and at Christmas it was a thing of glory, covered with a big potted poinsettia cradled in red or green foil wrap, flanked on either side by platters of the Italian cookies my Auntie Margaret had been baking for hours: round brown-purple wine biscuits, biscotti-shaped pale almond bars and chocolate-colored molasses cookies, and round golden butterballs rolled in confectioners' sugar (a.k.a. Danish wedding cookies or Mexican wedding cookies). Scattered among the cookies would be tiny boxed individual torrone (Italian nougat candy) with Italian motifs and Hershey's kisses, and a dish of riotous rainbows known as "Christmas candy" and another of Italian hard candy molded in the shapes of slices of oranges, tangerines, and lemons and wrapped in foil picturing the respective fruit. Since horizontal surfaces always gather items, you might find the occasional wrapped Christmas gift there, or tossed aside gloves, house keys, and the usual other homey house items. In the drawers and cupboards below were kept tablecloths and napkins for all seasons, bowls and vases.

Other times of the year called for different decor. During non-holiday times, it might be paper napkins, tobacco tins, tossed-aside mail, a rolled up newspaper, cigar boxes. On Valentine's Day a big heart-shaped box of candy might lay there, tempting a small girl with a sweet tooth. During the summer, ripening tomatoes from Grandpa's flourishing garden perched on the sills of the two small windows which flanked either end of the sideboard like soldiers on patrol, and any overflow would make its way to the sideboard. If it were the season for fresh-picked vegetables, a paper bag of them would be waiting there for us to take home when we left: fat fragrant tomatoes, stolid green zucchini, long emerald cucumbers, fresh garlic, heady onions. At Thanksgiving, the sideboard played host to bowls of mixed nuts in the shell, filberts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, and the tarnished silver nutcrackers older than I was, and butternut squash and pumpkin pies with their shiny orangy-brown tops and fluted crust leaving the faint aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg everywhere. There might be a vase of zinnias in the fall or roses in summer, but always in the spring there would be a big jarful of soft grey pussy willows, cut live from the branches, so cuddly and rabbit's-foot-like that they would be irresistible to pet.

Oh, and then it was Easter, and the cookie platters were back, with a wee difference. The heavier cookies were gone and strewn among the wine biscuits and butterballs were egg biscuits, light as a feather and pale brown, coated on top with just the faintest suggestion of white icing, all flecked with a pinch of multicolor sprinkles. Instead of Hershey kisses accompanying the little torrone boxes in their colorful Italian designs, there were small chocolate eggs in Easter pastel finery and occasionally a smattering of jellybeans. It was the time of year for rice pie, and one or two would be waiting there for company, set on the table to be cut into soft sweet pieces and accompanied by the fragrant coffee that always seemed to be percolating on the stove. Bobbing their white heads over it all would be the waxy, pristine branches of the Easter lilies set in a pot with purple or pink or blue foil around it, nodding a spring greeting.

I think of chalk pictures and Mary Poppins, and wish I knew some way to reach into that picture, touch the sideboard, be transported just one more time...

The House Without a Christmas Tree

Remember these? They were all the rage in the 1970s. People bought them ready-made, or, even more popular, bought a whiteware version which they then glazed at a "ceramics" class, and everyone's tree was fired in a big communal kiln. Then you would add the plastic colored "lights" and the star, and the entire tree would glow from an ordinary light bulb set within the tree. Some families added them to their other Christmas decorations, set on a china cabinet or breaking up a row of volumes on a bookshelf or used as a nightlight in a hallway.

For others...

The house next door to us was a big two-story home that had been built in the 1920s, and the land surrounding it, including our lot and the house on the corner as well as the land across the street, belonged to my godmother's family, the Danellas. My godmother grew up in the house and was part of the first class to graduate from Hugh B. Bain Junior High School in the last years of the 20s, and later she lived there with her mother and her husband, with her brother, sister-in-law, and niece living upstairs.

When her family sold that land and our house was built there, Mom and Dad must have found the two families next door good neighbors as well. My mother's mother quickly made friends with my godmother's mother, although both women struggled to understand one another as they were from different regions of Italy and the dialects were often quite disparate. In the empty lot next door that still belonged to the Danella family, an enormous vegetable garden grew each year, and there were pear and plum trees along the driveway, and a grape arbor in the small back yard. My godfather, Angelo Montella, was our fuel oil dealer, a genial, moon-faced man who was a soft touch for animals like my mother. If it were up to the two of them, they would have taken in every stray cat in the neighborhood. My godmother, Lillian Danella Montella, was a matter-of-fact, sensible woman. She kept an immaculate house despite the fact that she worked, went to the hairdresser once a week, and nursed her mother through her last years. Mother came to trust "Padina Lillian" ("Padina" being what you called your godmother if you're Italian) and when I was born she and Padine Angelo became my godmother.

I remember trotting across our driveway to her house on errands, to visit on holidays and on her birthday, which was August, and when I was tiny her mother "Zia Maria" and Victoria's mother "Zia Maria Antonia" (Victoria and her mother lived on the opposite side of the chain link fence from the old Speedway which separated our properties) would babysit me if Mother had to do an errand. In the summer she would come home to find me enthroned in one of the Adirondak chairs under the grape arbor, eating cantaloupe and grapes, and plums and pears from the trees.

My godparents never had children, and I was never nosy enough to inquire if they regretted it or not. It wasn't my place. But I always worried about them at Christmas, for they never had a Christmas tree. My godmother explained gently that they didn't really need a tree, they had no children. Trees were for families.

This didn't mean their house didn't have a festive air at all during the holidays. In our neighborhood front doors were only for company; in fact in winter, many people, like us, blocked up our door for the winter, which is why you would drive about New England in those days in February and still see Christmas bells, wreaths, spray snow, and other decorations on front doors. So you entered Padina's house through the side door, a big, stolid wooden door painted green, the entrance to the cellar on the very left, and up a short flight of steps to the back door (next to this door were the stairs to go upstairs to the apartment where Jimmy, Dotty, and Cindy lived). There would be something Christmasy on the door, a little wreath, perhaps, or a couple of Christmas cards. The door opened directly to the kitchen, which was, when I originally knew it, very old fashioned, with beadboard all around and a vintage gas stove against the left wall with a chimney pipe which went into the wall. For many years Zia Maria's rocker was right under the back window.

In the middle of the room was the kitchen table and there might be a Christmasy tablecloth or a little centerpiece, perhaps some curtains that were less summery than before. To either side of the door was a bedroom, and at the very corner of the kitchen was the glass-paned door with the glass doorknob that led into the formal dining room with the parlor and Padina's piano beyond. (The parlor was almost never used except at night when Padina might play her piano; in summer when the windows were open the classical pieces she played floated out the windows like heavenly birdsong.) I never knew them to keep a television in the parlor; after Zia Maria died, they made one of the bedrooms into a den and had the TV there, formerly it was always in the kitchen and so were they.

I loved that glass door. Just seeing Padina's neat-as-pin dining room, something we had no room for, and the shadowy parlor with the beautiful spinet beyond and all the lovely old woodwork was like looking into a magic world. At Christmas my godparents tacked up all their Christmas cards around that glass door and made it more magical still. But I was still always sorry that they had no beautiful Christmas tree to look at.

One Christmas season, and I have forgotten what year it was, or how old I was, Padina beckoned me in the house. The cards were already bedecking the glass door as she opened it and ushered me into the dining room, where it was cool and dim. Then she clicked a switch and the top of the buffet glowed with color. "There," she said matter-of-factly, but with slight amusement somewhere in the background, "do you feel better?" Set between the candlesticks was a ceramic tree that she had bought, or perhaps had been given, I don't recall longer. The details have blurred—did it have snow on the tips of its branches? or was the star large or small? the bulbs differently shaped?—but I remember the happy spectrum of color and the comfort of knowing they finally had a tree. It wasn't a big tree, nor one with shiny ornaments, or traditional tinsel icicles. But it was a Christmas tree, and in some way it was enough.

Our Flag Was Still There

Sometimes even a flag has a memory.

A few years after we moved into our first house, I told James I wanted a flagpole, one of the banner flagpoles, so it could also be used to hang seasonal banners and special ones for holidays. Accordingly, I used one of the frequent Michael's 40 percent off coupons to buy the mount, and another to buy the flagpole, and a third to purchase a summer banner. Later three more seasons would join the queue, and ones for Christmas, Easter, Hallowe'en, and Thanksgiving. James put up the mount one Saturday afternoon and we had our banner, waving summer hues over the front steps.

But I wanted a proper American flag, not a printed one, one that would last us for years to put up on Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day, one with sewn stars and stripes. Michael's had a flag like this, but it was expensive, almost $40. We were on short commons in those days and it was a big bite to take from the budget.

Happily, Labor Day was coming up, and Michael's usually had 50 percent off coupons on that day. So on that afternoon of September 3, James and I made the trip to the store and came home with the coveted flag. I happily enjoyed thinking of the very next time we could put it up.

A week later, it was September 11, 2001.

And in the midst of watching the horrific carnage on television and sending tense messages to friends online whom I knew worked in New York City, I went in the kitchen drawer for a length of twine, took the flag outside, and used the string to mount the flag at half-staff, and there it swayed in the breeze, in all its terrible beauty.

The flag still flies each Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day, but the twine remains where it was knotted on September 11.

Never forget.

Seen: Red Geraniums

There they were in front of Kroger this morning, flanking other multicolored potted plants. Geraniums are not my favorite flowers; I dislike the musty, unattractive scent. But red geraniums and May always bring back the particular memory of Mother's Day and St. Ann's Cemetery.

With our factory income there weren't many spare dollars for flowers for the cemetery. I would have preferred the waving tulips or fragrant hyacinths in springtime, or the lilies that predominated the rest of the year, but the bright little geraniums were the least expensive of the potted flowers that were sold near the cemetery gate or at the garden stands at the "mill outlets." Dad or Mom made the careful selection of three geraniums after counting out creased and folded dollar bills to the proprietor. On Mother's Day, still all dressed in patent leather pumps and spring-colored dress from Easter, fresh out of church and joining the line headed through the gates, I sat in the back seat with the three terra-cotta pots covered with brightly colored shiny paper, a little row of scarlet or pink, as we made our way down the curved road.

Almost as soon as you entered, to your right were a sad little collection of tiny headstones with lambs or cherubs upon them. These were for the babies, and they almost always had soft flowers of white or pink bobbing next to them. Passing several more plots, brave on a sunny Sunday with blooms of all sorts—gladioli, lilies, tulips, hyacinths, roses, and more—and fluttering satin ribbons, we would stop at the right side of the road, choose a geranium, and walk the few steps to Grandma Lanzi's grave. Dad's face always got soft and sober when we approached and he would kiss her picture gently before we stopped to pray. I have no memory of her; she died when I was three; the only thing I do recall is that we had a small Christmas tree that year, set on the big parlor table, rather than a large one, and only turned the lights on Christmas Eve. There were faucets on each corner of each plot, and if the geranium was too dry we would water it before setting it down under the headstone.

Even though it was Mother's Day, we had a potted geranium for Mother's brother, my Uncle Ernest, whose real name was Agnello. We always brought flowers for him, no matter what the holiday. He had not a tall headstone but a small rectangular stone set in the ground, like the rest of the graves in the plot across the street, and Mom kept track of where it was by row number and its distance from a certain tree at the edge of the plot. I have no memories of him, only that he was the adopted father of my cousin Raymond who lived in California. Still, you could see the empty space in the family right there in Mom's face. She would tell me rollicking stories of her girlhood when Uncle Ernie apparently had an old jalopy of a car in which Mom and her brothers would pile in to go places. Several times they drove straight to New York to see the Yankees play; I marvel even now—straight to New York, before the interstates, before the Connecticut Turnpike! It must have taken hours, all for a ballgame, and they would come back tired but happy.

And finally there was the slow left turn that brought us abreast of Grandma and Grandpa D'Ambra's headstone, where Mom lingered. Like me, she was very close to her mother; in her last few days she even called for her when in pain. With a little brush from the car she would sweep any bits of grass or dirt which had gotten on the rim of the stone from lawn cutting, and with spit she would clean the glass over the picture of her parents. I remember their little house on Killingly Street; Mom had no car so we would take the bus to Hartford Avenue and then walk the rest of the way, past the Warwick Shoppers World and the other businesses. By the time I was old enough to remember them, Grandpa had gone blind. He had been a vibrant working man, having grown up on a farm and then become, among other things, a coal miner and an ironworker. Now he was blind from cataracts and I recall only a silent man on the sofa, listening to the television. Grandma was sickly by that time, but I remember her offering me cookies and milk. They were childhood sweethearts and died within a month of each other.

Around us spread marching lines of marble and stone, almost all with a colorful surround of flowers. Cars stopped, families poured out, women in spring hats or lace mantillas, little girls in poufy skirts like mine, men and boys in suits and ties, gathering in little knots to pay their respects. Ribbons from the hats might flutter, the children would fidget, mothers would send a child with a container to get some water. If you saw someone you knew, you waved hello in a gentle manner; like the library this was a place of silence.

But around you the trees rustled, the birds sang, the bees darted from flower to flower, and the red geraniums were like flags.

Scream of the Bunny

For us it was always a typical Easter. If money permitted, there was a new dress, in organdie or dotted swiss in a pastel color, with the scratchy petticoat that made your skirt stand out prettily, but which itched like the dickens and you were forbidden to scratch in public, so you just squirmed, so it looked equally as bad. A little spring hat trimmed with a flower and/or a wide green or pink or yellow ribbon was de rigueur in those days, with an elastic band under the chin to keep it on. The elastic itched, too, which added to the dress-up ordeal. As you got older, you might have a little purse, and of course, for going to church, white gloves. Black patent leather shoes finished the ensemble; later you might be allowed to put on white sandals when you visited the family and the god-awful hat could go after you showed the family how cute you looked in it or posed for a picture. Church would be packed full of what my parents called "the three-time-a-year" crowd (Christmas, Palm Sunday, and Easter), and it would be a High Mass, which meant everything was sung except for the epistles, the Gospel, and Father's homily, so it was a long time to be sitting in a hard pew, especially for a small child.

When I was very small, if I got restless, Mom would give me her tube of bobby pins to play with. I would kneel backward on the kneeler using the pew as a table, and shape the pins into figures I imagined were Rocky and Bullwinkle (for some reason I can't fathom now, Bullwinkle only had one leg; I knew he was supposed to have two, but if I set up the bobby pin duplicate with two legs, it looked "funny" to me) and guided them through silent adventures.

After church came a visit to the cemetery, and then we went home for Easter dinner (usually a ham). Mom cooked while Dad read the Sunday paper and I checked out my Easter basket, which usually contained a hollow "Peter Rabbit" chocolate bunny and some plastic eggs with small chocolate eggs inside. In the pre-kindergarten era there was also a stuffed bunny every year, but the rabbits started to overrun the house, just like their natural counterparts would have. Eventually I ended up keeping only "Hoppy" (officially "Harold J. Rabbit"), who looked like a real bunny with brown coat and a white cottontail.

I particularly, however, remember the Easter I was in second grade because of something that happened at school. Our teacher was officially Mrs. Grady, who had both the second and the fifth grades, but she trained neophyte teachers during the year. While I clearly remember Miss Greenberg and Miss Okelowicz (I think that's how it was spelt) from fifth grade, I'm fuzzier on the second grade teachers. I believe I had one named Miss Fisher and she was the teacher that day...no matter.

Anyway, it was art class period and we were making Easter bunnies by cutting two long white ovals, as instructed by the teacher, and pasting them onto a big white construction paper circle, which was the bunny's head. Then we were to draw the bunny's face with crayons and maybe put some pink into his ears. Well, I was trying a new "technique" that would make the bunny's face look 3D, with round cheeks, and, to me, as a second grader, it looked pretty cool beside the other kids' rabbits, which had the more conventional round eyes, a button nose and a smile. I was usually the little "mouse" in school, the kid that knew the answers but didn't put her hand up because that meant I would have to speak in front of everyone, but this little artistic victory made me conceited, and I remember clearly bragging up my bunny. One of the boys next to me finally got sick of it, and reached out his hands, threatening to tear my bunny head into shreds.

I started to scream. I mean, not squeaking or squealing, but full horror-movie screaming.

Next thing I knew Mrs. Grady was in the room. I can't recall any longer whether she was tall or short, but she was stout and had short permed grey hair, and that morning looking down at me she looked taller than the Jolly Green Giant and the giant from the beanstalk put together. Her voice wasn't much kinder: "What is all this noise about? Do you know I can hear you screaming from down the hall?"

I think Miss Fisher or whomever was the teacher did explain to her about the bunny, but I was still sternly reprimanded about screaming about something so foolish. And, you know, to this day when I think about that scene, I still want to sink into the floor and disappear as I did at the time.

Reprint: "Will You Be My Valentine?"

I guess we were pretty typical as mid-60s elementary school kids go.

The boys wore their hair short and parted to one side or the other. The occasional cowlick or bowl cut appeared. They wore button-down shirts—often "cowboy shirts" with piping—and pressed troussers (often courderoy in this winter season, or wool). They wore sturdy lace-up shoes in winter and sneakers in summer. The girls were in dresses, skirts and blouses, or jumpers. Short hair was popular (especially with moms who had to wash that hair), held back with a headband or a gold or plastic barrette. They wore sturdy Oxfords or Hush Puppies, or strap shoes. A few extroverts whose moms allowed it wore patent leather dress shoes and might have had their hair permed. Ringlets were still popular, too, and hair bows. To stay warm during a long walk to school or at recess, the girls often wore snow pants under their dresses; these came off in the morning along with the thick winter coats and hats and scarves and rubber boots that fit over your shoes and were stowed in the chaos known as the cloakroom behind pivoting bulletin-board doors that had corkboard on them. When the doors were closed, the best papers from that week were displayed pinned to the corkboards.

Valentine’s Day didn’t start immediately after Christmas as it does now. Yuletide was allowed to wind down past the new year before the candy started to appear, but it was only at the tail end of January and into February that schoolchildren started to gear up by surveying what classroom valentines were for sale in the eternal delight of the 60s child, "the five and ten"—Woolworths, Newberrys, McCrory, Ben Franklin, McCrory, and whatever other local store plied the trade.

The least expensive Valentines, most endorsed by Mom because of their cost, were just plain little hearts and cupids with cartoony boys and girls or animals wishing each other a happy day or professing love or affection. Girls' Valentines featured dolls, flowers, cute animals, and lots of hearts. Boys' Valentines would more likely have their youthful protagonist in a train engineer's uniform or spacesuit, or would feature trains, cars, airplanes, sports equipment, or construction equipment. Specialty cards, like those with Disney characters or the cartoon heroes of the day like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, or theme cards involving real-life race cars or spaceships or television programs were pricier. There was always one, larger Valentine in the box reserved for the teacher; the most common design was some sort of a blackboard with the message written in white "chalk." These were purchased and (sometimes) laboriously signed over and over for twenty to thirty classmates until the day you could dump them in the big box on the teacher’s desk. (Mom always insisted you make out one for everyone in the class, even the kids you didn’t like, so it would be "fair.") In the lower grades, the teacher decorated the box herself, usually with white or pink construction paper. White was favored since then the hearts could be made in both pink and red, and on it in red crayon would be neatly printed the grade and the teacher’s name.

As you grew older the teacher would allow the best artist in the class to decorate the big box. It was an honor to encrust the box with layered hearts or tissue paper flowers, although some students always wanted input on the design.

One February art class closest to the fourteenth was always reserved for making Valentine cards for your mom and dad and grandparents. Stacks of white, pink, and red construction paper (sometimes black was added for a cool shadow effect) were put into service. Sometimes the teacher purchased foil-like cupids or hearts to embellish each card, and lace paper doilies were always a favorite for backgrounds for mothers' cards. Some kids brought in magazine clippings of flowers to further add to the decorative effect. Twenty-five children wielded twenty-five snub-nosed scissors, folding a red sheet in half and carefully reproducing the lopsided teardrop shape with the flat side that would open up into a really-truly heart. The more ambitious children cut odd shapes from the edge and the interior of the folded heart and what unfolded was a confection in "lace" design. These hearts, plain or cut-out, were layered with smaller or larger hearts and then stacked together permanently with the inevitable paste (the flicking paste brush sending bits of white everywhere, including on the clothing and hair of unsuspecting classmates) and cheerfully crayoned with greetings.

We also cut out hearts, again both the plain and lacy variety, to decorate the bulletin board at the back of the room or on the pivoting cloakroom doors, white or red scalloped edges surrounding our best designs.

Later, at home, you would happily hand the now-stiff hand-fashioned card to Mom and/or Dad with a proud "Happy Valentines Day!" and Mom and Dad would admire it and then set it on top of the television console or on the kitchen table, leaned up against the vase of flowers Dad had brought for Mom, so everyone could see it. If you were lucky, Dad would take Mom out to dinner and you could come, too, although in most households this was postponed to the Sunday closest to the holiday. Still fresh in your Sunday dress or suit, you'd all troop out to a nice restaurant where the waiters wore suits and there were cloth napkins instead of the paper ones you had everyday, separate salad forks, and white tablecloths.

In that Valentine afternoon at school, however, you had received your own haul. The Valentine box was opened and the cards distributed. A few girls shyly smiled at a few boys, and a few boys tucked special Valentines away, their ears pink with embarrassment. There was the constant squeal of a few girls who had received sarcastic comic cards from the few whose moms had not supervised their card purchases and were sticking their tongues out at the guilty, laughing boys. Afterwards, there might be cupcakes and punch or some chocolates Hershey kisses and then it was time to run home and show Mom your cards (after carefully anointing a chosen favorite classmate with that ultimate winter Valentine, a snowball!).