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...

Summer Twilight

We dreamed of air conditioning, like in the movie theatre or in the department store, cool and soothing over our warm skin simmering in the humid evening air, slowly braising in the summer sun.

Instead we had to rely on what breeze the night brought us as the sun sank over the radio towers atop Neutaconkanut Hill, the sky turning from pale cerulean to a velvet navy blue, stars incandescing one by one. We fled the warm lamps and even warmer rooms—despite ceaselessly whirring fans and the occasional waft of air through a window—and instead emerged into the mosquito-ridden twilight, one from one direction, two from another; the composition of the crowd changed nightly.

It was summer in the 1960s. My godmother and her husband came out to sit on "the piazza," what they called their open porch, in hopes of a breeze. Other neighbors unfolded their canvas-and-wood or woven-tape-and-aluminum lawn chairs and sat in circles around citronella candles in back or front yards, still slapping at mosquitoes. Moths flew sorties around traffic lights topped with crenelated caps. If there was a baseball game on television or, even better, on radio, you could hear it through wide-open front doors and thrown-wide windows, the crack of the bat against the ball, the crowd roaring, the announcer shouting. If you were lucky the breeze rustled the leaves of the trees and played accompaniment to the crickets strumming their tune in the grass. In the lower part of Cooney Field, the usual complement of young men were playing a summer-long after-supper baseball game of their own. If it were a Friday night, Mom would put on a light duster and some sandals and walk the one block to Mary DiPrete's house so the two of them could sit out in the yard in metal lawn chairs to chat.

We kids were free to go anywhere close to home so long as our mothers knew where we were. We'd never heard of a "playdate." Asking permission consisted of "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Penny's house." "Okay, be home by nine o'clock!" It wasn't a long trip for me. There was a wooden gate always left propped open between my godmother's house next door and Victoria's house on the opposite side of the chain-link fence, so that Padina Lillian's mother, "Zia Maria" could easily visit with Victoria's mother, "Zia Maria Antonia" in the Adirondak chairs under the grape arbor in my godparents' back yard, where they would talk in Italian about the progress of their gardens—there were always tomatoes and zucchini and string beans growing throughout the summer in both yards—and memories of the Old Country. Children were welcome to use the gate as long as they did no damage, and I would slip through and walk respectfully out Victoria's side yard, across Fiat Avenue, and on to Penny's house.

Overland and Flint Avenues came to a point at Fiat Avenue, and it was on that isosceles triangle of land that my friend Penny lived with her mother, stepfather, two sisters, and baby brother. The lot was set up so that the only thing behind the house was the driveway, so the whole front yard was their back yard. On the Overland side of the street was a retaining wall, and here we all gathered: Penny and her sisters, Pauline from down the street, Armand and his little sister from across Overland Avenue, sometimes Barbara from over on Jordan Avenue. We'd play kickball in the street until it became too dark to see, and then perch on the wall in our shorts and sleeveless tops, most of us with Keds bought from the US rubber outlet store down off Harris Avenue, fidgeting, kicking our heels against the concrete. Behind us, there was a good chance Penny's grandmother Carrie would also be sitting outside, perhaps talking with a neighbor.

Since school was out, we would avoid that dreaded subject; most of our conversation seemed to revolve around television programs. Batman with Adam West was then popular and much wangling went on about who was the best villain, the Joker or the Riddler or the Penguin? The Penguin certainly had his fans; Burgess Meredith's comic opera portrayal and his "quack-quack" laugh was much admired. Catwoman also had her fans. The other topic of conversation was always Dark Shadows. Everyone—but me—loved watching Barnabas Collins the vampire, and the others of the horror soap, like Angelique and Quentin. The original storyline, more of a Gothic romance involving a governess named Victoria Winters, had long gone by the wayside as Jonathan Frid fandom came to the fore. I wasn't into vampires, but liked to punctuate the stories with wolf howls to add the appropriate atmosphere. Later I'd have my own foray into horror soaps with Strange Paradise.

Eventually Carrie would tells us it was time to go, or Penny's mother would call from the kitchen where the fan was running ceaselessly and the refrigerator dispensing endless supplies of Kool-Aid. We'd groan and moan and slip off the wall and slowly trudge toward home, stopping to watch the frantic flutterings around the streetlights. Tomorrow would be another night, but now it was time for a cool sponge bath or a shower and a humid trip to Dreamland under a summer sheet, the windows open wide so the symphony of the crickets would lull you to sleep.