Knots in My Yo-Yo String Knots in My Yo-Yo String Read online

  When garbage met darkness, the potential for horror doubled.

  Emptying the garbage after dinner was a frequent chore of mine, but only one particular instance do I remember. My mother had dumped the leftovers into a cake batter bowl and sent me off. The season was winter; it was already dark outside. The light from the back door petered out halfway down the yard, leaving me to moonlight. At the garbage can I went through my usual ritual: I curled my fingers around the metal handle of the lid, took a deep breath, held it, and with an almost audible winching of willpower, yanked the lid off. Careful not to look directly into the can, I overturned the batter bowl. I tapped it against the can to loosen any stragglers—and discovered I had a problem.

  Whatever we had had for dinner that night must have been sticky, because half of it was still clinging to the bowl. I tapped harder. Still the stuff stuck. Risking breakage, I banged the bowl against the can. Nothing came loose. My chest was getting tight, my lungs demanded breath. In the moonlight I caught a glimpse of white worms. I panicked. I dropped the bowl into the garbage can, slammed down the lid, and raced for the house. I waited until I was inside to gasp for air, as I was sure that the garbage can, open so uncommonly long, must have fouled all outdoors. When my mother asked about the missing bowl several days later, I said I knew nothing about it.

  Though night at various times conspired with a locomotive or a garbage can or a pup tent to frighten me, at other times night did not scare me at all.

  We used to play a game called outs. It was the major leagues of hide-and-seek games. The kid who was It covered his eyes and counted to a hundred while everyone else ran and hid. If the It kid found you, he yelled “You’re out!” and then the two of you were It and went seeking the others, and so on, until all were It but one—the winner.

  There were no boundaries. You could hide anywhere. Popular hiding places included the stone piles, Red Hill, alleys, assorted backyards. As if the hiding needed to be made any easier, we always played outs after dark.

  My favorite hiding place was behind a stone pile near the creek. I would crouch silently for an hour or more in utter darkness. The dark did not scare me when playing outs. What scared me was being found.

  One night I heard the Its coming close to my hiding place. I slipped away down the path to the park and trotted up past the state hospital. I didn’t stop until I was more than a mile west of town, in Jeffersonville. By the time I got back home my parents were calling my name down the dark alleys and streets. All the other players were home in bed.

  * * *

  Night was at its best once a week: outdoor movies in the park. After dinnertime and baseball games and Popsicles for dessert, kids from all over town headed for the band shell. Little kids sat in the cement-anchored benches that still form the stage’s permanent seats. On the hill behind, older kids pulled up wooden benches or just sat on the grass. One night I must have been thinking I was older than I was. As I made myself at home on a wooden bench on the hill, several teenagers decided that was where they wanted to sit. They lifted the bench at one end, and off I slid to the grass.

  The movies were usually in black and white. Occasionally we got through the show without the projector breaking down or the film snapping. More often than not the movie was about Francis the talking mule.

  Afterward everyone scattered, across the fields to the East End, North End, West End. We George Streeters walked through the American Legion field and over the granite bridge spanning Stony Creek and turned left. Sometimes we took the dirt path, sometimes the tracks.

  On moonlit nights the tracks looked like silver ribbons. Behind me, ahead of me, I could hear the voices of other kids. I could see their dark shadows. Atop the ten-foot clay bluff to the right was the spear field, then the dump, then Red Hill. A bald, packed dome of eraser-colored clay, Red Hill was said to be the home of the Devil, the clay’s color coming from the infernal fires burning below. I always looked to see if it was true that at night you could see the hill glowing. Once, I thought, it was.

  Always glowing, however, was the dead end, the faint “Welcome home” from the last streetlight. From the path, from the tracks we funneled onto George, the after-dark, midsummer band shell park movie kids. You could always bet that someone would face the row house windows and do his best imitation of a talking mule.

  And somewhere beyond the East End a locomotive was moving through the night …

  chh

  A

  Family

  Thing

  On the night of May 16, 1936, my mother and father got married. This was three years after Lou Spinelli, nicknamed Poppy, had spotted pretty, dark-haired Lorna Bigler on the dance floor at the Orioles Lodge and said to his friend Babe Richards, “See that girl. That’s who I’m going to marry.” On the night of their wedding, they were on another dance floor, at the Little Ritz, a nightspot on Route 202 north of town. They were broke, so this was all the honeymoon they would have.

  At one point during the evening an announcement was made: A contest would determine the prettiest lady in attendance. My mother doesn’t recall the contest procedure, only the result. The winner was the new Mrs. Lou Spinelli. Her prize was a gift certificate to have her portrait done at the Davis Photography Studio.

  Four and a half years later, on February 1, 1941, I was born. My brother, Bill, came along four and a half years after that, on July 29, 1945. My mother’s wedding-day prize, the framed portrait from Davis Studio, stands today on her bedroom dresser, the center of a triptych flanked by photo portraits of toddlers Bill and me.

  And Jerry makes three. Here I am at three months (1941).

  Mothers can get short-changed by memory. My recollections, for example, begin somewhere in my third year. By then some of my best experiences with my mother, some three years’ worth of constant daily interaction, were already over. When my mind’s recorder finally turned on, it was moments with my father that made the more memorable impressions: trips to high school ball games, backyard baseball, setting up the Christmas crèche. My mother’s attentions continued, of course, but they tended to be less obvious, less noticed. They were the background of my life, the everyday care and support that at last came into full recognition when I acquired a family of my own.

  * * *

  The marriage of Louis Anthony Spinelli and Lorna Mae Bigler brought together two heritages: Italian (my father) and Pennsylvania Dutch (my mother).

  When I think of my Italian side, I think first of Sundays after church. The four of us would walk—or after 1954, when we got our first car, ride—the four blocks from First Presbyterian to my grandparents’ home at 226 Chestnut. It was a row house with porches front and back and a rose arbor and dark polished furniture that made the living and dining rooms feel gloomy to me. The kitchen was where the light and the people and the food were.

  Around the kitchen table sat aunts and uncles and cousins and, always at the head, my grandfather, Alessandro “Alex” Spinelli. In front of him was a small glass pitcher of red wine. Before each meal, including a breakfast of cold spaghetti, he drew the wine from his own barrel in the cellar. He was bald and he did not speak English very well and his breath always smelled of garlic and he smoked thin black wicked stogies and his fingers were as thick as sausages. He had labored many years for the Pennsylvania Department of Highways. Later the Borough of Norristown employed him as a street sweeper. Sometimes, riding my bike, I would see him with other old men, pushing a broom along a curb.

  That was his job. His love was the “farm,” a small patch of vacant land that he rented in the East End. During the growing months, every day after work, he went to the farm to tend his vegetables. I like to think that, as he put hoe to earth, he sometimes reflected on what to me was the remarkable central fact of his life:

  “He came over on a boat all by himself when he was only fourteen years old.”

  That’s how I say it, even now, when describing my grandfather’s coming to this country. He was an orphan in Italy. He worke
d in the olive groves around Naples. An aunt arranged for relatives to meet him in New York, handed him a one-way ticket on a steamship, and off he went, across the Atlantic Ocean, a black-haired teenager, alone, solo.

  Fifty years later I, a nine-year-old American-born boy, sat at his kitchen table, eating the roast chicken with my fingers because that’s how he did it, trying to imagine the bald old man at the head of the table with black hair.

  The first course was always salad, as simple as salad gets: lettuce with oil and vinegar. Then came the chicken, then spaghetti and meatballs. My grandmother often made her own spaghetti, rolling out the dough and slicing it into strands with a device that reminded me of a harp. She would spend a whole day nursing the gravy at the stove. (To many Italians, spaghetti sauce is “gravy.”) The dessert was often hot chestnuts, roasted on a second stove in the cellar.

  As with the Spinellis, a table stands in the center of my memory of the maternal relatives. In this case the table is not in a kitchen but on a sloping lawn under a huge oak tree. Made of planks laid over sawhorses, the table is very long and is crowded with pickled eggs and cold cuts and potato salad and three-bean salad and lemon meringue pie and dozens of other goodies. The place is my Aunt Isabel and Uncle Ted’s home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, about ten miles from Norristown. The occasion is the annual family reunion.

  In my early years the reunion was, after Christmas, the biggest event on my calendar. It was the only time I got to see Aunt Lizzie and her gang from Highspire, some eighty miles away. Even their names seemed different. There was a Willard and a Juanita and a second cousin exotically named Kendra.

  One year there was even more excitement than usual: Uncle Elwood and Aunt Kay drove in from Michigan. I kept staring at my midwestern cousins Bruce, Janey, and Suzie. They might as well have come from Mars. Alas for Aunt Margaret and Uncle Chet and their kids Cindy, George, JoAnne, and Patty, there was no magic of distance. They lived on Chain Street in Norristown, a mere block and a half from 802 George. I barely noticed them.

  As a once-a-year event, the reunion became a gauge by which to measure my progress, both physical and social. On the tennis court-size side yard, the uncles always got up a game of softball for the kids. I began as a tiny, grunting fumbler, swinging in vain at the slowest underhand tosses with a bat as big as I was. By the age of ten or eleven, I was clipping the grass with sharp grounders; then line drives to the garage; then, as a seasoned teenage shortstop, long flies into the strawberry patch beyond the trees. But by then the family reunion was no longer number two on my calendar. It had been eclipsed by such happenings as school dances and miniature golf with my friends. The year came when I felt myself too big to participate in the softball game. In college, some years, I did not even attend the reunion.

  But home—home is a reunion daily. And I never felt too big for Christmas. Christmas was a Bible thing, of course, and a school-vacation thing and a wrapped-presents thing and a homemade-cookies thing—but most of all, as I look back, it was a family thing.

  My parents spent almost nothing on themselves. They bought only the clothes they needed. It was a big deal to treat themselves to a milkshake. They never went to the movies. And yet, for all they gave my brother and me, you’d have thought they were rich. My Christmas gifts came in piles. From Lincoln Logs to the inevitable walnut in the toe of my red felt stocking, I accepted the presents strictly as the objects they appeared to be. Only years later did I realize the truth: the gift was my parents’ selfless love.

  One Christmas morning it bounced lightly off my chest as I came down the stairs, and I looked to see my first football wobbling at my feet. Another year it waited for me in the kitchen. I had unwrapped the last present from under the tree, and my father said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Looks like you did pretty good this year.” And then someone asked me to go to the kitchen for something, and there it was, in front of the sink: a spanking-new cream and green whitewall-tired Roadmaster bicycle. Love leaning on a kickstand.

  My mother and father at the beach in 1940, six months before I was born.

  Big

  Brother

  When my younger brother became student council president as a ninth grader at Rittenhouse Junior High, I was proud. In the years that followed Bill and I played golf, flung Frisbees, shared friends and cars. We were pals.

  But those days were yet to come. During the George Street years, the four-and-a-half-year difference in our ages ruled out being pals. When I was in fourth grade, Bill was in kindergarten; when I was in tenth, he was in sixth. We had different friends, different involvements. Except for two years, we attended different schools. We shared parents and a house, but that was about all.

  Because I wasn’t paying much attention to him then, my store of memories today is not nearly as well stocked as I would like it to be. I remember him, when he was very young, eating ashes from the coal furnace.

  I remember him pilfering my penny collection to buy an ice cream cone.

  I remember him as a toddler, packing our first puppy, Spot, into our father’s black-domed lunchpail. When this kept happening, Spot was sent off to a family without toddlers.

  A few years later along came Lucky (so named because after the lunchpail puppy, we were lucky to get another), part terrier, part unknown, a pretty mutt, mostly black, with white chest and paws and tip of tail. She was friendly, eager, barely disciplined, which is to say, she was like my little brother. They got along wonderfully.

  Our dog Lucky.

  I remember feet-fighting in my bed—lying on our backs and flailing our feet at each other. It was just harmless, boy horseplay, but sometimes I carried it far enough so that Bill wound up crying. I think now that in making him cry, I was fabricating an outlet for tender feelings toward my little brother that found no expression in the natural course of events.

  I remember Bill getting into trouble more than I, both at home and in school. I secretly admired him for daring to just do things, regardless of consequences.

  And I envied him his animation. Well before I entered junior high, I began cooling out. Gone were the days when I would serenade passersby from the gate in my yard or jingle-jangle off to school in my cowboy outfit. I was still friendly, but in a shyer, quieter way. Meanwhile Bill was just lighting up. He was everything I was not: bold and lively and funny. He was a natural mimic and a clown. He had, as the Lloyd Price song went, “Personality.”

  And that’s about it, the extent of my kidhood relationship with my brother, Bill.

  Or so I thought.

  For something surprising happened, something nice, when I told him I was working on my autobiography. I invited him to jot down any recollections of me that he might have, in case I missed any. Several weeks later he handed me a list of memorable moments. I read it over. I was stunned: I hardly recalled any of them.

  He remembers his own hurt feelings when I wouldn’t let him ride my tricycle.

  He remembers, as a preschooler, how impressed he was that I could read cereal boxes.

  He remembers how angry I got when he raided my closet for shirts and when he tangled the strings of my Howdy Doody puppet.

  He remembers fearing for me when Raymond Chillano beaned me with a pitch during a Knee-Hi baseball game. And when the same Raymond Chillano, knowing I could not swim, tipped me in my street clothes into the deep end of the pool at the Valley Forge Swim Club. (Raymond was not always so hard on me. In fact, he was one of my best friends.)

  He remembers an episode which, at the time, he considered positively historic. I was in the fifth grade at Hartranft Elementary. Bill was in first. Normally we walked the three blocks home for lunch. But on this particular day our mother had to be somewhere else, so she gave me money and told me to take my brother somewhere to eat. We met at noon. We went to a luncheonette a block away. We ordered our lunch, and for a little while Billy Spinelli felt as big as anyone in that place. He was having lunch in a restaurant, not a parent or teacher in sight, off into the world with h
is big brother. On the way back to school we were chased by bees.

  Bill remembers as clearly as I the dirt path by the railroad tracks. He especially remembers one day when I propped him on the bar of my Roadmaster and gave him a lift from the dead end to the park. He remembers feeling the carnival-ride thrill of it. He remembers feeling proud and special. Most of all he remembers feeling safe, his brother’s breath in his ear, his brother’s arms joining the handlebars in a protective embrace.

  Such are Bill’s recollections, and after all these years they bumped me over to a new point of view. I have always tended to see our relationship from a single perspective, from my own eyes; that is, Bill as my little brother. Now I see it from a second perspective: myself as his big brother.

  I have decided that I like Bill’s memories of us better than my own. I especially like the one about the bike ride on the dirt path. I am picturing it now. I am feeling Bill’s feeling of safety, and I am feeling the big brother in myself. Maybe, if I keep picturing this memory of Bill’s and feeling it for a long-enough time, it will begin to fool me into thinking it is my own.

  My brother (left) and me, clowning around at Christmas, 1957. The cigarettes are candy.

  Sixteen

  Things I

  Wished I Could Do

  1. Spit between my front teeth

  2. Blast an earsplitting, two-fingered whistle

  3. Braid a lanyard with the colorful plastic cord called gimp

  4. Drink a quart of milk, or anything, at one sitting (like Roger Adelman)

  5. Rock the cradle with my yo-yo

  6. Bless myself like a Catholic

  7. Tap the side of my nose and blow out a booger

  8. Crack a twin Popsicle perfectly in half every time, never to be left with three quarters in one hand and one quarter in the other

  9. Bend my thumb backward until it touches my wrist