ancient flea-ridden creature with sores on his back who chewed the oats from his feed bag in a way to capture my interest, slowly but tirelessly, with the glassy eyes of a superior contemplation.
Less frequent visitors were the knife and scissor sharpeners who worked on the trucks with their noisy footpedal grinding wheels that sent sparks off the steel, sparks being to me the most suggestively volatile phenomena, so quickly self-consuming as almost not to exist; and peddlers wearing derbies who bought used clothes and carried them in enormous packs on their backs; and junk dealers who pushed two-wheeled carts piled high with newspapers and rags and flattened tin cans and broken chairs and beds and boxes of dishes; and men ringing doorbells to sell cartons of fresh eggs, or magazine subscriptions, or red paper poppies from the American Legion; and bearded men in black hats and black winter coats who came begging at the door with coin boxes and letters of credentials from yeshivas. “My God,” said my mother one day, closing the door after still another transient had rung the bell, “is there no end to this? When my father brought us to the Bronx when I was a little girl, he didn’t know the whole Lower East Side would follow.”
These itinerant peddlers, beggars and entrepreneurs were often unwholesome-looking or shabby or dirty and had dull blackened eyes from which all light had departed, but I don’t ever remember feeling threatened by any of them.
One day a Department of Public Works crew appeared to repair a pothole. Their truck carried tar pots and towed a two-wheeled cart that was a kind of stove for heating their asphalt. The stove made a roaring sound as it fired. The crew raised and dropped long-handled flat-irons to flatten the smoking asphalt fill. One of the workers wore a pin-striped suit and vest, and a grey fedora. He was dressed just like my father. But his suit was creased and dirty, and because he was warm his tie was loosened. His hat was pushed back. I was alarmed. I had hoped he was the boss, but the boss was sitting in the truck and reading the newspaper.
When the job was done, this man in the suit swung his long-handled tar iron over his shoulder, just like the others, and followed the truck up the street as it slowly went looking for the next pothole.
L ate each spring a Parks Department traveling farm exhibit encamped in the big park, Claremont. With great excitement of her own my mother took me to see it one day. We crossed Mt. Eden Avenue and the Oval, and the other direction of Mt. Eden Avenue, and then we were at the foot of the park’s retaining wall of rounded stones. We raced up the flight of stone stairs. It was a huge wonderful park, with playgrounds and fields and tree-shaded paths. It was cool compared with the street. In a wooded meadow were the tents and trucks of the traveling farm. There was no gate, no entrance. Suddenly we were among the sheep and their lambs, cows and calves, horses with their foals, all of whom seemed to lend themselves in gentle patience to the touches of city children. Only an occasional bleat or whinny suggested they would rather be somewhere else. But the geese and ducks squawking about in clipped-wing panic would not let us get near them, which seemed to me a logical reaction, a mark of their intelligence, in fact. I was invited to hold a rabbit, which I did. Animals were warm. I touched a foal’s back too lightly and the hide twitched, as if I were a fly. A wooden pen, about the size of a sandbox, held a rippling of peeping chicks, as if a bright yellow flag of the sun was waving over the ground. Hay was played out to the animals in their pens; I smelled the hay, and the manure, and it was not entirely unpleasant, it was a forceful array of smells that alerted you, somehow, to an insistence on more life than you knew. Smiling suntanned young women in light green dresses lectured from the back steps of trailers. We were guided with our mothers’
Less frequent visitors were the knife and scissor sharpeners who worked on the trucks with their noisy footpedal grinding wheels that sent sparks off the steel, sparks being to me the most suggestively volatile phenomena, so quickly self-consuming as almost not to exist; and peddlers wearing derbies who bought used clothes and carried them in enormous packs on their backs; and junk dealers who pushed two-wheeled carts piled high with newspapers and rags and flattened tin cans and broken chairs and beds and boxes of dishes; and men ringing doorbells to sell cartons of fresh eggs, or magazine subscriptions, or red paper poppies from the American Legion; and bearded men in black hats and black winter coats who came begging at the door with coin boxes and letters of credentials from yeshivas. “My God,” said my mother one day, closing the door after still another transient had rung the bell, “is there no end to this? When my father brought us to the Bronx when I was a little girl, he didn’t know the whole Lower East Side would follow.”
These itinerant peddlers, beggars and entrepreneurs were often unwholesome-looking or shabby or dirty and had dull blackened eyes from which all light had departed, but I don’t ever remember feeling threatened by any of them.
One day a Department of Public Works crew appeared to repair a pothole. Their truck carried tar pots and towed a two-wheeled cart that was a kind of stove for heating their asphalt. The stove made a roaring sound as it fired. The crew raised and dropped long-handled flat-irons to flatten the smoking asphalt fill. One of the workers wore a pin-striped suit and vest, and a grey fedora. He was dressed just like my father. But his suit was creased and dirty, and because he was warm his tie was loosened. His hat was pushed back. I was alarmed. I had hoped he was the boss, but the boss was sitting in the truck and reading the newspaper.
When the job was done, this man in the suit swung his long-handled tar iron over his shoulder, just like the others, and followed the truck up the street as it slowly went looking for the next pothole.
L ate each spring a Parks Department traveling farm exhibit encamped in the big park, Claremont. With great excitement of her own my mother took me to see it one day. We crossed Mt. Eden Avenue and the Oval, and the other direction of Mt. Eden Avenue, and then we were at the foot of the park’s retaining wall of rounded stones. We raced up the flight of stone stairs. It was a huge wonderful park, with playgrounds and fields and tree-shaded paths. It was cool compared with the street. In a wooded meadow were the tents and trucks of the traveling farm. There was no gate, no entrance. Suddenly we were among the sheep and their lambs, cows and calves, horses with their foals, all of whom seemed to lend themselves in gentle patience to the touches of city children. Only an occasional bleat or whinny suggested they would rather be somewhere else. But the geese and ducks squawking about in clipped-wing panic would not let us get near them, which seemed to me a logical reaction, a mark of their intelligence, in fact. I was invited to hold a rabbit, which I did. Animals were warm. I touched a foal’s back too lightly and the hide twitched, as if I were a fly. A wooden pen, about the size of a sandbox, held a rippling of peeping chicks, as if a bright yellow flag of the sun was waving over the ground. Hay was played out to the animals in their pens; I smelled the hay, and the manure, and it was not entirely unpleasant, it was a forceful array of smells that alerted you, somehow, to an insistence on more life than you knew. Smiling suntanned young women in light green dresses lectured from the back steps of trailers. We were guided with our mothers’
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