When I was a kid, the only times I was allowed in the house were to go to the toilet, sleep, eat, help with dishes after dinner, and do homework (not necessarily in that order). I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, NY, and I never needed a phone, because all my friends were in the neighborhood and could be easily accessed by knocking on their doors or ringing their doorbells (the only buttons I had to push).
I remember, once, when I was 8 years old, and the first one home from school, I would ride my bike most of the time after I got home. But on one occasion, while I was riding down my street, a car came up from behind me and honked the horn. Startled, I turned my head sharply to the left and in doing so, I also turned my handlebars to sharply and flipped my bike end over end which threw me down to the pavement where waiting for my right forehead, was a NYC sewer manhole cover. Now these covers are cast iron with raised square patterns:
Although it didn’t knock me out, it dazed me and gave me an incredible headache. I eventually made it to my front stoop (in NYC, a set of stairs leading up to the front door),
where I sat and waited for my sister to get home. When she arrived, I asked her to “Please get me some aspirin. I have a bad headache.” Well, she looked at me with deep concern in her eyes and said “What?” She told me later that I was talking gibberish. I then mimed to her for a pencil and paper so I could write my request down. Well, I wrote, “Please get me some aspirin. I have a bad headache.” She looked at the paper, and immediately proceeded to get me into the house, and call an ambulance. At the hospital, I was diagnosed with a severe concussion where I spent a week. When I finally got back home and could converse normally, my sister showed me the note I had written to her the day of my accident. It was a mathematical equation. It’s funny how the brain reacts to trauma….
After this incident, if my parents were working and my sister was unavailable to let me in the house, I would have to take public transportation (Mostly subways) to Manhattan, as I was too young to be in my house alone. My mom was always working in Manhattan on Broadway as a seamstress:
(West Side Story, The Music Man)
After school, I would take the “A” train to Manhattan from Queens, where I would hang out backstage until my mom was finished with her work. Now, back in the day, there were cops with Billy clubs on patrol in the streets and on the subways and there was the death penalty effect for violent behavior. So, I was very safe when traveling through this system, unlike today, where you take your life in your hands by traveling in the NYC subways.
More to come……