Rainy Day Children of the Summer

Kids in my old neighborhood found fun things

to entertain them during a summer storm from watching

the sidewalk steam away its heat to dodging raindrops

to call one another out to play.

The best part of being a kid on Gless Avenue in Belleville in the 1960s was having four cousins - Patsy, Tommy, Bobby and Lorraine - living next door, and about a dozen other kids all just a few houses up or down our dead end street.

For a few years, my Dad’s older brother Joe lived by himself downstairs from us after Gram died. Uncle Joe was old then, to me, anyway, and had no kids of his own, as far as any of us knew. And it seemed to us as if he was already retired, or simply too worn out to work anymore.

Someone called him a babysitter once because he had a half dozen kids and me playing on his front porch. He just smiled at the babysitter remark and waved his hands in a "suffer the little children" gesture.

Continue reading: Rainy Day Children of the Summer

Chasing the mosquito man

For all the DDT -- Drop Dead Twice -- sprayed

on hot summer evenings, the killer fog never seemed

to eradicate mosquitoes (or lightning bugs). One always managed

to squirm through a tiny hole in the metal screen

and spend most of the night buzzing your ear.

I saw the greatest minds of my dead end street running into the blue mist of the sweet-smelling cloud behind the Essex County Mosquito Man's Jeep.

Summer in the 1960s, and the living was good.

Sticky fly paper hung over the Maytag wringer washing machine next to the kitchen sink. Melmac cups were neatly stored on the yellow contact paper on the shelves behind the glass doors. Sometimes, you'd bug Ma while she was cooking and get to eat a raw hot dog. It was just like rolled baloney from Prosperi's around the corner store.

Continue reading Chasing the mosquito man

The fountain of youth under the pipeline

The fountain of youth under the pipeline

Four decades later, I return to the pipeline. The dragon's

tail is less pronounced, and full-grown trees

hide the view of homes on Sycamore.

“Hey, Ant! You got a third eye!” Gary yells but it doesn’t help me see much better.

Fumbling, I pick up my twenty-six-inch Schwinn, but I drop it just as quickly. Then pick it up again. Holding it up, it’s holding me up.

Gary is staring at me. I sense this more than I see it. Can’t see much of anything really. Gary looks like a tree, the bike in my hand, a tangled red bush. The world isn’t spinning but it’s coming in cloudy.  I sense something tremendous has transformed my eight-year-old body.

“That’s what happens when your bike hits a rock on the pipeline,” Gary explains.

Continue reading: The fountain of youth under the pipeline

Waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man

Hot summer nights on our dead end street 

were full of mosquitoes, fireflies, kids playing Sputnik, 

and an interminable wait for Jerry the ice cream man.

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

It was the same way up and down the block on Gless Avenue in Belleville, N.J. Anybody who got rid of their ice box and got an electric refrigerator had about the same amount of freezer space.

Unlike an actual ice box, think: the kitchen on The Honeymooners, where you put in a block of ice and it melted water into a pail underneath, these new-fangled refrigerators used electricity to take heat and make cold.

Continue reading Waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man

Waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size that fit two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was never room for ice cream except at your birthday!

It was the same way up and down the block on Gless Avenue in Belleville, N.J. Anybody who got rid of their ice box and got an electric refrigerator had about the same amount of freezer space.

This is Jersey. It's hot in the summer in New Jersey. We were hot. We sweated and drank tap water from the garden hose to cool off. We ran around in the sun, got sun burn, it peeled, and we went back out in the sun.

In the summer, it was hot. We played in the heat. We kids kept cool by running around outside and making our own breezes. We played hide-and-seek and learned to count to 100 by fives. At our peak on that one dead end block we had up to 28 kids. (We're talking baby boom, here.)

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Time to run with scissors (one of those forwards!)

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!

"First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.

Ear-Splittin' Louden-Boomer

My neighbor Jerry was always one to take things apart to see how they tick. He liked to play his Grand Funk Railroad at Ear-Splittin Louden-Boomer until the speakers exploded. Then he'd take apart his woofers and tweeters and make them as good as new.

He was the same way with his electric guitar and amp. You could hear him halfway up the block on Carpenter Street.

He had one of those gas-powered airplanes. It made a lot of noise when the engine was running. It sounded like a wild lawn mower. But I don't remember him ever getting the plane to fly. And even if he did, it would surely have crashed in to one of the gazillion trees on our property.

Did I mention Jerry got me to join the Boy Scouts? Then he got too sick to ever go on any of the camping trips. We tried to send each other Morse Code signals bedroom-to-bedroom with a flashlight. I never could get the difference between a long and a short flash, so, to tell him I was finished, I put the light on my chin and looked like Herman Munster.

No wonder he became a computer program ... when the first PCs came out ... and later made a career - from which he retired - out of keeping a New York bank's computers humming.

He was also a cable TV installer. That was when it was all brand new. He was the first person I ever heard of to have a carpal tunnel operation.

When you looked at the scars from that operation, you'd think he tried to kill himself.

He was the first kid in the neighborhood to play the Woodstock album - and the Fish Cheer really, really loud. It was like we were getting away with something.

Anyway, Jerry always came down from Pennsylvania for my book signings. Once he came down and had to rush back because it was his daughter's prom and he had to take her pictures when she was all dolled up.

Nobody was surprised when he told us that his daughter was an honest-to-God rocket scientist.

Copyright © 2008 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

Death Is Philadelphia - AARP

I guess if anybody would know, it's the folks at AARP The Magazine.
The group's July & August 2007 issue has a story on Things To Know By 50.

Number 42 is How To Stay Married.

This article in "the world's largest circulation magazine" instructs poets to "pretend your relationship (marriage) is a road trip. Your wedding was the Holland Tunnel. Your life is the New Jersey Turnpike. Death is Philadelpia. Pretend there are no exits, only rest stops."

I've actually been to Philadelphia and I don't think it's that bad.

The Holland Tunnel a wedding. Wow. I know I'll never make it as a poet now.


Copyright © 2007 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.