I have so
many happy childhood memories, but here were two that leapt to mind
when I read your question, so we’ll do those. One is of the joyful
vairety; the other is delight.
Both of these occurred when I was 3 to 5 years old, living in Buffalo, NY.
My
dad loved to take me for a walk on Franklin Street, which must not have
been very far from our apartment on Elmwood Avenue. I have just
Googled for the maps of the main places from my memories of this time
and found them all in a relatively small area of
Buffalo. St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Canesius Jesuit School on Delaware
Street, the street we lived on (Elmwood Ave. ) and the street where my
grandparents lived ( West Ferry Street. ) I know now from the map that
we lived on Elmwood very close to Delaware because
it was a very short walk to my kindergarten at Canesius School. My
world at age 3-5 was circumscribed by these four places.
ST. JOSEPH’S CATHEDRAL on Franklin Street.
You can see on the map
that St. Joe’s was at the other end of Elmwood Avenue from where our
apartment was. So perhaps we drove to the church and just went for a
walk in that vicinity.
My Dad was
in the Knights of Columbus in St Joseph’s parish, and also was the
Scoutmaster of the Explorer Troop of the Parish. When my mother broke
her leg ice skating on Lake Erie, I was 5, and
one of my Dad’s scouts Chuck Alaimo was tasked with walking me to
school in the morning. I don’t have any recollection of how I got home.
Perhaps one of my aunts picked me up and took me back home. Chuck
lived nearby and it was on his way to school, so he
held my hand the two or three blocks and took me to the school in the
snow and ice. (Buffalo has the most snowfall of all American cities, if
you didn’t know.)What a good Scout!
But that’s not the happy memory I was going to tell you.
My Dad was
really attached to the Cathedral parish. He loved the building, the
grounds, the nuns and priests. I was supposed to go to kindergarten
there, and I don’t know why that fell through,
perhaps because of the distance from our house. Anyway, my intended
kindergarten teacher was Sister Aurelia. I recall she was young and
pretty, and the day Dad told her I wouldn’t be coming to her class, she
went into the convent and brought out the three
figures – Jesus, Mary and Joseph—that we have used all these years in
our main nativity set. They were wrapped in a hankie or a scarf, and
she seemed so sad.
But that’s not the memory I was going to tell. This is it.
One day in
the spring my Dad and I were walking down Franklin Street in front of
the cathedral and we met a man in a wheelchair coming the other way.
We stopped and talked, and I saw that the man
didn’t have any legs below the knee. I started to cry and they asked my
why and I said it was because his legs were gone. The man smiled really
sweetly and reached in his pocket and gave me some coins. My Dad kind
of didn’t want to take them, but the man
insisted that he wanted to give me something, that it wasn’t for Dad, it
was for me.
I remember
noticing that my dad’s feelings were stirred by this encounter, but I
didn’t understand it. Now, I can surmise that the man was a veteran of
WWII which had ended only a few years before,
during which Dad had lost buddies but himself had been spared grave
physical injury. Perhaps he felt, ‘There but for the grace of God go
I.” Anyway, we went into the cathedral and used the coins to light a
candle for the man with no legs, and knelt and said
a prayer to Mary for him.
I
can’t imagine it was my idea to do that. My Uncle Johnny had a candy
and ice cream store and I’m pretty sure I would have thought of getting
an ice cream before I would have thought of lighting
the candle. But my dad made me think that I was the one who was pious
and generous, and I felt quite happy that I was such a good girl. I
think now it was a defining moment, literally, in that in whatever way a
5 year old can have a sense of self, I had the
sense that I was sympathetic, prayerful and unselfish. More than likely,
it was how my dad wanted me to be, or to become. I just know that it
made me feel really happy. I call this kind of happy “Joy.”
The
second happy memory involved a toy truck. I have found a picture of it
and would really like to paste it here, but I can’t figure out how to
do it.. It was a Tonka truck 1954 with a green
cab and white cargo area. It was heavy, to my hands at least, molded
metal with hard black rubber wheels, and a chain across the open back.
The white sides of the cargo area were like slats. On Google the
captions call it a utility truck. Anyway, our apartment
was on the second floor, above the dental office of our landlord, Dr.
Patti (sp?) who lived in the 3rd floor apartment above us with his wife and children.
Our
apartment was spacious to my eyes. It had a front entrance and a back
entrance, both up a flight of stairs. The back door entered directly
from the outside, but the front door entered from
an indoor staircase. From the front door, the kitchen was directly
ahead and the bathroom to the left at the end of a hallway. To the
right the hall went to the living room and two bedrooms. The hardwood
floor of the hallway ran from outside the bathroom
all the way to the back door, an extremely long distance to me at the
time.
I
don’t know why we got the truck, but the day we got it, Daddy started
playing with me with it, rolling it to me across the floor. I loved the
feel of it, the sound of the rubber wheels rolling
on the wood, and especially that power of pushing it and watching it go
such a distance! Little by little, I learned to line it up and push it
straight so that it would go farther and farther without bumping either
wall, and get all the way to Daddy on one
push. Gradually, he backed up farther and farther down the hall towards
the bathroom end. That was the dark end, while I sat in the living room
end, which was full of light from the windows on that side. Mom stood
in the kitchen doorway, watching intently
as we sent that truck speeding between us, back and forth. From my push
it would go clear into the dark where my Dad’s big hands would catch
it, turn it around and whizzz it back to me. It had a hefty feel as I
turned it back around for the return trip.
I loved the solid weight of that truck.
We
were all laughing at the sheer fun of simple play. I clapped my hands
every time I sent it down the hall, and every time if came back to me.
Over and over I sent that truck into the dark
and only to have it return again and again and again from my father’s
hands, into mine, my mother leaning in the doorframe, cool and graceful
in her yellow and brown skirt, cheering us on.
Our
play seemed to last for hours, but in fact, it has lasted 56 years in my
heart and mind as a moment of pure happiness, the kind I would call
“delight.”
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