If the summers of Dortmund Circle were filled with sports of all sorts, flingable fruit filled the summers of Abbott Parkway. That wasn’t the only difference.
While nearly all the kids my age on Dortmund Circle were boys, girls dominated the peerage on Abbott Parkway. There were a lot more kids on Abbott Parkway, in part because the street was twice as long. That length also changed our venues of play.
On Dortmund Circle, all us guys lived within a few houses of each other. Our playing fields (mostly the street and our driveways) lay right outside our doors. Given its substantial length and the location of most of the kids, Abbott Parkway presented a different avenue to fun.Continue Reading “Simple Summer Mornings In The Years B.C. (‘Before Chili’)”
Hats Off To Easter!
My mother once told me what Easter evokes in her mind. She grew up in Lackawanna “on the other side of the tracks.” She’d work in my grandfather’s grocery store on Ridge Road. During the Easter season, as she walked up Ingham Avenue to her father’s shop, the alluring aroma of ethnic cooking wafted through her nostrils.
Those smells told you what neighborhood you were in—Polish, Italian, and a mixed ethnic conclave of everything from Mexican to Croatian. Even before getting her master’s degree in Home Economics, the teenage version of Lena had a nose for food. The yeasts were her favorite. From them, she could tell what type of bread each kitchen baked.
Arriving at her dad’s mom-and-pop supermarket, she entered an aromatic atmosphere that defined Easter, not just for her, but for nearly everyone of that era. The sweet scents of purple, pink & lavender hyacinths mixed with the perfumes of the tulips and lilies. My grandfather sold these potted flowers each Easter so families could adorn their festive tables with colorful centerpieces.
Fast forward a generation and the smells were still there. Only the tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils aren’t in pots. They’re planted along the front of the house between the sidewalk coming from the front door and the wall of pale yellow bricks. The flowerbed sat just below the four rectangular panel windows that open up to the parlor of the modest raised ranch home of my youth.
It’s funny. I don’t remember the smell of those tulips. I do remember the smell of the Continue Reading “Hats Off To Easter!”