II. La Vida Es Sueño

Then comes me. I was apparently conceived during a visit my parents took to the World's Fair in New York sometime in 1939.

I only have a few very early childhood memories: in my mother's arms watching some kind of parade, with a band and all, passing in front of the house in Port Richmond.

The smell of canvas (I still "rejoice" in this smell whenever I sense it, which is not too often) from the large tent my parents used to set-up on the beach at the northern-most end of the North Wildwood beach in southern New Jersey, and the flap that tied down over the screen window high on one side of the tent.

Later memories : Watching TV, one of the first in the neighborhood, with loads of neighbors and their kids sitting around on the sofa and chairs with us kids on the floor in front of the grownups, all looking at this oscilloscope-sized BLACK & WHITE screen with a big magnifying glass in front of it, viewing the Mummer's Day Parade on New Years when it was too cold to go out to see it in the flesh.

Being in our car (probably a Nash-- no more of them around!) riding under the subway-elevated line in Philadelphia when the 2nd World War came to an end-- all the cars honking their horns and all.

Having strange dreams of floating above my body and traveling to different places-- then coming back with the very real sensation of actually falling into bed!

The visits to the Philadelphia Water Works Aquarium, that dimly lit, mysterious, damp place having monstrous picture window-like aquaria with water leaking in several places around the bolted metal frames, and the sounds of moving water, seeing those fish with big gaping mouths swimming like in slow motion.

The cat-o-nine tails, a wooden stick about eight inches long having foot-long thongs of leather on the end, that my father always threatened us with if we were "bad". He NEVER used it though.

The visits to Bowman's Hill Tower, along the Delaware River north of Trenton, New Jersey-- climbing the narrow stone stairs of the seemingly unending circular staircase with the shaky wrought iron railing up to the lookout platform-- where my father invariably grabbed me and said he would throw me off the top!

The trip to Trenton before one of my birthdays to get my first oil painting set-- Trenton was very different then! I gave an oil of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the one where he is kneeling beside a rock praying, to Aunt Anna, my father's sister--she framed it and still had it many years later.

The fishing and crabbing trips off of Wildwood Crest or in the Delaware Bay-- the smelly bunker that the crabs liked so much they all crawled into the crab trap to get some! And we used to come home with bushel baskets full of large blue shell crabs (we always threw back the females, the ones with the reddish egg mass on the bottom) packed in masses of green seaweed (and THAT smell of "clicking" crabs and seaweed is an authentic seashore flavour-- it now appears somewhat unusual to me that I have been describing so many smells that I remember-- nobody else ever talks about smells!), and porgies much bigger than I see today at the ShopRite super market.

Then there was the crab cooking session, with the things crawling out of the basket onto the kitchen floor-- chasing them and trying to grab them by the two back legs so they would not bite us!

And filleting the flounders, and scaling the porgies with the scales attaching themselves to anything and everything within a six foot radius.

The eels, my grandfather's specialty, and how you had to hold them to skin them while they were still squirming all over the place-- slippery as hell! Had to use pliers to hold the skin.

Then we discovered the delicious sliver of meat in the blowfish that everybody else throws back-- that fish that puffs up when you tickle its stomach. Dissecting the fish to get to that smallish piece of meat was a real task.

My maternal grandfather always took me fishing with him down to the rockpile separating Wildwood Crest from Cape May. Sitting on it you can see the Naval Base across the inlet, with its firing range that sounded more like popcorn popping across the waters. You only hear the sound of water lapping onto the rocks, the occasional hum of a motorboat or commercial fishing boat slowly going by (strange, it seems as if I saw them pass sort of like viewing a stop-motion animated film-- where the action progresses in little jumps, not a smooth continuum, due to my mental processing of other sensory stimuli that would take my mind away from the motion for a few seconds), and the cry of the seagulls as they vie for scraps of bait I would invariably offer them, throwing it as high in the air as I could, waiting for one of them to catch it in midflight. One always did catch it.

Then there was the time he took me to fish off of some old pilings just off of New York Avenue, on the bay side of Wildwood. It was a place where we would always catch a flounder or two and maybe an eel. It is where I caught my first Oyster Cracker, those ugly big-mouthed fish that are supposed to crack oysters open with their powerful jaws-- at least that is what my grandfather said. I got so wrapped up in fishing, I climbed up onto some wooden pilings farther out than my grandfather so I could "catch more"-- and FELL IN when the wood broke, exposing me to the unknown underwater world of the eel, the oyster cracker and those crabs with the sharp claws! I was terrified! To my surprise the water only came up to my neck, and I scrambled out back to "Uncle Dick" (we always called him that, probably because my mother told us to--I guess she was not too happy that her mother found him in some bar! BUT Grandma was "happier" than my mother-- at least she always projected this "feeling" to us). Wet and with a new experience!

I HAVE NOT GONE FISHING OR CRABBING SINCE THOSE GOOD OLD DAYS, and I miss it!

The first home I really remember if the Duffield Street house in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. Two stories with attic and basement, large yard that went from Duffield Street to the street in back, with a large garage in the rear.

There was a front porch with oak rockers painted dark green (as was the trim on the windows, doors, etc.) having slat seats, and a small front yard full of plants (Hosta, those common big-leafed, low growing things with spikes of purple flowers at the end of the summer. And the Jack-O-Lanterns filled with lantern-shaped seed "pods" having a strange hue of orange-- just right for when they were ripe: Halloween! And Irises, loads of Irises all over the place), with a wrought iron fence in front.

The back yard had some very tall, straight trees that my father planted, one for each of the 5 family members, just this side of the garage. The garage was used for a chicken coop, and I remember the smell of fresh eggs picked right from under the birds, and feeding the things-- and even watching my father chop the head off of that days dinner! They really DO run around even without the head (reminds me now of many people I have known!).

During the summer there always appeared lightening bugs, those insects that glow on and off to attract a mate in the dark. My brother and sister would catch them in a jar and watch enthralled as they blinked intermittently. They have a peculiar smell that I can only associate with lightening bugs. An exotic, acrid, earthy scent.

The back yard is where we kept the aluminum boat that we would use for fishing. The motor was kept in the garage in an old, large metal drum of some sort, always filled with water--I can still smell the exhaust of the running motor-- apparently it had to be run in fresh water for a short while after being used in the ocean.

Curious about the garage-- years after we moved out of that house and after I graduated from Villanova-- a then-time friend who I met again by accident talked about the garage and mentioned how I would always say it had ghosts in it. It is probable that it's true, because I was always known for my wildly weird imagination, like the times I would scare my sister shitless while playing cards, saying that the Old Maid was going to come out of the card and eat her! She would run away screaming! Nasty stuff!!

There was a huge oak mantle between the living room and the dining room, painted white for some strange reason-- today I enjoy being with wood "au natural" and have "stripped" many pieces of old furniture we had and discovered the charm of golden oak, my favorite wood.

To the right of the mantle was my old ratty looking oak desk, that my father got from work when they were "upgrading" to metal. He even engraved a small plastic "plate", black with the letters in white, with my name on it. I still have that same desk in my study here at home--now refinished, and still bearing that "Sigmund" just above the top middle drawer.

The attic was a spooky cramped area where all the Christmas decorations were kept-- among other things I suppose, but I only remember the boxes of lights, tree ornaments and other holiday stuff. My father always put lights, with bulbs larger than the usual ones you see today, around all the front windows-- and there were lots of windows (each one had a separate screen and storm window insert made of wood, that mounted on two clip-like things on the top part, and each had some identifying code stamped on a small lead plate so that we would know which window each belonged to-- all painted the same dark green as the window trim)! And the train set, with the engine that puffed smoke when you pressed a button-- with real train sounds and all. Once a year we could play with it. We always looked forward to Christmas-- and still today, I try to return to those past times during the holidays by doing the same happy things-- sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not-- like this past Christmas, BUT that is for another chapter.

It might seem prehistoric or something, but the milkman actually came down the cobblestone street (Belgian blocks, those neat little rectangles of granite) in a horse-drawn milk cart! The milk was in bottles with paper caps, and the milk always had a layer of cream on top! We had to wash the bottles and return them to the front porch-- "recycling" was the logical thing in those days, it is not a new concept! Curiously, when I was in Madrid muchos años later, across from the American Embassy there was a dairy with cows and all, and they delivered milk the same way, by horse-drawn cart-- this was in the time of Franco, when Madrid was like the U.S. used to be even before my time! That will also be another chapter.

I started school in the "local" public school, which was actually miles from home. No "bussing" then, you had to walk! About the only thing I remember about those school days is the time we actually made butter by churning cream until, somehow, butter really appeared!

Once, while walking through a dump on the way to school, I saw a bunch of kids all huddled around something. It was boxes of my comic books-- I liked Superman, the Classics series (classic stories illustrated in comic form, like The House of the Seven gables, etc.), and especially the horror kind. I was dumbstruck! These were MY comic books. I "branded" everything of mine that I could with an old rubber stamp I found in that desk my father brought home from work for me-- "SHIPPERS LOAD AND COUNT", a nondescript series of words with an unidentified content which I used for absolutely everything I could stamp it on. And there was my stamp on all of the comic books! "Sonny, you had too many of them, and they were all that weird stuff. You should spend more time with school work", was how my mother explained the unannounced disappearance of my treasures. Life continued, even after that!

Then we moved to Gilham Street, Mayfair, in northeast Philadelphia. The house was still being built, and we would go over to see how it was coming along. Just a row house, one on the corner end of the block of repeating house-clones, all looking the same-- although over the years, people changed the fronts with stone, covering the brick facades, added plants, fences, aluminum screen doors and other trimmings, even car ports over the garage in back. The area was sort of desolate, with building just starting. The school, a Catholic one, was only 4 blocks away. And there was talk of a new "shopping center", whatever that was, to be built on the Roosevelt Boulevard--only three blocks away-- WOW, what a potential convenience.

When we finally moved in, there were nothing but empty lots in the block across the street, with some signs of building another street of home-clones. Once, one night when I went to walk the dog, a mutt named Scamper, I walked through the lot in front and somehow walked on some wood piled up-- a piece of twig sprung up unexpectedly and I really jumped up thinking some animal was lunging at me! My active imagination again!

Two stories, brick, with a sort of large basement, part of which was taken up by a garage separated from the rest of the cellar by a wall. A large side and back garden where my mother planted rose bushes along the inside of the chain-link fence and Irises bordering the walls of the house, offspring of the ones her mother gave her for Duffield Street, the old type, smallish purple and yellow flowered kinds. These same Irises have gone with me wherever I have lived, even to the Canary Island place I have! What better way to keep a naturally beautiful part of the family history alive!

The basement was my lair, shared with my brother for our stuff. We each had one of those famous desks, each with our name on it. I had those metal shelves (much stronger than you can buy today!) for my science books, cabinets for shells and fossils, my marine aquaria on the wide glass block window sills, and a space on the side of the garage wall for the animal cages for my chinchilla (gotten from the S.P.C.A.), flying squirrel, chipmunk, and bats collected on one of my caving trips. Thinking back on these things from my present locus in space and time, I am really surprised that my father allowed me to do and keep all of these things. Why? I found him generally cold and seemingly disinterested in what I liked-- he was not a "warm" or hugging person, nor one with whom I could talk if something bothered me. He simply DID things for us, and as I unsuccessfully fight away the tears that are welling up in my eyes, I guess that is how he "showed" us that he loved us, even though I might have preferred more "closeness"!

All my free time was spent at my desk in the basement. My father would often say to my mother, "What is 'the boy' doing down there?" I sometimes wondered whether or not he could recall my name, which, incidently, is the same as his-- I am a Junior!

He and my mother had really high aspirations for us kids, wanting us "to have more than we had", they would say, "to have a better life"-- and somehow the three of us have been "better off" in a lot of ways. They were mortgaged up to the gills, my mother had to start working to keep up with the bills, and all progressed somehow.

A friend from Iowa visited me once and brought me a pair of raccoons. I had asked him to try to catch me a pair of young ones. We kept them in a pen my father made in back of the house. I was the only one who could really handle them, usually with thick leather gloves on. They hated my father for some reason, and would always try to bite him. After a year or so, they "disappeared". They were much bigger, stronger, and a bit tamer than before. I did not even bother asking too much what had happened to them, I could imagine. By this time I was accustomed to my parents doing "unannounced" things, and preferred dedicating my time to my hobbies: identifying and cataloging shells, fossils, minerals, and whatever else I got into in the Natural Sciences.

I shared a bedroom with my brother on the second floor. We made a "crystal set", one of those "primitive" radios receivers that worked using a galena crystal (PbS, lead sulphide-- not to be confused with "PBS"!) with a "cat's hair" poking it, and some sort of wire coil that you had to manipulate to get different radio stations to appear-- used NO electricity. My brother and I would use earphones to listen to "The Shadow" and other such programs after we were supposed to be asleep.

Billy, my brother is the electronic whiz. He knew Morse code and built a radio transmitter, passed whatever test was required, got his call letters, and communicated with people around the world. He kept an index card file containing all the "call cards" he would receive by mail. He now teaches at the old Glassboro State College (now Rowan College) in New Jersey not far from Philadelphia, after graduating from Villanova a couple years after I did. He has 5 kids ranging in age from married to 3rd grade.

He entered a seminary in Bettendorf, Iowa, but returned home after a year-- just like my father. Interestingly enough, when he went there, the whole family took the first "long" trip we ever took together, all the way out to Iowa. We really never took trips, except to the shore during the summer.

My sister, Barbara, entered a convent to become a nun, and stayed until her final vows, which is when my maternal grandmother died and she returned home to be with mother.

Strange life, this sacred, human, religious / earthy one! My "fantasy" was to become a Jesuit-- the ONLY thinkers left in the world today-- but I never did more about this interest than play priest when I was a kid.

One of my mother's aunts was/is(?) a nun-- the only "religious" I know about in the family. My religious side is really "inside" me, I try to live it in my own way. One has to "believe" in some higher force, whatever it be-- just to make sense out of life! In a way it is "comforting", in yet another it is somewhat intimidating.

My parents also had a summer place on New York Avenue between 17th & 18th Streets in North Wildwood, New Jersey, a large three-story "duplex" I guess you could call it. We lived on one side, and we rented out 3 apartments on the other. That was work during the summers, keeping the apartments cleaned and ready for the next occupants. Plus us kids all had summer jobs to help pay the bills-- we only got an "allowance", the rest went to our parents. I worked as a waiter, dish washer, short-order cook, selling ice cream on the boardwalk at a Howard Johnsons (very small, not like the HoJos of today), operated a carousel, and was an usher/ticket seller at one of the local movies (saw The Seven Year Itch and Blackboard Jungle more times than I want to remember!).

Work on the boardwalk often ended after midnight. I would frequently buy a hoagie (a really foot-long one), go with my bike (the peddle kind) to the beach, lie on the sand and listen to the sound of the surf breaking along the shore, watch the fleeting shadows of the plovers running in their funny way up and down the water line as the surf advanced and retreated, and looked at the star-filled sky, identifying constellations (Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, etc.) and trying to figure out which specks of light were stars and which were planets-- the stars are supposed to twinkle while the planets appear as a steady glow. Something to do with the distance the light travels from each and the amount of dust and stuff in space the light travels through.

The house ALWAYS needed work : painting the clapboard siding (three stories of it!), general plumbing (I remember my father using some kind of lead pot to melt lead for the sewer connections under the house-- another smell that I find unique, that of melting lead and solder [it might have been the rosin, that brownish ooze that always appeared], a crawlspace you had to maneuver over the sand), roof work, wall papering and much more. We went down the shore on weekends before the summer season to get the place ready for the summer. My mother and my brother and sister and I lived/worked there during the summer during school vacations, while my father remained in Philadelphia working at GE. He came down on weekends.

Each side of the house had a large garage in the back. One of them was my "lab", where I had a table for a desk, a large display case (that they gave me at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) where I kept fossils, shells, bird and fish skulls, meteorites and other such stuff. Piled in back, on a high shelf were bits and pieces of furniture and other things that would not fit anywhere else. Under this "junk" shelf was one of those old refrigerators with the large coils on top, a GE I think (it did not function). I kept film, the alcohol I preserved various snails, clams, sea urchins, starfish and fish in, and the many jars of preserved animals I had for later study.

Along the side of the garage I planted-- you can imagine what-- the same purple and yellow Irises. In front I had a bed of Prickly Pear cacti-- the only cactus native to the sand dunes of southern New Jersey. No one ever associates cacti with NJ!

Behind the garages was the vegetable garden, always full of Jersey tomatoes, some cucumbers, and strawberry plants.

My bedroom was on the third floor. It had a sloping ceiling and one dormer window like on the side. There used to be a lighthouse at the end of North Wildwood, and at night the light would appear, then disappear through this window. I would sit up and count the seconds between flashes.

This house was sold while I was studying and teaching in Europe. It was just too much work. No one bothered to write me that my father had developed cancer and could no longer do the high painting and other work!

My parents then bought a smaller one story/with attic place on Columbine Road in Wildwood Crest, slightly south of North Wildwood, in a mainly residential area. It was a beautiful Arts and Crafts-style home, with cedar shingles, three dormers in the attic, and a large wrap-around front porch. My father had a garage built in back, paved the driveway and put up a chain-link fence. At this point my father died.

My mother had a gas heater put in, hoping to eventually live there-- it was quieter than Philadelphia, and a smaller house with a much larger garden.

Shortly thereafter I returned from Spain to be with my mother. I lived in Wildwood, where I worked at the local commercial laundry first as a sheet pusher on one of the large sheet pressing machines. The laundry gave great Christmas parties, with loads of buffet-style food-- plus a bonus! I later drove a laundry pick-up truck, going as far as Atlantic City to get dirty linen from the hospital, local restaurants and such. Later I taught science at an area well-equipped high school, and gave evening classes at the local school in Biorhythms and Parapsychology.

I planted an enormous vegetable garden on one side of the two-lot property-- the usual, loads of tomatoes and other vegetables. Guess what I planted on the border of the fence? Irises, of course, and a bed of those cacti--which even produce beautiful yellow flowers followed by the fruit which is edible-- slimy but edible. Still no car, just getting around by bicycle. Took the bus to Philly to visit mom.

My bedroom was in the attic. That is where I set up my books, lab, and work area. The bed was a mattress on the floor in the front. My companions were the pair of Siamese cats I brought back from the Canaries, Devi and Shiva. The kitten production continued, and I usually either gave them away or sold them.

I noticed an ad in the paper that a large apartment house a couple blocks away was selling some old mantle pieces before knocking down the house to build a motel-- real "progress"!. Somehow, with the help of a neighbor we were able to move the crappy-looking, seven foot monstrosity, painted over in white, to the house. This was in the middle of winter.

I spent literally weeks, inside the house, stripping away the FOUR layers of white, blue, white and gray paint from the thing (not realizing, at the time, that the fumes of the stripping solution would maintain me in a constant state of dizziness)! Had to use dentists tools to get the encrusted paint chips from the carved details-- and there were loads of carvings on it, not even visible nor imagined under the layers of paint! It also had several columns along the sides and a widw mirror abobe the first of two ledges.

My mother always wanted a mantle piece-- possible because she liked the one on Duffield Street many years before. By Christmas time it was completed-- a real gem, in my favorite wood, golden oak! I installed it on a wall in the front room; it was just decorative, not to be used as a fire place. It was my Christmas present to my mother, an incentive for her to finally move in with me at the shore.

She did decide to move to Wildwood Crest within a couple of months, after she would sell the Philadelphia home and tie up any loose ends there. In less than seven weeks she too died.

At the insistence of my brother and sister, the house in Philadelphia and in Wildwood Crest HAD TO BE sold-- money in their pockets was more important than where I would live or what I would do. They both had homes and growing families, and my lifestyle was not really to their liking.

The homes were sold, the "inheritance", what there was of it, was split up........

and the story continues, hopefully, in Chapter III. Friday, 12 January 1996

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