It felt good to commune with my father yesterday as I typed the opening of his autobiographical manuscript here. So good, in fact, that I’d like to commune some more. Here’s the second installment of what he sent me a few years before his death at 76 on January 27, 2009.

I’m not entirely sure that anyone out there is interested, but feeling him looking over my shoulders (or am I looking over his shoulders?) is doing wonders for ME.

Growing Up and Stuff: An Adventure
Part 2

A few things expanded my universe—clip-on roller skates and bicycles. We started to grow up, discovering ourselves and girls. The games changed to Post Office and Spin the Bottle, and some of this girl stuff without playing any games at all.

Then there would be guy talk. When I got older, I found that gal talk was twice as vivid and left very little to the imagination. So much for the guys who thought they knew it all.

Then, of course, came time to break from those guys on the block and seek another group that was a little more interested in girls and less in a good game of stickball.

I was standing in line in Gym at Seth Low Junior High School when I first met Eddy. He already shaved and had a five o’clock shadow. With these few words we started a long friendship: “I’ve got a date and need a few more guys for her girlfriends.”

Eddy was always the romantic and could find girls anywhere. It led to many adventures and helped mold my teenage experience, and also gave me a group of guys to hang out with.

So I became part of a group that ventured out of my world of the block. We went off chasing Eddy’s love interests and having a great time. We expended this to other boroughs after we got into High School.

We discovered Boro Park, a short ride on a bus for us. It became the place to be for the next few years.

In the summer, it was Boro Park at night and Coney Island or Brighton Beach during the day. How could a guy go wrong? We were on this happy trip and growing into our upper teens.

We moved from buying loose cigarettes (we called them “looses”) they sold from an open pack, two cigarettes for three cents. We moved up to buying whole packs at one time. After all, we had to keep up our images.

What image, you might ask? Well, at the time, there was a book and then a picture named The Amboy Dukes. It probably was the only book I read all the way through at the time, except for schoolwork. It was about a group of teenagers trying to act the act of growing up tough.

Not that we were tough. In fact, we avoided almost everything doing with tough, except the image.

We even started our own social club in the basement of a store. We cleaned it up, painted it and borrowed furniture. We managed the make the place presentable and intended to have parties and get-togethers. In order to make the rent, we had to take in some side guys, but with all our efforts the club didn’t last long, the rent being the villain.

Now, between some of Eddy’s adventures, school and odd jobs for pocket money, it seems that the years flew by.

Working odd jobs in the neighborhood consisted mainly of delivering for grocery stores, meat markets, and fruit stores. I could jump a bike from the gutter to the sidewalk carrying a full crate of grapefruit in the basket and thought I was hot stuff.

Hanging out was one of our big things. Since some of the others guys worked in other local stores, we’d hang out in some of them after work and on some evenings.

The candy store, for one. It had a soda fountain, booths to sit in, and you could have your favorite ice cream sodas, or plates of piled high ice cream topped with cherries and real whipped cream, egg creams, cherry-line rickys and charlotte russe (little cakes with a whipped cream topping).

Hanging out with the guys in places like the candy store, a familiar place to us, and comfortable … now, we might not have had the most intellectual conversations, but it was the company, not the conversation, that bound us together for that period of time in our lives.

To be continued …