Of Martians and Kings

My first clear memory conjures a tree-lined avenue in the Bronx.  The street is named Leland Avenue.  It was a bustling drag in my childhood mind, crowded with baby carriages and new moms.  Under brightly colored chiffon scarfs, the women wore their hair twirled collectively in a million tight pin curls, battened down with enough metal bobby pins to anchor a battleship.  They sat on front stoops and compared offspring, gossiped, complained and encouraged each other. They watched their kids draw with stubs of fat chalk on the sidewalk, play tag, hopscotch and jump rope.  One to two hours of fresh air daily was mandatory.  Even in the winter my own mother would open the windows of our dank, tiny apartment for a daily dose of gray city sunlight.

Occasionally, the crowd of loquacious sidewalk female inhabitants were forced by law to cram into nearby doorways and vestibules as loud sirens overhead screamed practiced warnings of impending destruction.  Later in my childhood, when I was school age, we learned the correct way to clamor under classroom desks as we rehearsed, as a major east coast city, to escape inevitable attacks from the evil Russians.  The attacks never came.  But we were ready for anything in the 1950s, including invasions from Mars and newfangled rock and roll.

My grandfather – musician, spinner of
fables, humorist and my first art teacher.

My grandparents lived on the same street, a few houses down.  I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, an immigrant from Copenhagen who made his early way in America as a pianist in the fabled silent movie theatres of New York City.  On the burnished, dark brown upright in the home of the sophisticated  Dane and his younger Austrian wife, he played a repertoire of trills for his attentive grandchildren – highlighting the mustached Hollywood villain as he tied the heroine to the railroad tracks, the train sped forward, her hands untied at the very last second before she was carried into the sunset by the man in the white hat.  He played ragtime and beautiful classical music.  His fingers flew and he was a fascinating spectacle to behold.  When he got up to get something out of the “icebox” for my cheimaphobic grandmother, my younger sister and I would open the piano bench, careful to minimize creaking of its satin brass hinges to reveal reams of sheet music and an over sized publication of a Rand McNally world alas.  My sister and I could not read sheet music but we did recognize maps.  So we settled ourselves side by side on the backless bench and spread the giant publication on to the filigreed music holder, conveniently centered over the black and whites, and we would bang out the melodies of Kansas or Africa.  Usually, after only a couple of minutes, Grandpa called us into the kitchen for flat soda and pretzels or into the back room to work on a specially prepared art project – with a hopeful smile and a look of relief on his face.  My grandmother was not so subtle.  “Pop, tell the kids to stop banging on that piano.”  There must be something wrong with grandma’s ears, we thought.  We sounded great.

My little sister’s latent talents were not yet identified, but she was less artistically inclined than I was and she would often be dragged from the art lessons by my killjoy grandmother to have her face washed of black carbon paper, heavily smudged, or her hands scrubbed from her curious finger immersions into colorful pots of paint.  My sister always lived on the edge, pushing the limits of my grandmother’s short patience, only a phone call away from regular daily extraction from our grandparents' apartment by my mother, off to home for a dreaded nap.  On the other hand, I spent hours at the nicked and scarred rectangular wooden table that my grandfather so painstakingly prepared with exciting and creative materials.  Colored pencils, construction paper, scissors, little tin topped jars of paints and springy sable brushes.  I learned to draw by tracing the “funnies” with Grandpa, and later copying them freehand – he especially favored a comic strip called “The Little King.”  Then it was my nap time.  He would stay with me until I fell asleep, creating yarns of nap time sagas, fractured fairy tales on the fly, fueled by his unique and exceptional imagination.  Little Red Riding Hood somehow landed on a thatched cottage roof in the deep woods on a Wednesday only to be rescued by sliding down the long neck of a purple spotted giraffe on Friday.  The “sandman” perched on the clothesline that draped across the small back yard, right outside the window.  Where did he sleep?  In the clothespin holder bag?  What did he look like?  I think that he may have resembled “The Little King.”

Eventually I would fall asleep, completely unafraid of sandmen, little kings, Russians, Martians and Elvis.