7-Up

One of my Oldest Friends has proposed that we watch the movie 49-Up, which came out a few years ago (check!) and then to review our own lives, bringing together our accounts in some fashion. This documentary began a series of interviews with a number of British subjects, who were filmed every seven years throughout their lives to follow them through what turned out to be very interesting times. So we might compare our experiences at seven, fourteen, twenty-one, etc, and see what we learn. I am not too sure about fourteen myself – that will require some research to anchor the year to events as I recall them, what we call timebinding. But seven I find already well-equipped with memory hooks.

When I turned seven we were living at 41-B Beaconwood Road, which is right off of Beacon Street, the same Beacon Street that runs all the way into downtown Boston. But we were out in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, in a side-by-side ranch-style duplex on a cul-de-sac. It was located about a mile from the Newton Highlands stop on the MTA. My room had a piece of linoleum to cover the floor, a desk and chest of drawers that were purchased unfinished and painted pale blue.

Bozo the Clown, who had a popular children’s television show, was reputed to live in one of the nondescript houses across and further down the street.

My parents worked every day in the city, my mother as a textbook editor at Ginn & Company, my father as an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The MTA was a trolley out where we boarded the train, and still is, the stations little open shelters beside the train tracks, that becomes a subway somewhere in past Brookline into the heart of the city, where the cars screech into underground ceramic-tiled stations. The noise was horrendous. But in downtown Boston we might visit the Garden, where the swan boats floated magically on a pond, or the Commons. Most likely we would visit bookshops. It seemed possible that I visited every second-hand bookshop in Boston and Cambridge, as my parents were both students of English literature on the prowl for books. My mother spent her commutes reading British Victoriana toward her dissertation, including the complete works of an author named Israel Zangwill that she would later get an entire book out of.

I expected that I would be a teacher and writer like my mother. My parents said when I grew up I could be a Cliffie, and go to Radcliffe, and iron my hair.

That summer is most likely the one that we went on a number of vacation road trips. Our family had no car at that time, and thus depended entirely on public transit and on friends who did have cars for trips further afield. (It is also most likely that my mother was working throughout the summer.) My mother had a friend from Ginn named Ardis Osborne who took us on a family visit to New Hampshire and Vermont (not really much of a drive by Midwestern standards). We went to a sharp rocky beach on the cold North Atlantic, that was quite different from what I had been led in southern Texas to expect of a beach. We saw Walden Pond, and the Minute Man statue dedicated to “the shot heard round the world”. We visited Fruitlands, the farm where Louisa May Alcott lived when her father Bronson Alcott was devising a utopian community.

I spent a number of weeks in a summer school, where the children spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in an auditorium waiting for the busses to their neighborhood. I was in a class that was introduced to some colorful little wooden blocks, that had clear mathematical relations to one another in their lengths, although I was the only one in the class that apparently was able to grasp this fact. It was quite literally graspable, as much of the New Math curriculum of the time required, and the rods were still in use years later when I went to the School of Education (but rather expensive apparatus I expect). But I digress.

In the fall we moved to another house in Newton, nearer the Newton Centre stop, on Cabot Street. I went to second grade at the Cabot School, a few blocks away. Miss Robertson was the teacher (not Robinson like the Swiss family, but Robertson, get that right!). It was discovered I could win spelling bees, acing even hard words from the fourth-grade list like "kitchen". The classroom had a piano and a record player in it, and Miss R taught us to sing quite a number of Peter, Paul & Mary songs off their album. We learned "Puff the Magic Dragon", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and "If I Had a Hammer", but I will spare you the recitation. She also taught us a song about the Titanic, probably in preparation for the visit to our class of a very old lady who actually remembered the sinking of the Titanic – not that she had survived it, but she remembered the event.

There was a ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and they thought they’d built a ship that the water could never go through! It was on the maiden trip, when the iceberg hit the ship, it was sad when the great ship went down. Long chorus of It was sad boys sad. The next verse contained non-historical material concerning the establishment of class relations on board, but concluded So they put the poor below, and they were the first to go. It was sad….

I was already reading better than any of the reading groups in the class, so for reading period they sent me down the echoing empty hallway to a special program in another classroom. The class there had free access to shelves of books, and the program was to read as you pleased. I took in a favorite book on Florence Nightingale, and lost it there.

Despite my peculiarities – my name was always cause for comment, It’s a boy’s name – I eventually began to find friends in the neighborhood. Marjorie had dark brown curls and lived in a very grand house, farther up the hill, where they had a black maid that I caught a glimpse of on one of my few visits. While I was still not sure what she meant by a black person, Marjorie confided in me that they were a different kind of people, who smelled funny. I cannot recall whether she mentioned that her own family was Jewish, although in retrospect that is quite clear to me.

I think it was that Christmas that my half-brother Christopher came to stay with us. Chris was very dear to me, although we were not strictly speaking related as he was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, and lived with his mother, but we had known each other since we were four and I put up with a lot from kids who made fun of such a thing as a half-brother when I told them I had one. We did not have a Christmas tree, but Chris and I made one in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper, lying on the floor in the hallway by the stairs as I recall, as that was the only floorspace big enough to work in. It was a very tall, narrow tree, two rolls wide, but not really very satisfactory as Christmas trees go. The wallpaper had been found in the attic. Other marvelous things were in that attic: a stack of ancient National Geographic magazines; a stamp collection featuring many stamps from someone’s wartime correspondence to Europe and the Far East, that I took with me when we left; a full set of Edwardian-era children’s encyclopedias, that I went about reading from cover to cover.

And then I turned eight, and 1963 began.