Alex Levy

There was a car slowly cruising up and down Woodside Avenue, and having nothing better to do, having just finished mowing my lawn, I watched it.  I felt rather mellow, as a cool, well-prepared martini tended to make me feel on a hot afternoon, especially after several hours of work on the perfect lawn.  The car, moving so slowly up and down the street, was unusual because there was really nothing special to see on Woodside, just houses, lawns and trees.  So, I watched it, until it came to a stop in front of the house next door, and a tall, burly man in his mid-forties stepped out of the car.  He limped to the front porch of our neighbor’s house, the limp being caused by the blue, flexible cast on his right leg, which covered it from thigh to ankle.  I called out a friendly hello  from the shade of my porch, and then decided to save him a few steps, as walking seemed difficult for him.   I left my porch, walked towards him and told him not to bother going up the several steps of the front porch, as the neighbors weren’t home.  I had seen the boys, led by their father, going off to a Boy Scout meeting, while the girls had gone off to a church meeting with their mother.  My neighbors were lovely people, who, however, still flew a 48-star flag on holidays.

He wasn’t interested in the family living in the house, didn’t know them, but he wanted to know whether the old lady who used to live on the second floor, the piano teacher, still lived there.  He said that when he was a teenager he used to wash her windows and run little errands for her.  At the time he and his family, which included his two brothers, had all lived in the corner house, in what was now the Cole house, although he didn’t know who lived in that house now.  He had spent all of his early years in that house, and remembered the neighborhood with a great deal of affection.  It was at this point that I became really interested because I had known “the old lady upstairs,” and it looked like I was finally going to get some answers to questions about our house which had troubled me for some time.  So, I introduced myself, and he introduced himself as George, and I asked him if he would join me over on my porch, where it was cool and we’d be closer to the beer, and he was willing enough.   We sat there on my front porch in the cool shade of a hot Friday afternoon, and we began to talk.

I’m going to stop here for a moment to explain that I always ask someone who is injured how it happened, how did he or she feel now?  George had that tremendous, blue cast on his leg, and so I just had to find out how that had come about.  I am not now nor have I ever been a candidate for sainthood, and because this questioning of the injured may give a false impression about how sensitive and caring I really am, I’d better explain why I do this.  Unfortunately, this particular post is getting a bit long, and so, if you’re interested, you’re going to have to indulge me, and read about that in the next post.

Abi came to us by way of Sol, my father-in-law.  It seems that someone owed him some money, and managed a barter arrangement in which Sol wound up with the crazy dog, which at the time no one knew to be crazy.  I wanted a dog because I always enjoyed dogs, particularly German shepherds.  Linda wanted a large dog to keep her company while she was home alone, and Sol had absolutely no need of a dog.  So, he gave us Abi, who, except for her little crotchets, was a very good family dog.

I’ve mentioned before how useful a dog could be in making friends with neighbors, but there could also be unforeseen circumstances.

It seemed that Abi had a secret admirer abut whom we knew nothing.  His name was Duke, and he was an unusually large German shepherd who lived on Highwood Avenue, a street running parallel to our own.  Duke was a talented dog who had somehow learned to open doors on his own.  This particular evening, he opened the door of his own house and left, having decided he wanted to visit Abi.

Linda and I spent our late evenings up in our bedroom, watching TV.  It was a large, comfortable room with its own fireplace, which however, we didn’t use too often, as bringing wood up and ashes down was far less appealing than a fire in the bedroom was romantic.  We shared a comfortable double recliner, an ideal piece of furniture for joint, intensive, television watching.  This Saturday evening, while we were as relaxed as two human beings who had lived together for a long time could be, watching late night TV, we suddenly noticed this large dog, a German shepherd,  that we didn’t know, in our bedroom, staring at us.  Duke had opened our downstairs door, which I hadn’t yet locked for the night, and come upstairs to join us and rub muzzles with Abi.  Naturally, Duke had startled us, but after we had recognized him, and a few phone calls later, we met his owner (with coat over nightgown), and he was taken home.  What was surprising about the incident was that Abi had given no sign that Duke, this quite large pooch, had entered our home.  Usually, she absolutely freaked out when anyone came near.  I guess that in this case she had her own reasons.

Dogs need to be walked, and this I did regularly each morning, keeping her on her leather leash.  I thought the leather leash was so much fashionable than any other kind!  Abi needed a sturdy leash because she’d also freak out at any number of things.  She was unpredictable.  A case in point was when an elderly man, the aged and frail grandfather of another family, was taking his constitutional one morning.  As soon as Abi saw him, about a block away, she freaked, barking, leaping and pulling at her leash in an uncontrollable way.  The fashionable, leather leash suddenly snapped, and off went Abi, galumphing in the direction of this poor, old man for all she was worth.  I was terrified.  I had visions of the elderly man bitten, mangled, on the ground, killed by my crazy dog.  However, when Abi got to him, she suddenly stopped, rolled over on her back, and waited to have her belly scratched, which the old gent did willingly.  As mentioned, Abi was unpredictable.

In Ridgewood, organized sports was a religion, and its first manifestation occurred when boys were ready to participate in the Tiny Tots program, a baseball program for seven and eight year olds.  Later there would be Biddy Basketball, street hockey and Jets and Rockets football, in all of which Josh would participate, but the first program was baseball about which I knew nothing and cared even less. It seemed  the thing to do for Josh because he would enjoy it.  What I didn’t expect was how much I would enjoy it, particularly that first day, a bright, crisp Saturday morning, when we were summoned to “tryouts” at one of the village’s elementary schools, a bucolic setting of rolling hills, manicured lawns and Douglas firs.  There was no baseball field in sight, and at the time it didn’t seem to matter.

There were about fifty boys gathered there, each with an outsized baseball mitt and a proud father.  We were told what would happen next, and we then stood aside as our boys were initiated into the wonders of baseball.

Fielding, being an important skill, was practiced and tested first.  All of the boys were positioned in “the field”, and the man in charge batted balls over their heads and in the general direction of the trees.  Once the bat had struck the ball, no matter where the boys stood, they immediately became part of a disorganized pack chasing the elusive ball.  After the ball had hit the ground and squirted away down hill and dale, the pack of boys pursued it.  They ran, they fell, they tumbled, they picked themselves up, baying all the while “Mine! Mine! Mine!”  Once they caught up to the ball, it became a primitive struggle of all against all for its possession, the winner holding it aloft like a trophy.  It was a wonderful scene of disorganization and chaos, and the boys had a wonderful time.

There was also a try-out for pitchers and that also was a scene full of wonder.  The boys were asked to stand at a particular spot and told to throw the ball over a temporary home plate and at the glove of Tony Argente, the man in charge of the event.  While the pitching was going on, the other boys stood around watching it, and waiting for their turn.  Possibly this was too stressful for one of the little boys on the pitcher’s “mound”, for suddenly a dark spot developed on his pants, as his bladder uncontrollably voided itself as he stood there by himself, with all eyes fixed on him, on the pitcher’s mound.  No one said a word, but everyone noticed.  Of course, he didn’t stay on the mound, and ran off the field in terrible embarrassment, but it was no tragedy, as by the following week he was back on the field and did much better.

From that first Saturday on, for the next ten years or so, I spent every Saturday morning or afternoon watching Josh on athletic fields of one sort or another.  Those Saturdays were among the happiest of my life.

The house facing us on the other side of the street, was cursed.  Every family that moved into it wound up divorced.  Strange, but true.  Yes, there were a couple of other houses on the block that had seen a divorce, but those houses had seen only one.  The house across the street had seen several, one after another.  Each time we got to know and like these new neighbors, suddenly they were divorced, sometimes after quite acrimonious exchanges in the street.  It was sad, because it meant that the house had to be sold, and its occupants disappeared, possibly never to be seen again.

The corner house, the one facing the Coles, was home to a family with three little boys and the tallest dog I had ever seen.  While their name was Italian, the lady of the house was very Irish, and much involved in her Irish heritage, making sure the rest of the family shared her enthusiasm.  They attended every Hibernian gathering they could find, marching in parades, getting dressed up in green on Saint Patrick’s Day, attending dinners honoring this or that worthy, and doing all those other things that the Irish do with apparent relish.  They enjoyed the parades the most as they enabled them to take their Irish wolfhound, which was their pride and joy, with them.  His name was Guinness, and he was a gentle beast. Occasionally, when the mood struck him, Guinness would take it into his narrow Irish wolfhound head to leave his home and gallop through the lawns and backyards of the neighborhood, leaping gracefully and effortlessly over rocks and fences.  Neighbors would try to help and head off the fleeing hound, but with no success.  That dog could really move! Pat would rush out of her house yelling for Guinness to come back, but usually to no avail. Finally, in desperation, she would stand at the top of the stairs of her split-level waving a large, raw steak and yelling for Guinness.  This usually did work, and got Guinness to return home.

Pat and Paul had three little boys, one of them a baby, the others five or six years old, who in the company of another little boy who lived further down on Woodside, wandered freely up and down the block.  They generally wore parts of military uniforms, playing military games, sometimes with a helmet, sometimes without, but usually with toy guns of some type.  Their specialty in the spring was the ceremonial beheading of tulips, which did not make them popular with the gardeners of the neighborhood, and enraged their parents who loved their tulips, but the boys were impartial as to whose tulips they decapitated.  I didn’t have tulips, so when they stopped near my house it was generally only briefly, just to have pissing contests near the hydrangeas.  They were fun kids to have in the neighborhood, and their verve and spontaneity made them favorites when they weren’t busy destroying tulips.  But they and their parents moved out for the usual reason, along with Guinness, the leaping Irish wolfhound, who died quite suddenly of some kind of stomach condition peculiar to the breed.

Later in life, two of the boys, the oldest and the youngest, became soldiers and served in Iraq. Ironically, the one who died tragically, the middle son, was never a soldier, never went to Iraq. While driving to his mother’s house in Colorado, his car went over a cliff.  His body was not found until days later.  It is always sad when someone so young dies, and his family and all of us who knew him when he was just a little boy on Woodside Avenue were hit hard by the young man’s sudden and unexpected death.

Learning to be suburban took a while.  I had to learn to grow grass just so that I could cut it down again a week later, and I did become the local expert on organic lawn maintenance.  Actually, what made me love my grass was the initial difficulty in growing it at all.  I had to rototill the entire area, at least half an acre, then I had to take all the big clumps of dirt and break them down into small clumps of dirt, after which it all required raking, and then seeding and watering, an organic fertilizer being applied last .  No weed killers were ever applied, as the theory was that if the lawn was healthy enough, it would drive out the weeds.  I doubted, but it worked.  I developed a beautiful, lush lawn, and while I was doing my outdoor work, Linda was inside, sanding, staining and wall-papering for all she was worth.  It seemed like the work on the house was never done, but we didn’t mind.  I guess it was nest-building.

The population of the neighborhood was changing, and the smaller families that moved in now took advantage of the space provided by these large houses by reconfiguring them.  However, Mount Carmel, the local parochial school, had to close and reinvent itself as a Montessori school.

Our neighbors were easy to love.  I actually had a neighbor named Betty White, who kept me from chopping down a young dogwood sapling that I thought a weed.  It is now a gorgeous, mature, flowering tree.  When she grew old, she and her husband retired to South Carolina, but their house was bought by a local real estate developer who was attempting to buy all the houses, from my house on, to the end of the block to convert them into condominiums.  It never came about.

Come to think of it, besides dog walking, another good way of getting to know your neighbors is to join a local protest movement.  In our case it was a protest against the installation of a mental health half-way house right in the middle of our neighborhood.  The village government had already placed a couple of “facilities,” in our area, and we were worried that, living as we were on the fringes of a Black neighborhood, we would become the dumping ground for all the mental health problems of the town and surrounding Bergen County.

When we heard about the Bergen Mental Health Center purchase of a rundown house on Boyce Place, we began objecting to it.  Eventually the argument came down to the Mental Health Center having bought the house, now needed to do something with it.  We offered to fix it up, and get it ready for a private buyer.  We even offered to find a buyer.  For several weeks we all worked like beavers on that house, cleaning, repairing, painting, refurbishing, and doing all we could to make the house presentable.  By the time we got done with it, it was beautiful.  And we did find a private buyer for it, complete with family and dog.

This fix-up and private purchase was part of a deal that assured us that no more socially useful facilities would be built in our neighborhood.  As a matter of fact, the area has been designated a historic neighborhood.  The meetings at our house, the petitioning, the arguing were all exciting, and contributed to making Woodside Avenue what it is today.  And taken all together, it was wonderful getting to know our neighbors.

I’ve no idea  how it is elsewhere, but in our family the most stressful time of the day was just before supper.  Possibly it was simply that five of us, in addition to Abi, all being together in the same place at the same time, while supper preparations were under way, was too much.  The crises always seemed to errupt just before we were to sit down to eat.  Mind you, these weren’t life-changing catastrophes, but they did have to be taken care of.  Who took what from whom, or who did what to whom could become issues and had to be addressed.  In our division of labor on discipline, Linda and I had decided that she was to deal with the small, every day kind of problems, while I would handle the big issues, when a “higher authority” was needed.  What constituted minor and major issues was not discussed, as we thought we would be able to tell them apart when the problems came up.  And so it was.

One particular late summer evening when things were rowdier than usual, something did happen; I don’t remember what it was, but Jennie announced that she was running away from home.  She marched out of the kitchen, slammed the front door, and away she went.  Linda and I quickly decided that our eight-year-old daughter running away from home was a major issue, and that I was to go after Jennie and bring her back.  I wasn’t too thrilled about going out in the drizzle, but out I went, and saw her right away, about a hundred feet ahead, near Carlisle Terrace.  Naturally, I tried to catch up to her, but no matter how rapidly I walked, the distance between us didn’t diminish.  While she gave no sign that she had seen me, she obviously had, and was adjusting her pace to keep the distance between us the same.  As we walked, the drizzle changed to rain, and now it was getting dark.

We walked down one block, made a right on Highwood, and then walked another block down Henry, and I finally decided I had to do something.  So I called her, and she turned around and faced me, with still the same one hundred feet between us, with the rain now coming down harder.   I asked her to come back home with me, water dripping down my face, but she didn’t want to.  I wasn’t making any progress with bringing Jennie back home.   What I needed was a different approach.  So I asked her if I could run away with her.  Somewhat suspicious of my turnabout, she thought about it for a moment, and then agreed to let me run away with her.  It was a lovely walk for the two of us.  Yes, it rained, but it was summer rain, and it was warm.  We walked I don’t know where, but somehow found ourselves walking through the dark, leafy, unfamiliar streets of nearby Glen Rock.  We splashed in recently formed pools of rain water.  We played leapfrog with fire hydrants, while the rain kept coming down.

The Rock of Glen Rock fame

We had a great time!

And then Jennie announced that she was hungry.  I admitted that I was also, and she suggested that we go home, that her mom was probably waiting for us with supper, and she thought going back home for supper a good idea.  But we were lost in Glen Rock, and finding our way home was also part of the fun.

Many years have passed since then, and it is likely that I screwed up many times as a parent, but I believe to this day that “running away” with Jennie that warm summer evening was my masterpiece of fathering.

If you want to get to know your neighbors easily and informally, get a dog.  A puppy might even be better, as you have to walk it more often.  It is absolutely amazing how many people you meet just walking around the block with a pooch.  When we moved to Ridgewood, we had Abi, a mature German shepherd bitch who behaved quite well at home and on the leash, but once in awhile. . .   Well, on one occasion, when we were still living in Teaneck, she had bitten our pleasant mailman, and on another I think she bit Manny Granich as he extended his hand to shake mine.  On the whole however, she was pretty well behaved.

Jennie and Abi

When she was in the car, however, she was an entirely different dog.  She went crazy.  She hated the world and all the people in it, except for her family.  She barked so loud and savagely that fuel pump attendants refused to pump gas for me, and I had to get out of the car and do it myself.  I must also confess that she went crazy at home whenever anyone walked past our house.  The neighbors knew enough to walk on the other side of the street when they passed our house.  Abi, truth be told, had “issues,” but at home with the family she was a wonderful dog.

It was while walking Abi that I met Robert Cole, who lived in the corner house, where Woodside Avenue and Carlisle Terrace meet.  Robert had a small dog that got along famously with Abi, and so we got into the habit of walking together and talking as we walked. Bob was an opera singer, and I believe he might have been a baritone.   He was also one of the stars of the New York State Opera.  I was mightily impressed by Bob, especially as I loved opera.  It wasn’t long before Linda and I went to hear him at a performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Henry VIII, in which he was Henry, and he was marvelous.  For me, the idea of a man entertaining thousands by the power of his voice alone was amazing.  As we walked our dogs, I asked Bob what it felt like to be able to do what he did on a regular basis, and his answer brought me back to reality.  He said, “It’s a job. You rehearse, you practice, you perform.  It’s a job.”

This is not Bob Cole, but he played Henry VIII

I had little to do with his wife, as she didn’t walk the dog, but one afternoon, as I was walking Abi, I suddenly heard shrieking coming from the Cole house, terrible shrieking.  I immediately ran home (only three houses away) with Abi and phoned 911 (no cell phones in those days), and told the police about the horrible noise coming from the corner house.  I don’t know what was going through my mind at the time, but I did know that there was something awful going on at the Cole house.  The police arrived a few minutes later, and I stood in the street, waiting to find out what kind of horror had taken place.  What did happen was that Barbara Cole came out of the house, furious.  There was no emergency.  She had just been practicing her Scream Therapy, and doing a good job of it.  I just had to learn to mind my own business.

Orchard School, Then, Now and Forever

Settling into a new community can be a daunting experience.  You buy a house after learning something about the community in which you will be living, but you really don’t have any friends or neighbors there, at least at first.  You also have to make your kids comfortable in their new school and figure out important things such as where an all-night pharmacy might be found or where the best local bakery might be.  The bakery thing was especially important.

One of the rules of my life had always been to live within walking distance, preferably a short walking distance, from a bakery.  Fresh baked good were important to my breakfast and my general mood for the day.  A buttered roll and a rich, creamy pastry for desert were my favorite breakfast, although I knew even then that nutritionists were unlikely to approve.  Fresh rolls and pastries brought me peace of mind and cheerfulness throughout the day, and working in the schools of New York City I required some self-pampering.

The kids settled into our new community quite naturally.  Melissa who was all of two or three, and not yet attending school, became the neighborhood nudist, wandering in and out of the house without a stitch on.  As conscientious, liberal parents, we tried to convince her of the necessity of wearing clothes, but to no avail.  The neighbors found her adorable, and now that she’s an adult herself, I’m probably in trouble with her because I chose to remind her of this.  Josh and Jennie were at the local elementary school, and were adjusting admirably.  Josh did have some trouble at the beginning but that resolved itself.

The principal of Orchard School was a man named Dr. Charles Abate, known to almost everyone as Charlie.  At the time he was an enthusiast for a type of learning related to computers.  The computer, however, generated so much paper work for the teachers that the system was basically unworkable.  Before moving to Ridgewood, we had naturally enough visited the school and met its principal.  In his office he asked us about our children, and we told him that Jennie, who would be starting Kindergarten, was an unknown quantity, but that Josh, who was due to start Second Grade, seemed to be having trouble with his reading, and as we had brought it with us, we showed Dr. Abate Josh’s First Grade reading text.  He noted that he knew the text, and that this particular booklet we had shown him was one sixteenth of the year’s reading curriculum at Orchard.

After we moved in to our new house, we registered Josh and Jennie at Orchard School, after which, Josh spent each lunch hour with Dr. Abate as his reading tutor, and Josh did learn to read.

The attention to reading, while good for Josh, also had a downside.  In his classroom, on the blackboard, there was a list of the students in the class, arranged in reading level order, and my Josh was at the bottom of the list.  One of my thoughts at the time was about the ravages this might do to my son’s self-esteem.  On the other hand, self-esteem would take care of itself once Josh learned how to read.  And then there was the thought that little damage would be done to his self-esteem if he couldn’t read the list anyway.  Needless to add that Josh became a reader and his self-esteem is fine.  The things we parents worry about!

Besides having been vandalized our new house came with its own story.  We had bought the house from a very nice woman who also happened to be a real estate broker.  She had modernized the kitchen with money from an insurance payment for an oil truck having accidentally demolished the porte-cochere on the side of the house.  She had married recently and hoped to make the house the home in which she and her husband would raise their own children.  It was not meant to be.  They divorced after about a year, and she put up the house for sale without making any of the other planned improvement.

The owners from whom she had bought the house were an interesting couple.  Their name was Henry, doctor and doctor Henry, he a psychiatrist, she a psychologist.  They had two children, a son and a daughter, whose names I never learned, although we did meet the girl years later, when she visited her childhood home, now our house.  She walked up and down the house, chanting, “bad Karma, bad Karma,” in a lugubrious voice, and while this was passing strange, for her family she was right, her family’s story being even sadder than that of the woman from whom we had bought the house. Because we never met these people (except for the girl), it is all hearsay, but it is interesting hearsay.

I don’t know what private demons haunted Dr. Paul Henry, but after returning from a trip to Washington he had committed suicide in the house.  He had hanged himself in one of the rooms, but we didn’t know where.  This in turn led to speculation among us as to where he had done it, in which room.  Somehow the consensus emerged that the awful event had taken place in the room that became Melissa’s.  The closet there seemed the perfect place, and as Melissa was still too young to be troubled by visions of a man dangling in her closet, it seemed a happy solution to the mystery.

The vandalism in the house had been caused by the son of this unhappy family.  It came about when he found out that the house was going to be sold.  He and his teenaged friends had formed a band, and the large barn which had stood in the backyard was the place where they rehearsed their music.  It was also the place where he and his friends held raucous parties, parties loud enough to have the neighbors call the police at times. The police were used to dealing with these types of situations and would shush them up.

After the boy found out that his mother had sold the house, and that they were going to live in New York, he and his friends spent a night drinking vodka, pouring plaster of paris down the toilets and smearing green paint over the original woodwork.  They also set fire to the barn, which burned to the ground.  I don’t know what happened to the Henry boy after that, but he did leave the house a mess.

Mrs. Henry’s story ended even more sadly than that of her husband, and I only heard about it years later.  I don’t know the reasons, but it seems that Mrs. Henry became a homeless person.  She spent her days and nights riding the New York City subways, and then, one particularly bitter winter night, she froze to death in the street.

Old houses come with stories. . .

We had moved to Teaneck because we needed more space for our growing family and because I felt insecure living in Manhattan without rent controls in place.  We had also settled in Teaneck because it was politically liberal and it had integrated voluntarily instead of going through the cycle of rejectionist politics that characterized so many other communities.  There was even a book about the success of its voluntary integration titled Triumph in a White Suburb, by Reginald G. Damerell.  I was quite proud of what my new community had done.  It was really something in those days of white flight and black outrage.

Our house in Teaneck was a lovely one, with its own little plot of green, at the end of a cul-de-sac just a couple of blocks from Route 4, and faced Queen Anne’s Road, which ran parallel next to a large and pleasant park with lots of playground equipment.  In brief, Teaneck was a lovely place to live, although I wasn’t crazy about what was happening at the local elementary school.

The school was overcrowded, with classes being held in the halls.  School authorities, wherever they are, are always inventive.  In this case they dealt with the overcrowding by announcing that they had developed a new program called “The Open Classroom Program,” which would teach kids to read even faster and better by holding classes in the hallways.  I tend to be optimistic, and so I was willing to give this modern educational miracle a chance.

However, we now had a third child, Melissa, and just as we had moved out of New York so as to get a bit more space for our two children, we now felt we needed a somewhat larger house for our three.  We searched earnestly and long, and found that whatever house we found and liked in Teaneck, we couldn’t afford.  We began expanding our search area to some of the other towns in Bergen County, and eventually we did find a “fixer upper” in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

The first time I walked into this “new” house, it was nearly one hundred years old and it felt huge, like a barn.  It felt too big for us, that we would never be able to fill it.  It was also shabby, in disrepair, vandalized, with plaster-of-paris having been poured into the toilets and green paint having been daubed at random on the woodwork of several rooms.  The outdoor area had been equally neglected, with moss growing where there should have been lawn, and with a basketball hoop standing on a cement platform where a barn had once burned down.  The house was located in one of the less “desirable” areas of Ridgewood, abutting as it did the local black neighborhood. For us, the house did have some wonderful features, not the least of which was its size, over 5,000 square feet, with seven bedrooms, five fireplaces, and a lovely library with leaded glass bookcases and a fireplace.  And the price was right.  All this house needed was work, lots of it, both indoor and out, and Linda and I set to work, although most of the indoor work was done by Linda.  This may all sound like real estate advertising, but it was to be our home for the next 29 years, the home in which we were part of a wonderful community, made great friends, and in which we raised three children.