Letter to a Baby Boy

Letter to a Baby Boy (Another in as Series of Letters That Will Never Be Mailed). May 26, 2008

Dear Baby,

Congratulations on being born! I’m not so sure I see the wisdom of being born at this point in time, when you may never be able to drive a car that is powered by gasoline, but I hope that you learn from the example of your family and grow to love mass transit.

Your grandmother and I met each other in a strange, 21st Century mode on an Internet Message Board, in 2001. When we found out how much we had in common, we began to correspond directly through email. In a wonderful coincidence, we learned that not only had we grown up within a few miles of each other, I in Bethpage and she in Levittown, but that we had been standing on the very same street on the very same day in November 1960. We both waited in the rain for a glimpse of Senator John F. Kennedy making a last-weekend campaign swing through Long Island.

My family was standing on the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Wantagh Avenue, and she was standing on Wantagh Avenue about a mile to the south. As adults, we both moved to the north shore of Long lsland. We have met in person several times, and we share a warm email relationship.

I take some small credit in the circumstances of your conception. If not for my efforts 20 years ago, your life might have begun quite differently.
In the early 1900’s a man named George McKesson Brown, heir to a giant pharmaceutical company, bought several acres of land in Huntington bordering on Huntington Harbor and the Long Island Sound, and built himself a great estate. It was known as West Neck Farm. He had a grand home built, based on a Norman chateau, with a garage and stables and a boathouse on the beach. When he lost everything, as heirs invariably do, he sold off parts of the farm, and then finally the chateau, which he sold to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart to become a Catholic boys’ boarding school, named Coindre Hall, after the founder of that order.

When the school closed down, a combination of bad management and pilfered plumbing led the building to a state of near-ruin. While Suffolk County debated what to do with the property, all sorts of developers came up with plans to develop the land, raising the possibility of destroying one of the last remaining Gold Coast Estates. I fell in with a band of protestors called, “The Alliance for the Preservation of Coindre Hall,” or something noble like that, and together we painted posters and picketed Parliament (aka the Suffolk County Legislature) while we tried to stave off any possible development. At one particular meeting, held in the evening in one of the large drawing rooms, a group of suits from a medical-rehab institute tried to persuade us that having such a facility in that neighborhood, given that there is limited access, no trains or buses, and no nearby support businesses, would be a swell idea, started off strong, but by the end of the evening the 5 men making the presentation had backed themselves, literally, into a corner of the room. Seeing them cower from the assault of the mildest-mannered best-behaved group of concerned citizens was the highlight of my career as a protestor.

Eventually, the County took over the grounds, and Coindre Hall is preserved today as parkland, and the building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, is used as a wedding venue.

Getting the picture? Good, because just a few more details and then you can go burp. The garage and stables became the home of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington. The boathouse is the headquarters for the Sagamore Rowing Club. The grounds of the estate has picnic tables and even a dog run, which won’t do you much good if you do have a dog someday because there will be no gas to power the car for you to drive there.

And Coindre Hall itself? By yet another coincidence, your Mommy and Daddy chose the beautiful chateau as the site of their wedding two years ago.

Dear baby, do you want to know a secret? I did it all for you.

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Roslyn May 19, 2008

When I was six years old my family lived in a small town named Roslyn Heights for 6 months, from the summer of 1955 to the winter of 1956, while we waited for our house in Bethpage to be ready. Often a town named “Heights” signifies an elegant address, but in this case we literally lived on the other side of the tracks from the well-to-do, just-plain Roslyn. (Not to be confused with Roslyn Kaufman, one of my first friends in Bethpage, who was thereafter forevermore known to me simply as Rozzie).

We lived at #33 Edwards Street in a garden apartment complex, on the second floor. The flat was cramped; it had a walk-in, but not an eat-in kitchen; two bedrooms (my brother and I shared one) and a little dining area and living room. All of our furniture from our house in East Meadow was somehow shoved into that tiny apartment.

We moved in during a brutally hot summer. One day my mother attempted to take my brother, some friends, and me to a nearby beach in our 1952 Chevy. We ran over a metal rod in the street which punctured a tire, and we all had to wait on the side of the road for help. Not having Triple A or a cell phone, I can’t imagine who or what we were waiting for, but a passing truck driver stopped and changed the tire for us. From then on, I always thought of truck drivers as friendly, chivalrous, and gallant.

I had gone to kindergarten in the Meadowlawn School in East Meadow, but I started first grade in the Roslyn Heights Elementary School, where my brother was in fourth grade. The school was an ancient, imposing brick building, probably built 50 years before, which could not accommodate the overwhelming number of students enrolled there. As a result, my first grade class was held in a left-over World War II-issued Quonset hut next door to the big school. (In an ironic burst of symmetry, some of my classes in my freshman year of college were held in old World War II Army barracks on the campus of Adelphi University, and the school theatre was in a Quonset hut.)

Kindergarten in East Meadow had been only a half-day, but first grade was a full day, and so it was the first time I had to eat lunch in school. I think we went next door to the old building for lunch. The looming, cavernous building terrified me, and I was unable to eat there. I would bring my lunch back to the apartment and eat it after school. Eventually I learned to swallow my fear, though others came in to replace it. My 9-year-old brother and I had to cross a fairly large street to get to school and back. There was one particular autumn day when my brother and I had to lug our book bags, lunch boxes (mine was a tartan plaid) and a pumpkin each across the Avenue and up the hill to our apartment. My doll Robin joined me at school occasionally; of course she was another burden, but not a weighty one.

My deepest shame, in all of my 17 years of education, happened in that Quonset hut. We had a substitute teacher one day, who asked us to write our numbers, as high as we could count. I got stuck on 12. I remember remembering that it was either 1-2 or 2-1; but couldn’t figure out which one was correct. Maybe if I had skipped past it, I still tell myself, I would have gotten back on track with 13. But no, I had to stop just when I had barely made it into the double digits.

My brother and I quickly made friends on Edwards Street. I know my friend’s name was Susan, but I don’t remember anything else about her. My brother’s friend was named Gilbert, and he was the perfect buddy to go on boyish adventures. In those days, children were safe to wander far from mother’s eye (although not really; it was only a year later that the case of the kidnapped Weinberg baby in Plainview became headline news) and the boys were able to get into mischief that only little boys can. I remember seeing them walking along a high brick ledge and jumping off onto the pavement. (My mother only learned about this from me 40 years later, saving her from a possible heart attack in 1955.)

I think the apartment complex was filled with other families on their way to permanent housing elsewhere; I know Gilbert also moved away, and he and my brother lost contact. For all I know, Susan, the barely-remembered best friend, is still living there. Interestingly, I went back to Edwards Street several years after we moved out; our apartment number, #33, which was on the left side of the street when we lived there, was inexplicably on the right side of the street when I went there as an adult.)

Despite the heat and the cramped little apartment, we had memorable times in Roslyn Heights. There was a dinky little town on our side of the railroad tracks, but Roslyn High School, and the little town of just plain Roslyn, was on the other, north, side of the tracks. When we drove into Roslyn proper, we had to drive up a hill and wait for the traffic light to change. I developed yet another fear, this one of the car rolling backwards down the hill. Although cars today are more reliable, I’m still not comfortable with that maneuver.

Sometimes on Sundays we would get into the old gray Chevy and drive through Roslyn Estates and Manhasset, looking at the fine homes there and dreaming. We would never have been able to buy one of those houses, but it was thrilling just to dream about. It’s still an if-only….dream of mine.
There was, and still is, a lovely duck pond in Roslyn; we went there to feed the ducks, which is probably frowned on today. We went to the movies in the theatre next to the Roslyn Clock Tower to see “Lady and the Tramp,” still one of my favorite movies, with the beautiful spaniel Lady still one of my favorite movie heroines.

My brother and I also were enchanted by an innovative children’s television show, that had also sprung from the mind, or the studio, of Walt Disney, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Later I realized that the show was actually a marketing gimmick for Disney to lead families to his new amusement park in California, but we didn’t care. We watched that show and made friends with the Mousekeeters. There was even a Mouseketeer named Cheryl, although she pronounced the name incorrectly; the proper pronunciation is the plosive, fricative CHeryl.

We stayed in Roslyn until January 1956. From the heat of summer, to the bitter cold winter, we experienced four seasons in six months.

We finally moved into our permanent, forever house in Bethpage on January 19, 1956; it was to be our family’s home for the next 33 years. Roslyn Heights had been my home for only a half year of my nearly 60 years; still, it was a memorable slice of time, and the place where I learned to read, write, and feed ducks; to eat lunch away from home; to make and lose friends.

I conquered some fears, and acquired new ones.

I learned I could depend on the kindness of strangers.

I saw my brother as a daredevil for the first time. I shared a room with him for the last time.

I watched a romantic movie about two dogs in heat in the heat of a Long Island summer.

I cried from the pain of my red, chapped hands in the frigid cold of a Long Island winter.

It was only six months, but seemed so much more.