Grandma's Been There

One of my favorite ways to recharge is to just sit outside and watch the seasons do what they do best. Each season has a unique personality, but there is one thing they all have in common. They don’t wait around for us to appreciate them. They come and go pretty fast, especially the spring.

When you watch the same movie at various stages of your life, you see the story from very different perspectives. I recently watched “Citizen Kane” again for the first time since I was seventeen. It brought back a lot of memories. It also brought up some questions that would never have entered my mind when I was a teenager.

The road to heaven was paved with suffering. Getting slapped by the bishop during our Confirmation ceremony was a reminder of just how hard it was to be a Christian. Only the baptized could go to heaven, and if communist soldiers invaded our country and demanded that we give up our religion or die, God wanted us to choose death. As young children in the early 1960s, we learned that being a member of the one true church wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

New books, new records, the latest clothes and shoes, new movies… Guess what city they all hit first?  New York, of which Brooklyn is a part. Thanks to your location, you’re more worldly and savvy than any small town kid. There’s nothing you can’t get here and you never have to worry about having someone to play with because you know kids in just about every apartment building on your block. Your country cousins would give anything to trade places with you. Forget about chasing rainbows. Baby, you’re a rich man.

By the time I became a fourth grader, I knew my way around the culture and the campus of my school. I wasn’t “new” anymore. My condolences went to the latest class of first graders. I’d survived, and with a little luck, so would they.

The mornings always felt two times longer than the afternoons, and Mondays always felt twice as long as Fridays. But lunchtime recess? Well, that flew by faster than we could rip open a candy bar wrapper. That was how our school days went.

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was a laundry list of what were referred to as “childhood illnesses” that every single one of us were going to get at some point. Viruses that all came with pink rashes, red rashes, blisters or lesions. The first nine years of my life are one big blotchy, itchy blur.

As pre-teen rock and roll fans in the mid 1960s, we were passionate followers and defenders of our musical idols. Laugh if you want, but we were totally sincere. With the kind of joy these young musicians and their music brought us, we owed them our allegiance and we were glad to give it.

Since we just passed the 67th anniversary of the date that's come to be known as "the day the music died," I thought I'd spend a few minutes talking about my earliest memories of rock and roll and my first exposure to Buddy Holly's timeless music.

The television shows made during the 1950s and '60s helped shape the way we felt about Brooklyn. Those shows presented an image of family life in American towns that were totally unrecognizable to city kids like me.