I’m almost done with my regularly scheduled article, a continuation of my previous post, ‘Three bagels, please,’ but sometimes one has to shift gears and go with the flow. And this may be one of those times.

I can imagine the following scene in the schoolyard of a Jewish School somewhere in the world.  Shimi says to Yanki, ‘I dare you to put a tack on Rabbi Schwartz’s chair.’ To which, Yanki responds, ‘Oh yeah? I double-dare you.’ To that, there is no response. A wimpish type might go on, ‘I triple-dare you,’ but by then all the fizz has gone out of the seltzer bottle, and nobody I know would sink to that level. If you’ve been double-dared, you’re it, and get on with it, whatever ‘it’ is.

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You can figure out more or less when this conversation took place, one between Barbara and her maternal grandmother, Mary Caplan – known in the trade as ‘Momsie” – from the topic under consideration. I can only assume that the older woman had in mind a memory from her childhood: sitting in a horse-drawn sled on a winter’s day somewhere in the Pale, swaddled in blankets to keep warm. And now, she said, men are walking on the moon. She was expressing her wonderment, but also, it was her way of saying, cut me a little slack (my paraphrase). So much has changed in my life, it’s no wonder I can’t keep up. Momsie was born in 1898.

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Introduction

Long ago and far away. That’s the where and when of my childhood, those multiple decades past in a very Jewish neighborhood in the northern part of The Bronx. (That’s right, ‘The Bronx,’ not ‘the Bronx,’ and certainly not ‘De Bronx.’ We were classier than that.) I could compile a list of some size about the special qualities of our neighborhood, but here are two things that I think are interesting. One, you never saw a cop on a beat anywhere near E. 208 St.; there was no compelling reason for any of police officer to be there. Second, there was a notable lack of watering holes in the area, at least where the Jews lived. And that absence of alcohol was true in our home and, I assume, in the homes of my friends. There may have been some ‘schnappes’ here and there in the neighborhood shuls, but who knew about such things?

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