Page 58 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
rents from their tenants. When he operated the leather goods store, she worked the counter, and when he died, she carried on. Although she was young when her husband died, not yet forty by my reckoning, she never remarried or, to my knowledge, even considered the idea. (The idea that formerly married adults or, for that matter, any “single” adults might have social lives never occurred to me.)
For as long as I can remember, with the exception of the few months when she lived with us after breaking her hip, Grandma lived alone in an apartment on Ocean Parkway, not far from our home. She had an interesting way of teaching her grandson lessons. When I asked her to tell me what was meant by “suggestive music,” she explained that it was the songs that were sung when the singer responded to requests from the audience; when she decided to cure her very young grandson of his drooling habit, she turned the tide, so to speak, by drooling in front of him to show him just how awful his saliva elimination process looked; and when her grandson complained that he was bored and asked her for advice as to what to do, she didn’t miss a beat and told him to stand on the dining room table and “potch” his tush. Sound advice, I guess, but a suggestion that I chose not to follow. To this day, when I dry a plate, holding it in one hand that is covered by the nondrying end of the dish towel, I think of Grandma, who taught me that truly sound technique. (Similarly, whenever I install a new roll of toilet paper, I think of my dad, who—contrary to accepted practice in hotels, and to the current views of my children—was a staunch advocate of having the roll hung so that it would unfurl from the bottom.)
Grandma took me to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Zoo alone. What a terrific and courageous thing for a grandma to do! I’m not sure that I have any direct recollection of the event, but I did develop and keep pictures of Grandma at the zoo, which I took that day with my first cam- era, a Brownie that I believe she had given to me. I do, however, have a pretty clear picture in my head of a polar bear that continually repeated his pattern of sitting high on his rocks, then moving to the pool of water in his cage, putting a paw in the water, lingering for a few seconds, and then returning to his rocks, only to start the process all over again.
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