Page 76 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
entrance to the residential portion of 1771 by climbing up the brick front stoop, where, as you would have expected, I played stoopball (see Chapter Six). The other entrance was reached by descending three or four brick steps that were flanked by iron picket fences that reached to the sidewalk. There, as you would not have expected, when I was about four or so, I managed to impale my rear end by, for some reason, trying to take a seat atop the pickets. (Soon thereafter, as though my first con- tact with the pickets was not sufficient to ward me off, very thorny vines that blossomed annually with beautiful red roses were attached to both fences.) That entrance led to a basement that became a waiting room, a consultation room, and an examining room. Its door would bear my dad’s name, followed, of course, by “M.D.,” and his office hours (which were, as he would say it, “twelve to two and six to eight, Monday though Friday, and twelve to two, Saturday”).
Seventeen seventy-one sat on Ocean Avenue near the northeast corner of Avenue M, only fifteen blocks from Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, where it terminated, very close to Manhattan Beach, which was on the south side of the bay; Ocean Avenue then sloped south again until it reached, of all things, the ocean, a fact that I did not learn until I was an adult. The fifteen blocks were formed by Ocean Avenue and the avenues that crossed it until it reached Emmons Avenue: Ave- nues M to Z, Kings Highway, and Quentin Road, which came right after Avenue P.
I note that, notwithstanding the name of the Broadway show, there was no Avenue Q; I had assumed that there was no Avenue Q because Avenue Q had a funny sound to it, but then I realized that between Ave- nue T and Avenue V sat Avenue U. It transpires that there had originally been an Avenue Q , but it was renamed Quentin Road in honor of Theo- dore Roosevelt’s youngest son, who was killed in combat in World War I. I do not believe that Quentin—or, for that matter, any other Roosevelt— ever lived in Brooklyn.
A description of the four corners of the intersection of M and Ocean, and its environs, will give you some idea of my new neighbor- hood. The building on our corner, which was separated from our house
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