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Why (as in yaverbaum)
overly expensive gifts to girls who caught my fancy; it was to avoid let- ting my father know about it.
Directly across the street from Chodosh’s was a shoe store that I remember as Buster Brown’s, which I presume was named for the shoes that were in turn named for a character whom I knew from the Saturday morning TV show, Andy’s Gang. The star puppet character of that show—in addition to Froggy the Gremlin (who would appear in a puff of smoke if you said, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy”) and Mid- night the Cat (whose entire vocabulary consisted of one high-pitched, drawn-out word, “Ni-i-ice”)—was Buster Brown (“I’m Buster Brown / I live in a shoe / Here’s my dog, Tige / He lives there too”). For years, my parents bought all of my shoes there. Buster Brown’s is most memo- rable for the way in which the salesman assured parents that their children’s shoes fit properly: through the use of a fluoroscope, an X-ray device into which your foot would be inserted and your bony wiggling toes could be observed in a luminescent green.
Diagonally across from our corner at Ocean and M was a Rexall drugstore, which I guess was important to my father’s patients and, therefore, to my father as well. To me, the drugstore was important because it was adjacent to something far more important to me, as least as a Proustian reminder of my gradual undertaking of real responsibil- ity. This was Morris’s Fish Store, to which, once I was a child of suitable age and discretion, I was dispatched on Sunday mornings to cower in the middle of a line of big, old, noisy, and aggressive women, to struggle to keep my place, and to return home with the right change and the requisite amount of belly lox (never, as you’ll recall, “Nova”), white fish (without bones!), sable (when I guess that things were going well in my dad’s practice), plain bagels, and a cut-up schmaltz herring, which was sold in a container of cream and onions, made on the spot. Proustian? To this day, I cannot smell schmaltz herring without being transported to Morris’s and thinking of my father and the important responsibility that had been placed on my shoulders.
Farther up Avenue M were three other locations that were central to my youth. On the southern side of Avenue M, a couple of blocks west
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