Come Away With Me

In pandemic days, I am reminded of what makes me stronger. The only catch is, I need to reach back in time to find it . . . .

My grandparents, immigrants from Lemberg, Austria, settled on the north shore of Long Island after they left their first destination, New York City, in the 1930s. They raised seven children, the first two of whom were born in Europe. Grandpa opened a hardware store in the town center of Glen Cove to support the family.

At different times each summer, beginning in the 1950s, my cousins came to visit from places like Philly and Ontario. I traveled in from New Jersey with my parents and little brother Stuart. Sometimes my uncles and my dad returned home for the week to work, leaving us kids with our moms, and Grandma and Grandpa. The visits overlapped without any particular planning. No reservations needed. No one ever turned away.

The two youngest of their seven children were not yet married. My Aunt Freda (photo on right) had a big bedroom of her own with bureau drawers full of costume jewelry, scarves, and purses. She worked as a secretary for her older brothers, lawyers in town who ran an insurance agency on the side. My Uncle Joey, the youngest, occupied the small bedroom, more like a college dorm room, no frills.

Zayda (Grandpa) Mutka drove us to the local beach every day in his Buick Special, packed with sandwiches, a jug of Kool-Aid, and scratchy wool army blankets that my Uncle Morris, a journalist assigned to General Eisenhower’s retinue, had brought home from the European front. The park and waterfront were donated to the public by J. Pierpont Morgan, the famous banker and financier, who once owned a summer home in town.

Grandma Rifka wouldn’t let us buy hot dogs because they weren’t kosher, but at 4 pm we could buy a Mello-roll from the snack pavilion, a wafer cone with the ice cream wrapped in a paper cylinder.

Peeling off that paper was a wondrous event. One day chocolate. The next day vanilla.

My cousins and I slept on sheets spread out on the wall-to-wall carpeting in my grandparents’ bedroom. We giggled until Grandpa went to bed and then we’d better be quiet, or else! Anyway, we were pretty exhausted from the playground in the morning, then the afternoon on the sand in the blazing sun. I tanned brown as a berry, leaving silly white stripes over my shoulders from my swimsuit straps. In that era, no one seemed alarmed if they, or their children, got sunburned.

Late one night my cousin Carol, about ten years old at the time, tripped and hit her head on the corner of the bed frame in my aunt’s room. Blood gushed from her forehead and I thought she would die. Her mom called a taxi to take her to the hospital. We were sworn to secrecy to never tell Grandma because she’d worry. Carol got seven stitches but I think she covered the bandage with her bangs to keep the mishap a secret.

Grandma had lived in Eastern Europe and most of her family died in the Holocaust, but I guess my aunts thought she couldn’t handle something like this.

Go figure.

When we were preteens, my cousin Marlynne and I couldn’t help staring at this handsome guy stationed at the lifeguard stand at Morgan Beach, overlooking Long Island Sound. Our hormones raged with excitement—we stood from afar to admire him in his regulation suit and giggle if he happened to look in our direction. We were motivated to go to the beach every day, even with our younger cousins tagging along, to spy on him. Grandma noticed and told us, “Oh, that’s Mrs.Feinman’s son, Herbie.” We were afraid for the rest of the summer that she would tell Mrs. Feinman about her two granddaughters with the insane crush. We were mortified that our secret was out, but really, it was obvious.

Once each summer, Grandpa took us on a daytrip to Jones Beach on the Atlantic Ocean side of Long Island. The magnificence of this excursion cannot be understated.

We left after breakfast, the Buick packed to the gills with children and food, the trunk filled with beach gear. The ocean waves were huge and thunderous, the sand fine and soft, unlike the pebbly beaches and placid waters in Glen Cove. We staked our claim in the sand and ran to the edge of the water, rejoicing in the sensation of the undertow pulling sand from under our feet.

My mom Rose was an excellent swimmer with perfect form, stretching her long arms gracefully and turning her head to the side for air on every third stroke. At Morgan Beach, she swam to the end of the jetty and back. But at Jones Beach, there was no protection, just open ocean and the powerful surf. Children didn’t venture into the water beyond knee height.

I would watch my mom jump the surf, facing the beach and riding each wave with her arms spread out before it crashed onto the shore. I knew it was deep out there; I never felt secure about her treading in the ocean waters. I watched her constantly, as if my vigilance would keep her safe—and keep me safe too—from danger of losing her.

Worried little child.

Now I can relax in the vision of my mom, confident in her strength, gorgeous in her grace, adventurous in her element. I believe that she always had her eyes on my brother and me, standing together on the shore, until she emerged onto the sand, dripping water and pulling off her bathing cap, a goddess of the sea taking respite on solid ground.

We had our chores too, to earn our “room and board” at the family compound. The house came with a wraparound pink cement patio, 1950s style, with circles cut out to plant young shade trees in strategic places. My no-nonsense Aunt Anna handed us brooms before dinner to sweep up the sand we’d tracked in from the beach, and while we were at it, the stray leaves and twigs, and the dirt from the yard not yet grassed in like other suburban lawns. She inspected the results and, if acceptable, dinner was served. If Aunt Anna complimented you, you knew you met the highest standards of cleanliness and behavior.

Grandpa brushed out the sand from the floor of the Buick and dried the seats where we’d sat in our wet bathing suits. My boy cousins and little brother just ran around, getting mosquito bites and catching fireflies in Grandma’s Mason jars at dusk. Sometimes, the older Italian man next door, Patsy, stopped by to say hello and compliment my grandmother on the nice little children helping out in the backyard. Grandma beamed, “And they’ll go to college too!”

One hot July afternoon, my cousin Mar and I were at Crescent Beach, the small one with the smelly seaweed, but closer to the house.

A man stood by the stone wall, putting his slacks on over his bathing suit. Change dropped out of his pockets but he didn’t notice and then left. We eagerly picked up the coins and counted them out, eighty-one cents! In 1954, that would’ve been equivalent to $7.74 today, a fortune.

We ran over to our mothers, “Look what we found!”

Both moms asked, “Where did you get all that money?”

Both cousins replied, “A man dropped it and we found it!”

Both moms insisted, “Let’s see if he’s still there.”

We dreaded the meeting and fervently hoped he was gone. Our moms confiscated our ill-gotten gains. That was way too much money for little girls to keep. The eighty-one cents disappeared somewhere, circling the planet for eternity, for all I know.

Back home, Grandpa gave us a serious grilling and lecture, ending with “Honesty isn’t the best policy, it’s the only policy.” He wasn’t a “finders, keepers” kind of guy. The shame of disappointing him stung me badly. To quote Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Grandpa’s moral compass likewise pointed only one way and he sent us packing in that direction.

In due time, my Aunt Freda got married and vacated her spacious bedroom with the stylized wallpaper, a white feather design on a powder blue background. Uncle Joey left the room with the plain, painted walls to seek his fortune and start a trucking business. I graduated to sleeping in one or the other of the vacated rooms, and then started dreaming of my own life beyond summer at my grandparents, where the worst thing that happened was that my cousin got stitches in the middle of the night and the best thing that happened was the assurance that there was always a place there for me.

All I had to do was show up as soon as school was out.

Years later, I visited my grandparents on a college break. Grandma took me up to her bedroom where the children had slept on the gray carpet, and opened her closet door to show me the plastic baby rattle—mine—hanging from a nail high inside the door frame. I had no idea it had been there all these years, the little piece of me that she treasured long after my patio-sweeping days.

Nostalgia is so much more than reminiscing about good times.

The memory of a random object can assume enormous power. Yes, the rattle, a small plastic globe with a handle for a baby’s fist; the Mello-Roll in the flavor of choice dripping down the waffle cone; the interesting pins and earrings in my aunt’s bureau drawers and the Charm magazine on her bedstand, somehow embodying the mystery of what it meant to grow up into a real woman.

These remembered objects indicative of their times are among my guideposts to adulthood.

Shared experience in innocent times connected us then and now (see photo of me and Mar on a memory lane visit to the beach pavilions), the trek through the park down to the beach, anticipating the glorious day; evenings on the terrace with the adults in Adirondack chairs quietly chatting about extended family matters; a crowd of cousins sprawled on the carpet, drifting asleep to the peaceful hum of the one air conditioner in the house.

In the midst of leisure days, lessons were learned—the responsibility we showed by cleaning up after the beach at Grandma’s and Aunt Anna’s behest; shame at the realization that scooping up coins could be stealing, against the Ten Commandments that we knew were a big deal with Grandpa, a religious man. It wasn’t just the law of the land that could get us in trouble; he intended to impart a premise of Biblical proportions.

Grandpa took a strong personal interest in the character of each of his grandchildren, the boys and the girls equally. He funded college educations or dental school for the ones who needed it. He helped my parents buy a house. Under his gruff exterior, he expressed his love in acts of service—including taking the time to insure that we understood the right way to act and live.

Grandma nurtured us with the unconditional love and protectiveness that came naturally to her. However she did it, we each felt that we were her favorite. When she taught me to use her sewing machine, I felt privileged in her care. When she made sure we did not write or sew on Shabbos, I felt the urgency of her beliefs. She was extraordinary that way; there was no limit to the security we felt in her presence.

My own trusting nature derives from the way I was treated back then.

I knew I was a part of something that made me feel loved and important, to this day, just because I was me—a cousin, a niece, a daughter, a granddaughter . . . a child.

Seventy years later, that feeling has not changed. In pandemic days, weeks, months, future uncertain, I reach into the building blocks of my past for the strengths, values, and family bonds that can serve me now.

I have so much to choose from, an embarrassment of riches.