Cream Soda

Memorial Day, 2019.

This solemn weekend begins what I have always thought of as the “Long Summer”, which lasts till the early October holiday weekend. (The “Short Summer”, of course, is from the weekend before or containing Independence Day, till Labor Day).

In October the Long Summer will no doubt have flown past, with so many projects as usual undone, so many plans forgotten.  But I still recall the feeling of the endlessness of childhood summers.

I was on City Island on Saturday.  No childhood summer went by without a few bus trips to City Island. Ice cream, or a hot dog; and sometimes a boat ride - accessed by the terrifying, fragile-seeming ramp. The unknowably deep water could be seen through the slats of the ramp.  “Think about Donald Duck” my mother told me once, to keep my courage up as I hesitated at the head of the ramp. On City Island on Saturday I happened to see a small structure painted in thick semigloss gray paint, starting to crack and peel.  And a memory was triggered.

Sunday, looking for the old phone I knew I had (but don’t) on a closet shelf, I found the Wooden Box which I thought I had given back to my brother years ago. He had left it behind when he moved out.  In it were the Broken Stone, The Bronx Meteorite (certainly not a piece of slag, no matter what skeptics might say), a few other things, and the incomplete set of plastic chess pieces.  Another memory.

Today a friend emailed a picture to illustrate a point not relevant here; but in the picture was a 1950s bus.  And the memories all came into focus, distant but sharp.

Until I started high school we lived in a three-story frame building, with a front porch.  The thick gray semigloss paint had a distinctive smell, slightly acrid but not unpleasant, that I remember as well as the feel of the summer heat; or the sound of the loose manhole cover up the block when a car drove over it.

Sitting on the porch, reading.  Donald Duck.  Or the Hardy Boys.  Or textbooks.  There’s an old photo of me sitting on the top step, with a history book open on my lap.  Or sitting with my father, learning to play chess with the plastic pieces, pennies and nickels filling in for the missing ones.  

Or watching Joe Yannatelli conducting his “experiments” from his top-floor porch across the street. The experiments consisted largely of lowering and retrieving toys on lengths of string.  But there was the Fourth of July when he spent the whole day unwrapping firecrackers and piling up the powder.  All that effort; and at 9:00 PM sharp not the promised great explosion, but I bright but utterly silent flash, and it was over.  Sort of like missing Halloween events and then not seeing the Great Pumpkin.

But the memory that came to me so sharply this weekend involved buses.  I had always been fascinated by buses, the way other kids were with planes or trains (or strings and firecrackers).  I had a collection of toy buses that probably numbered 50 or so.  Unlike the old phone, I know they’re still in a box in the closet; I should take them out and count them.  And part of the appeal of trips, to City Island or shopping or to visit my aunt was that they involved riding on buses.

So on summer afternoons I liked to sit on the porch, and watch the variety of buses bringing kids home from various day camps.  School buses old and new, chartered transit buses in unusual colors; and the most amazing, the streamlined one with the rounded, windowless back.  I know now it was a Flxible Clipper; but then it was a Buck Rogers style mystery.

And as I thought about this, another memory.  Sitting on the porch, drinking cream soda. I could sort of remember the flavor.

So today I took a ride down to the old neighborhood, and saw the old house and the old porch, much rebuilt.  And on the way home, I stopped and invested two dollars and thirty-two cents in cream soda.

Two dollars worth has since gone down the drain; and the thirty-two cents’ worth tasted only vaguely like what I remembered. 

But at least now I know.