Gifts

My little world ended at the curb unless I held my mother's hand — or my father's. It was a big thing when the time came that I was allowed to cross the street on my own. Privilege has limits. "Look both ways before you go."

When I was enrolled in school the dependence of holding a parent's hand was lessened. Their admonitions though would remain and would be reinforced by the safety patrol. "Cross at the corner." Running across the street in the middle of the block was prohibited. I violated that rule in second grade and was struck by a car and went to the hospital. It was a time before lawyers thought about putting their clients in higher income brackets.

School expanded the known world beyond the curb. School was tailored for gradual exploration and the circle of familiarity of things once unknown grew with us and us with them. Grammar school, our introduction to the world, was a neighborhood property and all of the kids were not too many curbs away.

Our growing knowledge of the world was the result of many small benefices. My father gave me little gifts: a brass telescope, a pocket watch, a globe that spun around on its axis, a radio. My teachers gave me and anyone else in their charge, perhaps beyond, what today is grudgingly considered their obligation: storytelling and answers to mysteries of the universe and a little prodding now and then so that we might seize incentives.

There were other people. They weren't teachers but they were equals to them. We didn't have to go to them but if we did they opened doors to places that impersonal noticeboards called museums or historical houses. They were tour guides and they ushered us around Hope Lodge, the only house in America attributed to design by Christopher Wren, to Mercer's Castle in Doylestown, Fonthill, to the State House in Philadelphia. Too many tour guides who breathed in deeply the air of history are replaced by audio-tape cassettes that deny us substance, soul and sweetness. Visitors now pick up their tapes and wonder around these places without being able to ask the questions that the older guardians anticipated. Tapes are a clever boon to entrepreneurs but their use removes the personal communion with their subject.

When we were very young and before we thought about drivers' licenses and social-security cards, and for my generation of boys their draft-cards, we had privileges: library cards and bank books. The school encouraged us to enroll in savings plans and to join the Free Library and others. Libraries, we soon found, were the quietest places on earth. The rule of silence was unquestionable and to break it meant to be banished until you could accept it.

What we saw of the world that began when we stepped off the curb was owed to our guides. Parents organized road trips to shop and to visit relatives and, to our greatest joy, our vacations. Mine would resort to towns by the sea where little boys built sandcastles that would be ruins in a day. There's a stark lesson about labor and the inescapable brevity of its rewards that we would see waiting for the inexorable power of the sea to come and pulverize our work and make it indistinguishable from the rest of the beach. "Man, thou art but dust, and unto dust thou shalt return."

There's a difference between seeing an Egyptian wrapped in gauze three thousand years ago and seeing my grandfather, then lately lain out and dressed up to be dinner for worms. Did a seer of an older time tell the not-yet mummy that a long trip abroad was in his future? He'd be viewed by strangers and only as a curiosity long after our grandfathers turned...returned to dust.

At a later time when we went to high school we'd be introduced to a more recent dead man who shared class with us. The skeleton in the Health class was always at his post and his nickname changed with every wag disposed to giving him a better title than anonymity that arrived with his bones. "Who was he anyway," we must have thought?

In our childhood social opportunities were made available but not designed to compete with our families and their reasonable schedules. We could join societies: the Cub Scouts or the "Y." Someone invented an ultimate day-care center. Their program was the movie matinee and there usually were no adults present except uniformed ushers whose job was to throw out the incorrigible. We weren't chaperoned at play: Little Leagues hadn't invaded our play lot to complicate our idea of sports. A natural gang would find a field and claim it as their own forever or until they grew up. They would choose up sides and play pure baseball untainted by umpires and (we) would play for interminable innings.

Organizers did run programs at the "Y." It was inevitable that they would invade our time but we had to approach civilization and learn from it. Adults were there to teach us to swim and introduce us to crafts and at the "Y" we could shoot pool and on Saturday nights watch Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin movies. They would be abandoned when we began to look at girls. There were weekly dances where we really went to dance with objects of our affections...and sometimes did. The dances introduced us to a social hauteur and somewhere between moods of vanity and terror a choice of clothes that would catch the eyes of girls was in order. It was no good for us to have mom be our fashion coordinator with her obscene tastes in socks and ties and for that matter everything she might have supposed to be smart in clothing. Once our peers determined the trend, opening gifts of clothing, other than underwear, could be unpleasant.

Evolution is a simple graduation in time. If Pop took us to the ball game he'd eventually be replaced by a social director, the cub master or the counselor from the "Y" and he'd be replaced by our pals. Later we would have to anticipate the next generation being our charges at ball games.

I don't know if my father had philosophical insight when he gave me the brass telescope that I could point at stars that were round instead of pointed as I had seen them in fairy-tale books and the pocket-watch that reminded me of the portion of the day when my responsibility was called upon. Nor do I know, so (if greater gifts to the intellect were intended) when I got the globe that I was heir to and for a while a piece of its mosaiced whole and the radio that was made to stir imagination from beyond where my eyes could see. As material gifts are measured, they were unbeatable.

Before I chose my own itinerary that would take me to places far away I could look at menus; Lowell Thomas took me to Tibet at seven o'clock in the evening for fifteen minute tours via radio. Fitzgerald's docu-tours whisked me to Egypt's pyramids and along the Amazon where Anacondas slithered after meals on cinema screens. Burton Holmes gave slide-shows and lectures at the Academy of Music and I think that everyone there had been to whatever place he described. My buddy's dad, Fritz Pira and his circle of friends rejoiced in their memories describing (to us) worlds far away where they once lived and others where they visited. The old priest at Saint Elisabeth's church, Father Roseboro, had journeyed across the Trans-Siberian railway more than once in his 'round the world vacations and more than once was in the company of the last Czar of the old Russia. A neighbor, Mr Mumford, and his wife would have us in for milk and cookies and tell us wondrous stories of their countless trips abroad. Their steamer trunks were pasted over with exotic names: Cairo, Beruit, Jerusalem, Singapore, Calcutta, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Le Havre, Manila. Their house was a museum of wonderful treasures: oriental rugs, tapestry, jade, silver, crystal, artifacts, relics, crafts. He let me beat on a voodoo drum and when my little recital ended he revealed to me that its skin was indeed that. At eleven I thought that was neat. He showed me snap-shots of the death of the Hindenburg that he had taken on that awful day at Lakehurst. I peered at the photos that caught calamity and suspended its horror and told him that I saw the great ship on an earlier journey and he was as excited about my account as I was of his. He was a traveller and he carried more treasure in his mind's eye than his house held as souvenirs. He gave me one, an ink well carved from a tall cedar of Lebanon with two wells for bottles and niches for pens. Its front and sides are inlayed and its back still bears the bark of the tree from which it was created.

My uncles who went off to war gave me coins that couldn't be spent, coins that conquerors minted in Europe and in Asia, sous and lire and mark and ore and yen and Kronen and I put them in a box with shillings and farthings and ha pennies. Those who fought in World War II, my uncles and older guys from the neighborhood, had tales of conquests of not so similar purpose and they bent them a little, no doubt, to please our ears. Burton Holmes wouldn't dare do that.

The classes that I attended where history, geography and social studies were taught led me to the treasures of time. They told me about the founding and development of my country...and other ones. They told me of the right of kings and that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, and that Rome fell because it was corrupt. If you don't fall because you are corrupt you fall because you are old...or flabby. I got the cold chronicle of the industrial revolution in Social Studies and the hot ancillary to it in English from Charles Dickens...or was it colder? I studied the convulsions of our own civil war and the one in England where round-heads experimented with Commonwealth and regicide. I learned that coffee came from Brazil and sugar cane from Cuba and pineapples from Hawaii and diamonds from South Africa and tulips from Holland and I already knew that coal came from Pennsylvania. I knew that Norman Thomas ran for president a hundred times and Eugene Debs ran for it from jail and only death would keep Franklin Roosevelt from being president forever. I think back and realize that we were taught History before Spelling and Math tables and before we got our first Reading primers. The day started with readings — by our teachers for the first six or seven years and then by each of the students on a rotating assignment — of an older history of Jews, of David and Solomon and Daniel and Ruth and their struggles against adversities: Goliath and Nebuchadnezzar and the Pharaoh. That book has been excised from curriculae now. It's lumped with "prayers" they say. It's offensive they say. We've lost a rich history of understanding things I say.

Teachers were like my father because they gave me little gifts and great friends. Names are resurrected. Miss Carlin introduced me to Caesar and Cicero, Miss Coyle to the Magna Carta and the Louisiana Purchase and Seward's Folly, Miss Gitman to Franklin Roosevelt and Taft-Hartley, Miss Fleming to Flushing Meadows and she took us to the United Nations, and Miss Major to the Sack of Troy , and to Homer, to Dickens' London, Shakespeare's refining psychology beyond Moses' introduction, Tennyson's poetry and Ernie Pyle's reports first-hand of the scene of battles that would affect the whole world.

Impressions guide us in much of our lives. They're very much like spells conjured to make us do and think in the way we view and respond to the people and the world around us. Impressions are the seeds of conversions, no doubt. I'm subjective for my part and depending on observation for my assessment of other people — at least in some part.

For me the larger world began when I stepped off the curb and, as much as I let go of the hands that held mine when I was very young, I find myself reaching for other ones. My teachers would have been a useless lot if they couldn't tell stories and give answers to mysteries and prod me on to small successes. If they saw me now, for all they did impart, they would be sorely disappointed.