The Block

Passing through Oneida, New York, I stop the car where I always stop, in front of the apartment house on Sconondoa Street that bears the name “Paul” on its keystone.  Even now I can see my grandfather, with his watery blue eyes, his body bent double due to polio, standing on the stoop, tilting himself backward, waving at me.  Would that he were still with us, the man whom I loved with all my heart.

Traveling with me is my daughter and grandson.  I tell them to cross the street, bereft of traffic like so much of Oneida, and stand on the stoop where my grandfather stood.  They do and they both wave.  I take their picture.  Then it’s time to move on.

The block, as that’s what it was called, was it the only apartment building in Oneida? I have no idea now.  But it was four brick stories, the bottom floor serving as a gas station with one Texaco pump, and a tool shop with all sorts of fascinating levers and wheels.  In the far back where I rarely went was a stack of cowhides, never used.  Who needed Disney World when you had such an adventurous place to play?

The upper floors were filled with relatives, every one of us connected in some arcane way to one another, aunts, uncles, great aunts, second cousins, we kids were in and out of their apartments at all times of day.  Did we annoy them, racing up and down the stairs and into one another’s living space? I have no idea.  It never occurred to us to wonder.

On the first floor, across from my great-grandmother, called Old Granny,  lived my grandparents, Carrie and Augustus.  If anyone called him “Gus,” I never heard it.  I thought they had the grandest apartment ever with wood colonnades separating the kitchen/dining room from—well, from what?  I see some of the apartment clearly but the rest fades away with time.  I remember a bookcase because after my grandfather died, I found a book that talked about the Great War.  It was written before the second Great War, no need for World War I when World War II hadn’t occurred yet.

The kitchen had a big wooden table with clawed feet, always covered in cloth.  Fly paper hung from the ceiling.  After my grandmother died and we’d visit, it looked as if that paper had never been changed—until my mother got at it.

The stove was fueled by coal. You’d need one of those hook-like things to open the burner and place the coal inside.  Ruby’s coal yard was right up the street from the Block; and for some reason, Mr. Ruby objected to anyone taking a lump—or two.  Being caught was out of the question.

My grandfather’s business didn’t only involve the gas station.  He had trucks, Paul trucks that would take propane gas out to the farmers in the area.  So many times they couldn’t pay him in hard cash but we always had crocks of butter, fresh eggs, and sometimes little gewgaws that no one knew what to do with.

Outside my grandparents bedroom was the front roof beneath which was the business office on the bottom floor. This roof had a short wall around it. That’s where we cousins would put on our summer’s end circus and my Aunt Lou would make popcorn balls.  Out the back of the apartment was another roof that had no wall and no protection. Sometimes the boys would jump off it, but my Cousin Jeanie told me there was quicksand underneath where they landed, so I never tried to make that jump.

I slept in the bedroom facing the train tracks, and all night long I could hear the trains passing by with their whistles blowing.  I loved the sound, finding it such a comfort and wishing I could be on one of the trains and go, well, just about anywhere.

No trains now.  Not much of anything in Oneida.  That wonderful apartment building that held so many of my sweet memories stands now only as a burnt-out hulk where firemen practice search and rescue operations.

I was born there; and when I think of a place where I would call home, where I was always happy, it is perhaps strangely enough Oneida, New York, a place my mother couldn’t wait to leave.

I’ve by now probably given the wrong impression.  I never lived in Oneida.  It was our summer escape, a time when we could be away from our father and his volcanic temper, his beatings.  My heart always froze when he would drive up from downstate to fetch us “home.”  I knew I would never be happy again until we returned to the place I loved best. With a grandfather who loved me when my own parents couldn’t.