SUN MAR 31 EASTER SUNDAY

11:00pm: An Easter Fable
She made her way into this world on a cold and windy Easter Sunday 1899, in Papert, Armenia, and was named Ovsanna (Hosanna) to commemorate the holy day of her birth. She inherited a turbulent, turn-of-the-century Central Europe that exacted a heavy toll on a young life: the Turkish Government’s Armenian genocide of 1915 claimed much of her family, the Russian Revolution claimed her first husband and infant child, and she was raped by Russian soldiers. But she survived, and made her way to Bridgewater, Mass., where she met and married my grandfather. And because time and turbulence had erased the memory and records of the actual date of her birth, that celebration was held each year on Easter Sunday. (Now we have calculators and software, not to mention the U.S. Naval Observatory, which advises that Easter Sunday in 1899 fell on April 2.) She is a worthy subject of remembrance not because she was my grandmother (although certainly in addition to that), but because she was a member of a very rare club here on Earth Disco, a kind soul and gentle spirit who touched everyone who knew her with warmth and compassion. My favorite memory of “Mom” (as we and nearly everyone called her) is not about something she did or said. It is about how she affected the people who knew her, as evidenced by the following true incident involving a young boy and a New York City cop:

I grew up on Long Island, but spent every summer here in the city living with Mom in her Kips Bay apartment, the south tower on 30th and 2nd. There was another young kid living in the building, and because time has erased his name from my memory we shall suffice to call him Shorty. We used to play handball on the back wall of the Kips Bay Cinema (still there after all these years), and meet Mom in the playground where she would invariably be babysitting some neighbors’ children. She would give each of us a quarter, and we would sprint around the corner to the Grand Union to snap up flavored Dannon yogurts (at a quarter @), vying amid the spoon-stirring and the summer swelter to see who could make his last the longest. (Every day or two Mom would give me a dollar to run down and get myself four of those little bad-boys, so the ‘fridge was always well-stocked.)

Anyway, one day in Shorty asked me if we had any eggs.
“Eggs?” I said, wondering what the heck he was talking about.
“Yeah, eggs,” he said, stepping onto the elevator.
“What are we gonna do with eggs?” I asked, following him in as he pressed the button for the eighth floor, where Mom’s apartment was situated. He gawked at me like I was wearing a clown costume.
“Chuck ‘em off the roof!” he said, as though it should have been obvious.

Now the roof of Kips Bay is somewhere on the order of twenty-two stories, or more, and I can remember being pretty intimidated the first time Shorty brought me up there to hang over the retaining wall. But being a tree-climber from the Island it didn’t take too long for me to acclimate to the height, and before long I was dangling my legs over the edge, hanging onto the rebar that was left extruding from the concrete wall at the corner.

Well, so I grabbed a couple of eggs from our ‘fridge, and we stopped on the fourteenth floor and Shorty did the same, and when we got up to the roof Short Stuff leaned over the north wall, overlooking the downstairs lobby and the courtyard connecting to the North Tower. He let it go and we watched as Newton’s Law of Gravity (an historic figure also born on a holy day—Christmas of 1642 for those of you with a sense of history) escorted the thing down to the tile walkway that skirted the exterior of the lobby around the whole building.
“Whoa!” he cried.
“Lemme go,” I said, holding my egg over the edge and letting fly. But as we watched it drop we saw the front of a shoe walk into the picture from beneath the overhang in the lobby below, and then a cuff and a leg and the rest of the blue uniform as the cop walked toward the shattered egg that Shorty had dropped. We must have collectively gasped, because he was walking directly into the path of my egg, still on the way down, and it landed not a foot from his foot, splattering all over his leg. We jumped, but continued to watch as he looked up at us, pointing his nightstick.
“Don’t move!” he called up, and quickly disappeared into the lobby of the building.

Well, any self-respecting, egg-inspired, adolescent rooftop bombardier would sit right where the good officer had told him to sit. NOT! Hell, any city kid half worth his salt would have known he had plenty of time insinuate himself out of that particular jam before that particular cop could get to the roof. We could easily have disappeared onto one of the floors, gone into our apartments, or even pass him going down in a different elevator and run out the building as he was getting to the roof. He could have watched us run shaken his night stick some more.

Well, but I wasn’t a self-respecting, street-smart city kid, I was just a green kid from the Island, so when this NYPD cop shook his night stick at me and told me to stay put, I stayed put. It didn’t stop me from offering some wise cracks--nervous energy--to this cop I’d nearly creamed with a flying projectile at 22 stories, I mean he—or anyone else who may have wandered into the path of that thing—could have been seriously hurt. Ah, what's a 10 year old kid know.
“Hey, kid, you got a pretty smart mouth, you want a J.D. card?”
Hell, I didn’t know what that was.
“Sure, I’ll take one’a them,” I deadpanned. Real smartass at 10, don’t you know.
“Do you know what a J.D. card is?” the officer asked, trying to give me some room to back out of this mess, or either enough rope to hang myself.
“No,” I sheepishly admitted.
“Well, it’s a ‘Juvenile Delinquent’ card, and you don’t want one, now take my word on it,” he said. “Where do you live?” he wanted to know of each of us, and when I told him I was staying with my grandmother he said “Mrs. Peters, that sweet, kind woman who babysits in the playground!” Well, I had to admit that I was, indeed, the grandson of that sweet, kind woman. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said to me. “That woman is a saint, and she deserves better from you. Now you boys get down off here, and don’t let me catch you up here again.”

And that was it, he let us go. But about two weeks later I was walking into the building with Mom and my Aunt Jan and her dog Patch when we ran into the same cop, still walking his beat, and coming out of the lobby.
“Hello Mrs. Peters,” he said to Mom, and likewise greeted Aunt Jan and Patch, which he knew by name as well. My heart was racing when Mom began to introduce me to him, I knew for sure he was gonna tell her about my little egg toss.

But he didn’t.

He reached down and shook my hand like he’d never laid eyes on me before. “Any grandson of Mrs. Peters must be a fine young man,” he said with a wink and a smile.
“Oh, he is,” Mom agreed, tousling my hair, and then he tipped his NYPD cap and said good-day to us and that was the end of it. He never said a peep.

Oh, and I never, even at that young age, thought for a second he did it for me. It was for Mom, because she was every bit of that sweet, kind woman, who exuded consideration and compassion for all people, alike, and he didn’t want to worry or trouble her over a kid who was just being a kid, and who would, hopefully, learn enough from such a fine woman to have half a shot at turning into a decent human being. Well, today is Easter Sunday, and Tuesday is April 2, so here's to a peaceful woman who suffered the hardships this world dished out with grace and dignity, and left us too soon for a more peaceful world in December of '66. Happy Birthday, Mom, we still miss you. Every Easter and every day.

Posted by cronish at March 31, 2002 10:56 PM