Chapter 11
“And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter
and sharing of pleasures, for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning
and is refreshed.”
- Kahlil Gibran
It was a lonely life the first few months at
Toll House Lane. We were in the
middle of a building spree.
Foundations were being dug and poured with cement, while homes were in
different stages of completeness.
However, there were only seven actually completed and occupied when we
moved in. Piles of dirt and stones
speckled the landscape like a bomb had exploded in space. It was desolate but alive with activity
and hope. Jimmy Dembrowski lived
in the first house built coincidentally at the beginning of the block as you
turned in from Park Avenue. If you continued another hundred yards or so, Park Avenue
crossed the Mill River into Easton.
Marty Lyons lived in the first house on the left hand side and was the
first house you came to when leaving Fairfield. He would be the only person I knew, or would ever know, on
the other side of the river. I
knew Mark from Hebrew School and the Jewish Community Center but he would walk
up to our bus stop in Fairfield and attend our schools. I never was quite sure why he did that,
but he did. Perhaps Easton still
did not have schools or they weren’t as good as Fairfield schools. He was the closest thing to being rich,
in my mind anyway. His father owned
the clothing store, Lyon’s, where we did all our clothes shopping.
Jimmy lived in a cape and we lived
in a ranch. That was really the
only difference between his family and mine. Hard working parents striving to make a better life for
their children. It turned out,
that all the adults who moved into our development, whether on Toll House Lane
or Stevenson Road possessed the same goals and aspirations; to attain the
American dream. To strive and work
hard to succeed at whatever they chose to do. Club Drive was a small road
connecting Toll house lane and Stevenson Road, but no one lived on this
connective road. It was the
conjunction of roads. It connected
two “thoughts” but other than that, served really no significant purpose. Interestingly, the Toll House gang
socialized among themselves and the Stevenson families, tended to gravitate
toward each other. There was neither
rhyme nor reason for this as far as I could tell other than proximity to each
other, but we were all in this together and shared a common bond...The
Development.
I would eventually, however, have several friends from
Stevenson Road like Peter Norlan, Vinny Noriega and of course Donald Wakens. My best friends from Toll House Lane
were Anthony Paninni, The Oriannos (Daffy A.K.A. Dominick and his older brother
Patrick), and of course Craig, Jimmy, and Larry. Larry wasn’t a great friend
though my sister, Arlene was friend’s with his sister. He did however teach me a life lesson,
years later involving Daffy.
They were as a diverse group of
people you could find anywhere in the world. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (you remember him), wrote in Letters From an American Farmer in 1782, that the American is one who was
‘leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners...Here individuals
of all nations were melted into a new race of men, who labors and posterity
would one day cause great changes in the world.’ 1 A true “melting
pot” as defined and written about by Israel Zanwill in the early 1900’s. Zanwill explained that the “melting pot”
was an analogy for the way in which heterogeneous societies become more
homogeneous in which the ingredients of the pot (people of different cultures,
races, and religion) were combined so as to develop a multiethnic society.2
It was sort of like beef stew. Add a few peas, and carrots, with
potatoes and meat and voila, beef stew.
Not quite as tasty but nutritious never the less. The whole was often
times greater than and/or equal to the sum of the parts. It was as though both men had seen the
future...and the future was now.
Unfortunately, prejudice and
discrimination reigned their ugly faces through our country during the fifties
and sixties and no more so than toward the blacks and the Jews. There was
certainly a melting pot, but not everyone was invited to the party.... not
everyone was welcomed. Our
development, smack dab in the middle of Fairfield county, was no different; just
a little more subtle and a bit more discrete. This bigotry raised its ugly scepter on many occasions and
in many different forms, but more than not it came out through the children; my
“friends”, which was the worst place to originate and fester. It wasn’t the south by any stretch of
the imagination, but it was as apparent as the wart on Mrs. Pannino’s
nose. You could cover it up and
hide it with makeup, but you always knew it was there. The sums of the parts were not
always greater than or equal to the whole. Only if you were the right part, the
right slice, the right ingredient, and we apparently were not. I found this out soon enough.
prev chapter
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
first
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
