A Me Grows in Brooklyn

It’s always fascinating to visit the homes of great authors, and I hope you will all have an opportunity to do so one day. In the meantime, you guys will have to settle for a grand, virtual tour of where it all began for me. Listen, you and I both know that if you had anything better to do, you wouldn’t be reading this crap.

So welcome to 800 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, circa 2011, which, for all practical purposes is no different from the way it was circa 1959 when Mickey and Seymour Ocean brought me home.

Mickey was certain, at the time, that I could not possibly be her baby, as I was a bit chubby and kind of homely, but when I began to resemble my older brother even she had to accept that it was highly unlikely a baby switch had occurred two years in a row. But I digress.

A tree most certainly does grow in Brooklyn, and so does grass, on which, theoretically, children could run free and play if the building management didn’t prohibit it. So we played on the cracked sidewalk and sometimes in the traffic, until Brian from next door got hit by a car and we decided that wasn’t such a good idea.

Here’s the elevator, which I show you not so you’ll think I grew up in a cinder block prison (that's a metaphor for another time), but so that you can see, for the first time, I’m guessing, a real life Shabbos elevator. It’s kind of like a Shabbos Goy except it doesn’t drink. Anyway, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the Shabbos elevator is programmed to stop automatically on every floor so that the Orthodox Jews in the building can take the elevator but pretend that they are obeying the eleventh Commandment (Thou shalt not ride in an elevator on the Sabbath unless somebody else pushes the buttons). I kid you not.

To take you on a complete tour of the apartment (pronounced apawtment) I grew up in would be tedious, so I thought I’d just focus on the part (the pawt) that had the greatest influence on who I eventually became, which would be the Lilliputian kitchen. I attribute my lifelong “fat” complex to a childhood marked by a dollhouse sized kitchen with dollhouse sized furnishings and foodstuffs. No wonder I always felt a bit like an Amazon. I’m sure it didn’t help that the cheerful framed picture over the table contained a whimsical list of calorie counts for various common foods.

Anyway, here’s the teeny table where my brother and I sat with our knees in our chests and ate our one hundred eighty calories of cereal every morning.

The teeny thing in the middle is a jar of mayonnaise – barely enough to last two days in a Jewish household, one hour tops in a Gentile home. It is highly representative of other jars in the teeny refrigerator.

Then there’s the miniature Mr. Coffee (a relic), which stands next to the microwave, which isn’t necessarily teeny and isn’t even that much of a relic; actually, it’s the only post-1960’s appliance in the house.

It is used solely, as you can see, to house food products, which used to be the job of the old gas oven. Don’t ask. It’s my mother’s idea of modernization.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing anything large or modern in Shakespeare’s old house. We great authors have a lot in common.