Boys Will Be Boys

Running Away from Home

An essay by Dr. Lloyd Sederer

I must have been nine or ten, thereabouts, since that’s when parents let – or often wish to have - their boys completely out of their sights, unsupervised too. When kids (especially boys) want to do the mischief borne of their DNA, and when parents don’t want to be pestered.

My best friend was my first cousin, Steve, a few months older than I, the older son of my mother’s sister, Muriel. They lived in Queens, Forest Hills , NYC (near where the tennis stadium is now), but it was as if they lived next door to us, since we saw them about every weekend, and spent summers together on Ben’s (Muriel’s husband) chicken farm in Walden, Orange County, NY, near the Catskill Mountains.

My grandparents, Rose and JT, on my mother’s side, lived with us, in the ground floor apartment of our brick, three-decker, attached house on the corner of Eastchester Road and Hammersley Avenue, which pitched violently downhill and east towards the Long Island Sound. In the 50s, Freedom Land, a vast amusement park (an east coast Disneyland wannabe about the same time the Anaheim version first arrived) was at the very bottom of the hill. That fizzled and died. Now we have Route 95.

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and my grandmother worked in her brother-in-law’s antique store on the Bowery. So, her home (more like an apartment) had antiquities, like 19^th C. furniture, lamps, chandeliers, oil paintings, and chatzkes.

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Steve and I were watching TV one weekend afternoon, having escaped to our grandparents’ ground floor apartment from upstairs - where our parents (and grandparents) were gathered, talking, smoking too. We were soon bored and started horsing around, wrestling with each other. We must have kicked one of the side tables because next thing we knew a lamp had crashed to the floor. Shattered. We immediately knew we would be labeled menaces to society as soon as our parents (not our grandparents because we could do no wrong) discovered the lamp’s catastrophic end, well over 100 years after a poor ceramic craftsman at a wooden bench had made it for a fancy European estate.

I think it was my idea about what to do. Run away. I didn’t think I could succeed in blaming Steve for the damages. I, thus, devised a plan of escape from the unjust punishment that would await us (which we had coming). A plan of our having gone missing that would inspire solicitous attention, perhaps indulgence(!) from our mothers - while also imagining ourselves intrepid explorers of the North Bronx. The weather was warm, it wasn’t raining, and we weren’t hungry, we had already eaten lunch. That “checklist” assured us we were ready to go.

We slipped out the ground-floor door next to the garage and headed north on Eastchester Road, soon crossing the trestle, the bridge over the train tracks below. It felt like a Rubicon. We reached Boston Post Road, a great thoroughfare with lots of stores, even a movie theatre. We wanted to buy something to eat, like ice cream or candy, but we had no money.

We lamented, were sorry for ourselves, the street urchins we had become. In a desultory way, we wandered more north, not much, not into the unfamiliar, marked by six-story apartment houses with narrow alleys behind them.

We presumed, or at least I tried to convince Steve, that they (our parents) would surely be aggrieved by our loss. We wandered for about another hour, then decided to go home. We had no place to go, except home, and it was getting dark. We shuffled back to 3100 Eastchester Road and braced for the reception we now feared we would receive. We didn’t expect celebratory trumpets.

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My and Steve’s moms both first issued a sigh of relief: We hadn’t been kidnapped or killed, a good thing, I guess, because who would pay any ransom, and the cost of the funerals could be prohibitive.

Then they got mad. Not for the lamp, which turned out not to be a real antique, but for running away and creating the awful, mother’s fear we did. Our crime jumped from the misdemeanor of a playful, unintended accident to the felony of creating maternal fear about the fate of their sons.

I knew my aunt Muriel wanted to hit us with a wooden spoon, like she would try from time to time in her home (though we usually eluded her swing). But she wasn’t in her own kitchen and my mother didn’t hit, just wore you down with questions and guilt. It would have been better to be hit, since that would have felt less painful than their disappointment with us. Then came their long talk with us; it probably was minutes but felt like days in captivity. They both let us know that we should have understood the worry we would create doing such a dumb thing, especially me, said Muriel, I recall, since I was supposed to be the really smart kid in the family.

No more TV that weekend. Scowls everywhere we went. Then my aunt and cousins went back to Queens. The whole episode faded away, or maybe I have buried the recollection among the many painful memories of what has been my less than decorous life. I was no angel.

The very next weekend I saw my aunt, Muriel. She greeted me heartily in her crowded Queens kitchen. No wooden spoon came out of the draw, to be wielded against me in the old-fashioned way of making a point. She gave me her million-dollar smile. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

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 Dr. Lloyd Sederer is a psychiatrist, Public Health Doctor, and Non-fiction Writer.

www.askdrlloyd.com