The girl I refer to, a pretty little dark-haired, dark-eyed cutie, couldn't quite make everything center. I helped her after I was through with mine and we both ended with little masterpieces.
When my mother arrived to take me home, she admired my design with appropriate maternal pride and I pointed out the little girl's design and, placing vanity above gallantry, told her that I had also made that one.
"Why?" said my mother.
And I smiled and said in a bashful voice, "Because I like to look at her/'
That, as far as I know, was the first stirring of my heterosexual fascination with women that has endured to the present moment and that shows no signs of slackening, thank goodness. Ever since kindergarten, I have liked to look at women, and, as time went on, to engage my other senses as well.
In the ordinary course of events, I would have stayed in kindergarten one year and entered first grade in February 1926, after my sixth birthday.
My parents, however, couldn't bear to wait that long. They felt that since I could read, the sooner I got started putting the ability to use, the sooner I would sharpen and extend it. They didn't want it to fade and shrivel through lack of exercise. (They were perfectly right.)
In September 1925, I remember, my mother took me to school. My father was working and couldn't come, but Uncle Joe came along as my mother's interpreter. At the time, I hadn't the faintest idea what they were doing, and it was only in later years, consulting my memory of various incidents, that I was able to deduce what must have happened.
My mother, backed by my Uncle Joe, was assuring the school authorities that I was born on September 7, 1919. Considering the uncertainty of my birthdate, it was less of a lie than it looked, but it was a little of a lie, because, allowing for all uncertainties, I couldn't possibly have been born that early.
Still, once that birthday was accepted, I turned six years old on September 7, 1925, and it was on September 8, 1925, that the fall semester started. I was eligible, therefore, to start first grade on that day, and I did.
The reason that I know that this is what must have happened is that when I was in the third grade, the teacher (for some reason I cannot remember) had the children recite their birthdates. In all innocence, I said January 2, 1920, and the teacher frowned and told me it was September 7, 1919.
I have always been quite certain of what I know, however, and I became very emphatic about having been born on January 2 7 1920. So energetic did I become in the matter, in fact, that the school records
$2 In Memory YetGreen
were changed accordingly. If that had not been done, my official birthday would have been September 7, 1919, for all time. 3
3 As a general rule, I don't want to hoist little red flags in my autobiography and say things such as "and believe it or not, this ended by having a remarkable influence on my life." That's a silly thing to do. Let me, however, make one exception—this one —for as we shall see, believe it or not, this act of mine in changing back my birthday in the third grade was to have a remarkable influence on my life. And don't worry, it won't escape you. When the time comes, I'll point it out.
Miller Avenue
About the time I entered the first grade, probably a little before, we moved to 434 Miller Avenue, on the corner of Sutter Avenue.
It was only a block and we were moving up in the world as well as up that block—literally as well as figuratively. Instead of being on the ground floor where the world could look in your windows at its lazy ease so that the blinds had to be forever down, it was one flight up. Instead of three rooms, there were four. In the new apartment there was also a gas range instead of a wood-burning stove, and electricity instead of gas jets.
For me, though, it was a traumatic experience. It was the first move in my life that I was aware of as a move, and I remember hurling myself, crying, on my parents' bed and holding onto it, as though to keep our apartment in place.
I quickly got used to most aspects of the change and came to see them as improvements, but I never grew to like the gas range. Indeed, to this day I am discontented with them and can't help but feel that the "ovens" attached to such things, whether heated by gas or electricity, are shoddy imitations of the real thing. The real thing, of course, is the cast-iron stove with the blazing fire inside and the flat stove lids that could be lifted with a special hooking device to show the fire burning beneath, and with a stovepipe stretching up and into the wall.
I also found it hard to get used to the toilet. In Van Siclen Avenue it was flushed from a water reservoir near the ceiling. You pulled a chain and down it came. It never occurred to me to wonder how it filled up again. When, in later apartments, the reservoir was behind the seat, or even nowhere in sight, I always felt uneasy, fearing that there might be no flushing.
I remember, too, that sitting on the toilet seat was always a dull and boring chore, so I would practice my reading. We had no books in the house but there were always some sort of boxes or cans in the bathroom with writing on them.
What I remember most clearly is the box of Bon Ami, a powdered cleanser, which I pronounced as I had always heard it pronounced,
TA In Memory Yet Green
"bah-NAM-ee." I would make out as much of the advertising spiel as I could and was particularly impressed by the picture on the can, which was that of a just-born chick with the broken eggshell behind it and the legend "Hasn't Scratched Yet."
I knew Bon Ami was a scouring powder and I was very impressed with the thought of the people who made it being very conscientious and checking on all the users to make sure it had never scratched. I was quite convinced that if they ever discovered a scratch, the legend would be changed to "Scratched Only Once."
I suppose we are bom with an instinctive assumption of honesty that must be beaten out of us by life, more or less painfully.
Years later, when I was studying French in high school, I burst into laughter on discovering that the French people, when they wanted to say "good friend," said bon ami and didn't even pronounce it correctly.
Staying in the neighborhood by moving only one block was a comfort to me. Sutter Avenue and Blake Avenue were the extremes of my world. Everything else seemed unbearably distant.
In those days, I remember, my father worked for a living as any human being did and stayed home on Sundays. That was a big day because it meant I could crawl into bed with him in the early morning and he would tell me stories. He told me, of course, the only stories he felt suitable for me—those from the Bible—and here he improvised improvements and dramatic detail.
One passage I remember particularly. Moses was bringing on the plagues of Egypt and an obdurate Pharaoh was being gradually broken down. Finally, after the first-born had died, Pharaoh had to find Moses to tell him to get his people out of the land immediately and on any terms. My father said, "But Pharaoh couldn't find Moses because Moses had said that Pharaoh wouldn't see him anymore. Pharaoh rushed to Sutter Avenue and everybody said Moses was on Blake Avenue. He rushed to Blake Avenue and everyone there said Moses was on Sutter Avenue."
I got the idea at once. Good Heavens, Pharaoh simply scoured his dominions from end to end looking for the man.
Blake Avenue reminds me, by the way, that the Roaring Twenties were the last decade of the immigrant, and I caught it. Blake Avenue, for instance, was lined with pushcarts in those days. Each morning, the small enterpreneurs, too poor to own even the smallest store, would
bring their stock on a pushcart, which they urged forward by muscle-power for who knows what distance to a particular spot that was theirs by common consent. There they spent the day hawking their fish or their vegetables or their needles and thread, or whatever it might be, to the hordes of housewives who drifted along this spread-out, noisy, smelly, one-long-line department store.
There was the iceman, too, who was a familiar figure because refrigerators were unheard of, and there was no apartment without an icepick. Whenever the iceman appeared, the kids would flock around to watch
him chop the ice with practiced blows of the pick, producing perfect cubes. (A cubic foot of ice cost ten cents, and for that dime he would place it on his shoulder—all sixty pounds of it—with a rubber pad between it and his shirt, and carry it up several flights of stairs and put it in the icebox.
For the children, the year was divided into seasons—exactly when the divisions fell or how anyone knew about it, I don't know. There would be a time when everyone was playing with marbles ("shooters" we called them), and then one day all the marbles disappeared, and everyone had tops, or checkers, or something else.
The girls had "jacks," with which they played intricate games in which they bounced a ball and picked up set numbers in time to catch the ball as they came down. This they did with incredible agility, but that was a "girls' game" and we didn't play it—probably because boys weren't agile enough.
Most streets were paved only down the middle so that on the curb side there was a strip of bare soil ("dirt" we called it, and that's what it distributed over us). We would dig a shallow hole at one end, toss marbles at it, trying to get into it while striking enemy marbles away from the hole by flicking our own marbles against them and getting a free shot at the hole if we succeeded in making contact.
With checkers, we had a remarkable game called "skelly," one of which I never tired. The sidewalk was marked off into natural squares by the cracks introduced to allow for expansion and contraction with temperature change (not that I knew that was the reason—I thought that that was the way God created sidewalks, and didn't question it).
At each corner of these squares we marked off a numbered little square, 1, 2, 3, 4, in order. At the center of each side of the sidewalk square were more little squares numbered 5, 6, 7, 8. At the very center of the sidewalk square was a very little square—just large enough to hold a checker comfortably—numbered 9, and this was surrounded by a considerably larger square, the corners of which were attached to the comers of the small No. 9 square by straight lines. This central struc-
ture was the "skelly." (This could, conceivably, have been short for "skeleton.")
From a distance you flicked your checker toward the 1-square. Eventually, you flicked it into the l-square without touching any of the lines, then went on to the 2-square, the 3-square, and so on. Meanwhile, one or more other players were doing the same, each going in turn, each getting a second shot if he landed within the proper square, or struck another's checker (driving it farther from its goal, with any luck).
There were complications. Getting into the 9 was very difficult, since if you landed in the space between the large square and the small square (or were hit into it by an enemy) you had to start all over at 1. You were safe if you landed on any of the lines, though, and loud were the arguments as to whether a checker was on the line or in the space.
Once you reached 9, you worked backward to 1 again and were now only partially in fear of the skelly, for if you got into it, you only went back to 9. However, if by some mischance you got into the central 9 itself in the course of your backward journey, you had to start all over again from 1. This hardly ever happened, but when it did, the game had to be suspended for five minutes while all the contestants jumped and yelled with ear-splitting excitement.
No game of skill has ever excited me as much as skelly did, and I could play it for hours. I wasn't bad at it, either. Of course, all that crouching on the sidewalk made all of us filthy, but I don't recall that fact ever bothering any of us, or our parents either. We were all supposed to wash our hands before eating (at least I was), but baths were once a week. (It seems to me, looking back on it, that I must have smelled rather bad much of my young life, but since everyone around me undoubtedly smelled just as bad, none of us ever noticed.)
There was one serious catch, however. The whole fun of the games we played was to win one's opponent's marbles, or checkers, or tops, or whatever it was we were playing with. That was called 'playing for keeps." If I lost a piece of paraphernalia, however, my parents strongly resisted replacing it. It quickly became apparent to me, then, that the joy of winning the next fellow's checker was small indeed, compared with the pain of losing my own.
I therefore steadfastly refused to play for keeps. What I wanted to do was merely win for the honor of winning, and I did not want to confuse this with material gain. This was called "playing for fun." Most of the young fellows, however, were adamant in their view that "playing for fun is no fun," so I was reduced to playing with only a few people
who either didn't mind just going through the motions or who were desperate for a game and couldn't find anyone else.
My father, of course, approved of my refusal to play for keeps. In fact, he was dubious about my playing for fun, even, since he felt that my time could be spent much more instructively practicing my reading or studying or trying to think great thoughts.
He was particularly dubious of the more energetic street games. We used to play "punchball," for instance. This was a variant of baseball, played without a lot and without a bat. All you needed was a street (we called it a "gutter") and a rubber ball. You hit the ball with your clenched fist and from there on it was pretty much like baseball.
To my father, any boy who played ball in the street was a "bum" and was clearly in training to become a "gangster," If I went out to play with them, it would elicit the remark, "Are you going out to play with those bums again?"
He didn't forbid me outright, you see, but he would load me down with his Talmudic aphorisms. "Remember, Isaac," he would say, "if you hang around with bums, don't think for a minute that you will make a good person out of the bum. No! That bum will make a bum out of you." 1
The result, of course, was that I didn't play punchball often, and that introduced a vicious cycle. Since I didn't play often enough to develop real skill, I was an undesirable choice for a team, and I played less than ever.
Fortunately, I developed a series of solitary ball games. I would throw a ball against a wall or against the small flight of stairs leading up to a porch. Ordinarily the ball struck and came back to me with one bounce on the sidewalk. That was zero points, and if it took a bad hop or, through sheer clumsiness, I didn't catch the ball, that ended the game. If, however, the ball caught a projection on the wall, or the point of the step, just right, it returned to me without a bounce and that scored 1. The idea was to see how high a score you could build up without ending the game. I grew very skilled at that and could bounce my ball for hours without missing, racking up scores of over 100.
All these games were, of course, extremely inconvenient to pedestrians who had to walk around skelly games, or to automobiles (there
1 Once, in recent years, I had occasion to repeat that saying of my father's, explaining the conditions under which he had delivered that warning to me. My good friend Lester del Rey, the science-fiction writer and editor, said to me, "So why do you still hang around with bums, Isaac?" And I said, "Because I love you, Lester." And that was the only time Lester ever let me (or anyone) have the last word. He was too busy laughing, and let it go.
weren't very many in those days, remember) that had to drive slowly through punchball games while enduring catcalls.
The noise, inseparable from the games, the cheers, the arguments, the screaming, must have been unbearable to people trying to carry on ordinary occupations. The thunk-thunk-thunk, steady and unwearying over the hours, of my ball against a wall must have driven many a person insane, too.
I don't recall ever being annoyed at the noise, whether I was part of a game or not. It was an inseparable part of the world.
And, of course, it was pleasure. I have never been able to work up much sympathy for those who mourn the plight of the city children crowded into their nasty streets. When I think back on the children of my childhood, all I can remember is that those nasty streets belonged to us and that the boisterous competition and the noisy excitement were the very breath of life to us.
It may be different now, I suppose,
&
nbsp; 3
There I was at PS 182 (I forget exactly where it was, but it was only three or four blocks from home) in grade 1A1. The initial "1" meant it was "first grade," and the A meant it was the first semester. You went from 1A to 1B, then to 2A, and 2B, and so on. We never called them semesters, however. We called them "terms."
Furthermore, each grade was divided into several classes. No. 1 was for bright youngsters, No. 2 for slow youngsters, and Nos. 3, 4, etc., for the vast stretches in between. So the fact that I was in 1A1 meant that I had already been included with the bright students, presumably on the basis of the judgment of my kindergarten teacher.
I suppose there were advantages in thus segregating youngsters according to the presumed level of their intelligence. Bright classes weren't held back by dull youngsters, and dull classes could move more slowly and do better in that way.
It did categorize a youngster (sometimes unfairly), however, and anyone in the "2" class was bound to feel humiliated. He might, if left to himself, stop thinking of himself as "dumb," but his schoolmates from the other classes would never let him do so. They informed him of his dumbness constantly, not willing to allow so vital a piece of information to be lost to the world.
I went to segregated schools throughout my childhood, of course, since the student body was always heavily Jewish. My teacher in 1A1,
however, was a plump black woman. I think she was the first black woman I had ever seen. (I seem to recall a black boy among the children in Van Siclen Avenue, but the only memory I have of him is of his having an accident that cut his forehead and noting with astonishment that his blood was the same color it would have been if his skin had been lighter. It meant, I deduced, that he wasn't black all the way through.)
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 7
