Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 1 Volume 8 | Page 24

L IFE S TORIES : C AN W E C OME I N AND L AUGH , T OO ? (C ONT ’ D )
Edna and I were the only ones still at home and we knew we wanted to be part of the modern world.
My father was a very kind, gentle person and had a great sense of humor. Mama loved to laugh, but
not like my father. She was much quieter. He did all the grocery shopping because my mother never had a
chance to get out of the kitchen. Cooking for at least twelve people every day was a full-time job.
From the time I was about eight years old, I remember many beggars coming to our kitchen door look-
ing for a meal or a little money. We didn’t have a lot, but my mother never turned anyone away and al-
ways made sure they had something to eat. I remember my brothers saying, “Ma, they all know you. I’ll
bet they put a big “X” on our door so the beggars know where to come to eat.”
We lived on a business street called Ogden Avenue. Most of the buildings were three stories high, with
a business on the ground floor and two apartments above the store. We lived in a third floor “walk-up.”
There were no elevators in apartment buildings in our neighborhood. The mix of people on our block was
pretty evenly divided between Jewish and Irish Catholic with a mix of names like Kelly and Cohen, but we
respected each other and we all got along very well.
Our apartment had six rooms but we only had one bathroom. Can you imagine twelve people in one
apartment with one bathroom? Well let me tell you, it was tough.
Humor has always meant so much to me.
When I was quite young if I needed a new pair of shoes, my father took me to a shopping section on
the East side of Chicago called Maxwell Street. I loved riding on the streetcar and always said hello to the
conductor. There were so many wonderful things to see at Maxwell Street. We looked at pushcart after
pushcart displayed in front of the stores, all laden with merchandise at bargain prices. The men tending
the pushcarts were called pullers. They tried their best to get you into their stores to buy whatever they
were selling.
When my father finally made up his mind about which store to go into, the first thing he'd do was
begin to dicker on the price. It didn't matter whether the shoes fit right—the main thing was that they
were a bargain. Sometimes they were too big and I could have used a pair of oars to go with the shoes be-
cause they were like gunboats. Sometimes they were too short, so my father made a long cut at the toes
to give me enough room. It didn’t matter to him as long as he’d gotten a bargain. No wonder my toes are
misshaped to this day.
While I’m talking about Maxwell Street, I want to tell you a very funny incident. On one of my father’s
shopping sprees he bought a beautiful bowl. The inside was covered with paintings of flowers. On the way
home he told me, “Rose, this will make a good soup bowl for me. It's big enough and Mother won't have
to fill it twice.”
My dad really liked soup and I had to agree that the bowl was very pretty. I remember telling him, “It
sure was a good bargain, Papa.”
Well, when he showed it to my mother and explained the reason he bought it, she agreed it was a
good buy and would mean less trips to the kitchen to refill it. The next day my mother served him soup in
S PRING 2018
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE
AGE soup,
16 guess what? He noticed that all the flowers
his new bowl. When he finally got to the end of P
the
were gone. He called my mother over and pointed to the unadorned bowl. "Mathilda, look! Where have