Month: March 2015

Finding Gary Dush on Facebook

| Linda DeMers Hummel

When my mother was 73, she said, “I want you to find Jonathan Pinsky for me.”

I knew Jonathan Pinsky’s face from photo albums I pored over as a kid, thinking it kind of crazy that my mother was once young. I knew about Jonathan Pinsky from her stories about him. He was the smartest kid in her class and won a full scholarship to Columbia. He always had a crush on her and would drop by their house with flowers. My grandmother loved him. My mother was so-so.

“What do you mean, find him?” I asked.

“You know, go on the computer and look around and tell me what became of him. I’m curious.”

Back then, having a home computer was relatively new for people my parents’ age, and, though they’d bought one the year before, theirs had already become a Free Cell Solitaire machine by the time she asked for my help. My mother realized that I used the Internet for its true intended purposes: stalking old boyfriends and diagnosing obscure illnesses. So she went with my expertise.

I tried for many hours but couldn’t find her old friend.

Being lost to the ages like that hardly ever happens to people of my generation. Say what you will about us — we do like to keep our names and faces out there. “Greatest Generation” or not, our parents just never had the chance to ride the social media train like we have.

Facebook has been a boon to people like me who are curious about whatever became of, okay, everyone I ever met. I love it when Baby Boomers talk about navigating Facebook as if we are really tuned into modern technology. We brag about uploading a photo or unfriending someone as if we’re Navajo Code Talkers. I will say, however, that it took me only 15 seconds to find Gary Dush’s profile when I went looking for it recently. But when it comes to people’s Internet footprints, you hit pay dirt with a name like Dush, so I’m not taking any credit.

Gary was an older boy from the neighborhood. I’d known his name my whole life, partly because of its indelicacy, but also because you knew everyone’s name back then whether you ever spoke directly to him or not. Until the summer day that he became a vivid memory, he’d always been on the not side.

My two best friends and I were hanging around Jill’s house, getting in her mother’s way as she cleaned. When she turned on the vacuum, we knew it was time to move. The Rexall Drug Store, two blocks away, was always a fallback in our effort not to over-exert ourselves. It had all the essentials: a clearance bin of 45s, nail polish, and movie magazines. We saw Gary and his friends coming toward us on the sidewalk.

I can see from his Facebook profile that Gary still looks a little mean, the way he did all through childhood. No boy in Massapequa could resist taking a verbal poke at him, and I’m sure his permanently crabby mood had something to do with being called Gary Douche his whole life. Jill, Brenda, and I questioned the nickname a few times. We knew it alluded to some pink rubber contraption with a hose that Jill said she saw drying on their shower curtain rod once in a while. It had something to do with being a married woman, but that was as far as we got.

We walked to a certain pedestrian rhythm. We would eye the group coming toward us, identify them without even thinking about it since we knew everyone, and then move a few steps to the right or left so each group could get by. I don’t remember what we were talking about as Gary and his friends approached on Broadway.

I don’t know if he rehearsed his little speech, or why he chose me over Brenda or Jill. But suddenly he stopped and pointed up at me, close to my face.

“You are so ugly! No one is ever going to want to make out with you!”

They passed us. They laughed until they were out of hearing range.

I didn’t obsess until bedtime, but then the parsing began. I was okay with his first sentence. I knew it was the truth. But the second part scared me because I really was planning on having a boyfriend someday. Did he think I would never make out with him, or with anyone? Ever? Had he already made out with some beautiful girl somewhere, and that’s how he knew? How did he know?

When Gary Dush said those words to me at 13, I took it as a final verdict. A boy had said something to me, about me, so it must be true. It took some years to uncover that it really doesn’t work that way.

Gary Dush’s Facebook profile only has one photograph, and I spend a long time looking at it. Maybe he doesn’t really look mean, I think to myself. Maybe he’s just squinting into the afternoon Arizona sun. I wonder if he’s still short or if he had a late growth spurt. I wonder if he’d remember my name.

Facebook profiles are often misleading, of course, so there’s really only one thing I know for sure. And that one thing makes me smile as I close my laptop. Gary Dush missed the mark at predicting my future. By a mile.

Quick Requiem at a Red Light

| Linda DeMers Hummel

After landing on Long Island and renting a car, I’m lost within ten minutes of leaving the airport parking lot. I didn’t think I’d need a GPS in my homeland, but apparently I do. One town just slides into another and looks exactly like the last one did. I feel like there used to be space between them that let you know you were changing zip codes. Okay, it’s been a while.

It makes me wonder how teenagers keep school rivalries going these days. In the Class of ’68, we referred to kids from Wantagh — three miles away — with a vague, almost mythical, curiosity as if they spoke a different dialect and worshipped at Stonehenge. I’m guessing that’s all over now because kids don’t actually have to see each other anymore to be BFF’s. Maybe kids don’t root for the home team either. Maybe they don’t chant at football games, or even go to football games. We shouted, “We are good! We are great! We’re the Class of ’68!” Our lungs got a workout back then. But we hardly ever used our thumbs the way kids do today.

I finally get my bearings by telling myself that when I get to the corner with Shoe Town on the right and Carvel up ahead on the left, I’ll know where I am. And then I recognize that I’m at that corner, but Shoe Town is gone. It’s a bank now. It’s probably been a bank for years. Maybe it’s not even the original building. I have no idea. When you haven’t lived in your hometown since 1973, things like this happen.

Shoe Town was one of the few perfect things in my pubescent years, and it seems right to mourn its passing as I wait at the red light. Before it came into my life and offered me the anonymity I needed with feet like mine, shoe shopping was a humiliating hell. Before the boxy store on the corner went up, all I had were smarmy salesmen measuring my foot and then sighing and saying, “I’ll see what I can do,” only to come back from that secret room in the back with one box instead of the five or six choices other girls got.

The summer before 6th grade, just before Shoe Town opened, my mother and I went on a fruitless quest to find something in my size (10) that wasn’t a patent-leather stiletto heel designed for a woman three times my age.

After one salesman measured my foot, he looked over at my mother and said, “Well, we don’t have any shoes that will fit her, but I could give you a couple of boxes to take home.”

She pretended to think it wasn’t funny, but later when I overheard her telling the story to my father, I could hear chuckles all around. This is what I was up against until I finally found a shoe store that made sense.

For one thing, Shoe Town was self-serve way before its time, so I could be my own agent. I could also walk there with my friends and spend as much time as I needed to try on every shoe in Size 8 or 9 that looked like it had any chance of fitting my foot and walking a few steps before I’d melt in pain in front of the full length mirrors they had in the corners.

Eventually I’d wander over to the Size 10 rack where I belonged and settle on a pair that didn’t embarrass me too much. Later, in my room, I would rub the 10 from inside the shoes until it was gone. Just in case. I took shoe size very seriously, as if it were a blight on my character.

When you come back to the place where you grew up, it’s all right there, sitting at a red light. Now you remember everything. How good it felt to buy your own shoes and carry them home. How the Carvel Flying Saucer melted in your hand all the way down Jerusalem Avenue. Opening your front door and knowing that roast chicken was for dinner. Your mother humming along to the Ray Conniff Singers on the HiFi. Running up the stairs to your room and trying on your new shoes. And thinking there was no way life would ever change from that day.

So you mourn the passing of a shoe store that was kind to you, and that’s not the weirdest thought you have at the red light. The oddest thing is that you still call this town home.

Oh, Jones Beach, You Were So Worth It

| Linda DeMers Hummel

After eight months of thinking I should get this pesky spot on my face checked out, one morning I woke up and started to panic. I might have been watching too much Discovery Channel, but I went from thinking, I’ll get around to it one of these days, to calling a dermatologist as if my chin had just melted off.

“Is this an emergency?” the receptionist wanted to know.

It may have been my tone. I took a breath and told her my symptoms.

“I have an opening a week from Thursday,” she said. It always soothes me when the person answering the phone hears my story and still sounds as bored as she did when she first said, “Dr. Goldfarb’s office. May I help you?”

This spot near my temple — whatever it’s called — is all my fault. It’s not the kind of disease that lands on innocent people’s pancreases while they sleep, or attaches itself to one of your lymph nodes even though you’ve eaten kale and gotten eight hours of sleep your entire life.

If my skin is about to crust over and slide off my face, I did it to myself, starting when I was 16 and began spending my summers in the sun, lathering on the baby oil and cursing the clouds. Memorial Day would begin with a marathon bake that served as a base coat. My goal was to overcome the Anglo Saxon genes in my DNA and stay the color of medium toast through September. Tanning was my only sport, and though I didn’t have a prayer of beating out Greek or Italian girls, I gave it my all.

1966 had been good to me. The extra room in my bra was finally being called into action. Almost overnight, it seemed, my bony hips were gone, and fat deposits became my friend in a way they would never be my friend again. My mother gave me permission to use Summer Blonde on my mousy brown hair. It morphed into the shiny blonde of my childhood, hair I only knew in pictures. And — as if that weren’t enough — I lived in a place where Jones Beach, ten miles of pristine sand on the Atlantic Ocean, was all mine for a 35¢ bus ride. Now the only thing left to do was wreck my skin forever.

Dr. Goldfarb, whose waiting room is full of mauve chairs and concerned folks in their 80s, walks into the exam room as he is reading my chart.

“So what brings you in today?”

I explain the situation as if nothing about it is my fault, and — oddly — I think I can fool him. The first question he asks is about sun exposure when I was young. Apparently, he’s on to me.

“How long has this spot been there?”

I cut the time by two-thirds so neither of us will become alarmed. He stares at it. He pokes it with an instrument. He picks up my newly created file and jots something down.

“We can take care of that for you,” he says in my direction over his reading glasses.

Before he fixes me, though, he lectures me about the error of my youthful ways. And I’m thinking that unless he’s storing his time machine in the next room, this is rather a waste of our ten minutes together and a copay.

He says, “basal cell blah blah blah” and “dermis something something,” but since all immediate danger has passed, I’m now noticing that he doesn’t have a single wrinkle on his forehead. This probably comes in handy when you don’t want to look horrified in front of a patient whose skin might be full of pustules. His cuffs are monogrammed. And he has $1,000 worth of pens in his pocket. There is money in old people’s skin, and it looks like I’ve arrived squarely in the middle of his demographic although I don’t feel at all ready to be here.

I wince as he freezes the dry spot on my face. We have a discussion about SPF products. I make promises. He turns to write a prescription for salve, and I know he’ll soon be on his way to another post-menopausal former bikini-beauty who is waiting in the next room.

But he turns, and — for the first time — looks directly into my eyes.

“Do you have someone who regularly sees your back?”

Such a simple question. But it takes me by surprise.

“No.”

“Would you like me to take a quick look?”

“Sure!” I say, reaching for an upbeat tone. I’m trying to sound like I’m not embarrassed that I have no one to look at my back.

Then I pray that there’s not some painless carcinoma galloping across my shoulder blade that’s about to be discovered. If I had a person who slept with me every night, he’d have had ample opportunity to view me from all angles and — if necessary — shout out, “Holy mother of God, what is that purple thing hanging off your back?” But that hasn’t happened, so I don’t know if there is anything purple there or not, honestly.

I yank my sweater up in the back so he can get a full view. The sweater rides up in the front, too, and gentle rolls spread out in front of me even though I’m sucking in and holding my breath. I can’t remember if my bra is the black lacy one, which would seem so . . . unnecessary, and I have no idea why I bought it anyway.

“Looks fine,” he says, and reaches for one of his Mont Blanc pens to write (probably) “Back looks fine.”

I am relieved about my back, but I feel a little sorry for the rest of my skin because I know where it’s probably heading. I’m slated for veiny hands and more wrinkles and liver spots and probably a few more spins around the Ferris wheel with Dr. Goldfarb.

Would I have rather stayed in the shade? Ha.

Oh, Jones Beach, you were so worth it.

The Problem of our Mothers

| Linda DeMers Hummel

Jill, Brenda, and I went everywhere together. And we had style, or, at least we had a style. Even if we were just walking to the candy store, we teased our hair and attached tiny satin bows to the point where our puffy bangs started because you never knew who might be on the corner. As soon as we turned 11, we started saying, “We’re almost 12.”

Our big problem was our mothers and their ridiculous 1940s ideas about how we should be spending our summer. They said things like, “Why don’t you girls go outside and play?” They told us how lucky we were that we could just walk out the front door and find exciting things to do.

“Like what?” That would be us, impatiently waiting for an answer we knew our mothers didn’t have. How sad they hadn’t noticed that living in Massapequa in 1961 was devoid of anything fun.

“Well,” one of them would say, “You could have races with each other. How about getting the little kids together and playing school? You could be the teachers. . . Oh, I don’t know . . . just do something for God’s sake.” They all had ideas about how we should be loving life.

Jill’s mother could speak French. Well, I think looking back, Jill’s mother had a few phrases under her belt, but in my mind she could have walked right into the UN and immediately been asked to translate into the headphones of Charles de Gaulle. She wanted us to practice with her since we’d started taking it in school that year.

“Bonjour, mès amis!” she would say as we came through the back door. She did it with such optimism, such hope that we would all chirp in unison, “Très bien, et vous?” What came out of us was a mumbled answer in a language so unrecognizable that she gave up by the Fourth of July.

Brenda’s mother had a plan to get us to lay our eyes on at least one book that summer. She thought it might be fun to take turns reading aloud from Little Women. When she took the book out of the bookcase, all I could think was, That book must have more than 100 pages.

“If we read for an hour every day, we could be finished by September.” Again, optimism in the face of total resistance. Brenda’s mom didn’t give up easily, though she did come to her senses, page-wise.

“How ‘bout if you walk down to the library so you can get caught up on your summer reading?” Hey, we were almost 12. We knew a fun-killing oxymoron when we heard one. And for good measure Brenda shot her mother a look as if she had just suggested selling the family dog. We were two for three.

My mother was a fan of Jack LaLanne in the morning. As a teenager, my mother had excelled at sports. Evidently, she could bowl perfect games and swim without ever coming up for air.

“I can’t believe what this man can do with a simple kitchen chair!” she’d say as she huffed and puffed all over the living room, following his instructions for an exercise that would give her beautiful ankles.

“How about we go jump rope and I’ll teach you some of the songs we used to sing?” We couldn’t decide which was more illogical. Girls our age jumping rope, or a woman my mother’s age taking the chance of falling and being paralyzed for the rest of her life. She was 33. For her own safety, we left her in the dust, too.

“Well, what are you going to do then?” our mothers would say as the screen door squeaked closed behind us, “You girls need something to show for your summer.”

It would be decades before cottage industries sprang up to keep kids competitive during the ten weeks of summer vacation, so here’s what we did instead. We sat in the living room and talked. It might have looked like we were idling, but we were planning for our futures with boys, sort of our own little fantasy league.

As far as we could tell, no boy had ever looked in our direction, even accidentally, thinking we were someone else. But we spent hours choosing which boys we liked the most and deciding that we needed to be smart, funny, and beautiful — like Tuesday Weld. We had a vague notion that big breasts somehow entered into this equation, but for obvious reasons we didn’t linger there.

We quizzed each other in current events. We retold jokes we’d heard on television, which gave a sort of Milton Berle quality to our sex appeal that we realized later wasn’t quite what we were looking for. The beautiful part was much more of an uphill climb for me, especially when it came to hair because mine had the texture of Brillo. As soon as the humidity index raised a percent, everything on my head puffed up like a blow fish. This caused me to sweat, which caused my face to become bright red, and knowing that my face was red made me nervous, which meant I was likely to trip over my Size 10 feet. I was a tragic chain reaction.

Tuesday Weld inspired us, yes, but it was from afar, either in movie magazines, or watching her drive Dobie Gillis crazy. Lucky for us, we also had a local role model. And Donna Goldsmith, wherever you are today, thank you. Thank you for maturing early and going with it full force. Without selfies, sexting, or a push-up bra, you were decades ahead of the pack.

Donna Goldsmith was as breezy around boys as we were clammy. When she giggled, a tiny breathy sound came from her lips, which always looked like they were ready to kiss someone. We paused near her whenever we got the chance, hoping some of her magic elixir would rub off.

Kids had basement parties that summer. We danced to records, drank soda, ate potato chips, and went home to bed, which, I know, sounds a lot like 1927. I was happy to join the arc of girls loosely surrounding Donna and her boyfriend, moving slowly to music, as if we were her backup dancers. She rested her head on his shoulder. He whispered something in her ear that made her laugh. How did she keep from sweating? Or blushing? How did she decide how close his hand could be to her bra strap? I was in awe of the way she mouthed  the words of “Town without Pity,” and looked into her boyfriend’s eyes.

I gave up being Donna in the summer of 1961. And honestly, it speaks to my resilience, in the face of bad hair and feet the size of small watercraft, because somehow Tuesday Weld and all her charms were still in the running.

On Long Island, We Really, Really Loved Our Lawns

| Linda DeMers Hummel

Everyone who lived on Hamilton Avenue had children, except for the Markowskis, our next-door neighbors, who owned a series of standard poodles instead, all with the name Claude. The Markowskis weren’t fond of kids playing on their lawn, which is to say the Markowskis weren’t exactly fond of kids. So since there were no fences in those days to show property lines, we just had to be light on our feet during games of Tag or Statue, and we got really good at giving the Markowski’s yard a generous berth, even when running at top speed.

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Lots of people in Massapequa were serious about their lawns, maybe because everyone had been transplanted from the city where the concrete in front of your apartment had been public domain. That could be unfortunate, especially when drunks peed on it or young love went bad late at night, and you could be awakened suddenly by screaming and reproach under your window. Once you moved out to Long Island, you actually owned this patch of luscious greenness. Dads mowed lawns with rigorous timing. When someone you were playing with did something to anger you, one of the best responses you had was, “Get off my property!”

For years on our school route home, a grandfather on Doris Place stood like a sentinel at the corner of his yard after school let out. If our feet veered in his direction, he would yell, “Get off my lawn!” For that reason alone, Mikey Gernhart made a point of his shoe going over the line Mondays through Fridays. This house was the only one in the neighborhood at the time with a built-in pool, which signified, of course, that the man was a millionaire. I vowed that if I ever had a million dollars, I would spend more time having fun and much less time screaming about my grass.

I spent my whole childhood figuring out the most efficient ways to avoid Mrs. Markowski’s lawn. I got pretty good at staying out of her way, using my Dodge Ball skills of always hugging the outer boundary when possible. When cornered by her, I became adept at her brand of small talk, which usually began, “Linda, I have a bone to pick with you,” and quickly got around to the latest time I stepped on her grass or made Claude bark. She didn’t spend much time outside, which was a good thing for us, and I have The Guiding Light, As the World Turns, and the American tobacco industry to thank for her disdain of the outdoors.

lawn  My mother was a big believer of being neighborly, so when she’d say, “You know, it wouldn’t kill you kids to help Mrs. Markowski carry in her groceries once in a while,” we did it reluctantly, though the inside of her house was always dark because of heavy drapes at every window, and the crushing smell of her Lucky Strikes and her husband’s cigars made us gasp.

Many years later, when Mrs. Markowski became a widow, I was long gone from Hamilton Avenue, with a husband and kids of my own. My parents began inviting her over for holidays because there’s just so much a poodle named Claude can do for you at Thanksgiving. So I’d see Mrs. Markowski a few times a year, and she got to know my own children in a way I’d been shut out of, meaning she didn’t yell at them or constantly worry about what they were doing to her lawn. She bought them little gifts she found at the Dollar Store, and they were perpetually charmed by that.

She still dyed her hair a shocking burnt-ochre color that gave way to a few inches of white at the part when she didn’t keep it up, which was pretty much never, not even for holidays. She still swore like a sailor after her first martini, but she also smiled more, usually after her second. Lawn care had been given over to a neighborhood boy who did “a crappy job” according to her, but he kept his job since she had cataracts by then and couldn’t see the bald spots and the crabgrass.

When she died, she had no living relatives and had outlived the last of the Claudes. By the time that happened, I was 47. I’d recently been divorced, had three teenagers, and was winging it financially. There’s something about the phrase winging it that implies there was a carefree section of my life that year. There was not.

A few weeks after her death, my phone rang at work.

“This is Lawrence Slezak,” a man said. “I represent the estate of Miriam Markowski.” The lawyer told me I was named in her will. She had left me more money than I’d made the year before. I had no inkling this would happen, and the lawyer was more than patient with me as I got my bearings. Really, I just babbled in his ear for a long time. I got up from my desk and started telling a friend what had just happened.

“And you weren’t related to her?” she asked.

“Not exactly.” It seemed a funny answer but the right one.

“You were related to her?”

“I guess you had to be there,” I said.

“Where?”

I meant the 1950s.

The Square Dance Unit. Or Why I Never Forgave Our Gym Teachers

| Linda DeMers Hummel

I liked school as long as I was sitting down, and lucky for me there was a lot of sitting in those days. I excelled at raising my hand and keeping my notebook tidy. In music class, I could hum, eventually locate the melody, and blend in. In art, I learned early that coloring inside the lines often trumped talent. I was relieved to have been born a girl because I had to do far less to prove myself than a boy did. It let me lower my expectations and avoid disappointment. I was excellent at being a girl.

There were setbacks, of course. Because we lined up and walked the halls in Size Order, I was never able to forget for a second that I was freakishly tall. Three girls in my class were also named Linda, rendering me “Linda D.” until I got to high school. I spent a fair amount of time wondering why my parents hadn’t thought ahead before giving me the most popular name in the universe, or — for that matter — combining their towering genes to create a child who was taller than her pediatrician by the time she was 12.

It was harder to adapt in gym class than other quadrants of Raymond J. Lockhart School, but unless it was October, I did okay there, too. Hugging the wall, and shouting, “Yeah!” when my team scored, and “Ugh!” when my team missed a goal, I could pretend to be in the mix of a spirited crab soccer game without my foot ever touching the ball. I was an expert at losing my place in line when we were climbing ropes. By 6th grade I’d mastered all the non-participation tricks ever invented.

But October always arrived no matter what grade I was in. And October meant that our gym teachers would push a button to retract the sliding wall that separated the girls’ gym from the boys’ gym and make their big announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, next week we will begin our Square Dance unit. This is an important social component of physical education. You will stay in your street clothes.” They always made it seem like we’d be curing Leukemia starting the next Tuesday and that always bothered me. Also, who called them street clothes?

Our gym teachers were a married couple. We guessed their combined ages to be about 230. Mr. and Mrs. Tierney went with the Darwinian model when it came to Square Dance as they did for every game we ever played. To me, Square Dancing seemed very much like Dodge Ball except there was some curtsying here and there. I was always slightly disappointed on the first day of Square Dance when I didn’t wake up temporarily paralyzed.

“Girls on this side of the gymnasium, boys on that one. Line up, single file.” And with that, the choosing-your-partner humiliation began.

So here it was, another year when no miraculous change in the curriculum was going to save me. I began by checking to see if any of the boys had grown a foot or two over the summer. As always only Russell Oliver, whose parents were rumored to be over seven feet tall, was taller than I was. I silently yearned for other Massapequa families to be overtaken with whatever chromosome arrangement was lurking in the Olivers’ bodies. I saw no growth spurts.

“Kevin O’Hara!” Mr. Tierney announced. To the accompaniment of some hooting and hollering from the other boys, Kevin walked to the other side of the gym, sizing up the girls waiting to be chosen. He took his pick, and promenaded her to the center line. Then every boy, one by one, got his turn.

As the number of unchosen girls started to dwindle, I did what I did every year. I hunkered down for the long haul, attempting a casual pose, absently looking up at the rafters as if thinking, What is that exciting, important thing I’m doing later?

Sandy Palma and I usually looked at each other at about this point. I was too tall and she was too heavy, and it would come down to which one of us would be the last chosen. I was okay with Sandy getting chosen before me. Sitting down, I could blend in better than Sandy. When she sat down, there just seemed to be more of her. But, oh God, did I hate being the last one even if I was trying to be gracious to Sandy, who deserved it. Being last meant you had to endure the sound of the boys engaged in mock applause when the last boy had no choice but to pair up with you. And for reasons that probably died with them, the Tierneys always acted like they didn’t hear the din going up.

Russell was called third on this day, an enviable position if he wanted to pick a pretty girl, and why wouldn’t he?

Then, in a move that made no sense to anyone, Russell walked over and chose me. What? I may have heard a collective gasp, or maybe that was just the voice in my head. Life was mighty rosy from the center line when you’re not the last girl chosen.

I always thought Russell’s choosing me was a pure act of kindness. As the only boy tall enough to promenade me through the perils of 6th grade, I thought it was a conscious choice, meant to help me out.

About five years ago, I found Russell Oliver on Facebook and wrote to him, telling him how fondly I remembered this moment and thanking him for it. His response was gracious without overcommitting. Because I don’t think for a second he remembered any of this, which makes me think that I took things way too hard in my childhood.

When Baby Boomers Go Old School

| Linda DeMers Hummel

I learned a lot about modern parenthood when I watched my brother’s kids for a week while he and his wife went on vacation. I stayed at their house in Massapequa, cooked the meals, and got their kids to and from school — Raymond J. Lockhart School — the same one my brothers and I went to. To claim the kids in the afternoon, I had to show a signed permission slip to a woman holding a clipboard at the door, who had a hard time letting go of her suspicions about me until the third day.

I got there early every afternoon and sat in the lobby with other people, waiting for the bell to ring. I noticed that when parents pick their kids up from school these days, they take apart backpacks immediately, before they even get to their cars, and this surprised me. Parents seem a little frazzled, as if there’s a lot riding on what’s in that backpack. There are questions and there is meaningful pointing to papers.

I pictured me in the last half of the 1950s, right here in this lobby, holding my book bag, walking down these steps with my friends. After a half-hour meander home — I’d say “hi” to my mother and eat a snack before going back outside to play. When she asked how school was I could say “Fine” without having to come up with any evidence.

There’s something transcendent about being in your old school after this many years have passed, and mostly it’s that the universal school smell hasn’t changed one bit. Of course everything looks smaller than you remember it, but not as disappointingly puny as the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History turn out to be, especially after you’ve already told your kids, “You won’t believe how huge they are!” As soon as I walked through those school doors, I could remember my teachers’ faces and the way they walked, even when I couldn’t remember all their names right away.

I was in the middle of 1st grade when Raymond J. Lockhart School was opened in 1957. Before that, the kids in my neighborhood had to be shuttled to class in rented space in Amityville. There were just too many of us, but there was a joyfulness about that, too. Our fathers had survived WWII, our mothers had welcomed them home, and now our parents were planning their futures in great detail, all the while procreating like champs. Now my friends and I could move into a real school with water fountains in the halls and linoleum floors that sparkled and smelled like fresh wax every morning.

For the first few days of picking up my niece and nephew, none of the other mothers said anything to me as I sat down. Mostly they stared at me as if I had Danger tattooed on my forehead and just spoke among themselves.

Then on the fourth day, when it seemed they were running out of things to talk about, one of them looked up at the stately portrait that hung in the lobby and asked the others, “Who was Raymond J. Lockhart anyway?” Before I could remember that no one was looking in my direction, or that Dr. Lockhart had been dead for about 30 years, I piped up, “He was superintendent of schools when I went here.” Maybe it’s just me, but I thought questions would follow, questions like, “So, what were kids like in the 1950s?”

Everything got quiet. Lucky for me the school day was over and the bell rang, and soon backpacks were being unzipped and papers were careening slightly through the air.

Here’s one answer.  We were children who did what we were told, and now we’re all a little embarrassed about that. Sticking a fork in a toaster would zip you across the room and result in instant death as you hit the wall. A pencil could (and would) poke your eye out no matter the speed or trajectory. I took it upon myself to be extra careful with chopsticks we got free from the Chinese take-out restaurant, and also with rulers, just to be on the safe side.

Oddly, along with all the household objects that could kill us, we were also swept up in the American Can Do spirit, and understood that somehow we could accomplish anything we set our minds to. This would turn out to be a handy way to think in our early 20s when we found out we were much smarter than our parents or than any humans previously born.

Massapequa. Ever heard of it?

| Linda DeMers Hummel

For the last 30 years I’ve lived in a city I love, where people take a certain pride in swallowing the last vowel sound of every syllable ever invented. I’ve never gotten the hang of it, though I’ve tried, and even after all this time, I’ll be talking with a stranger here in Baltimore, and the person will say, “You’re not from here, are you?”

Sometimes I say, “I grew up in New York,” but when you say it like that, you get, “Oh, Manhattan?” People think it’s exotic to have grown up in New York City, where you never learn to swim or drive, and you’re all blasé when you see Robert Di Niro strolling around your neighborhood.

Answering “Long Island,” doesn’t always work out down here either. To people south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Long Island may or may not be an extension of New Jersey, and that’s the end of that.

We never really get over where we grew up, or at least I didn’t. I mention it a lot, even if I haven’t lived there since 1973. My hometown has become more and more wrapped in gauzy, rosy memories, and in my head it’s exactly the perfect place it always was.

I love where I’m from. Massapequa.

So imagine my excitement when a whole bunch of people from my hometown all got famous at once. Of course this happened in the late 80s and early 90s, and here I am still talking about it, so you might want to consider the source. I guess I thought all that fame connected to Massapequa meant something about me, which it decidedly did not, but I got a whole decade out of riding coattails and boring the socks off people who innocently asked me where I was from.

Jerry Seinfeld, Alec Baldwin (and his brothers) and Ron Kovic, who wrote Born on the Fourth of July, got famous. Steve Guttenberg and Peggy Noonan, the White House speechwriter who wrote President Reagan’s eloquent words after the Challenger explosion, also got famous. And here I usually take a breath and mention a couple more, but I try to make it clear that Jessica Hahn and Joey Buttafuoco’s fame was not exactly what Massapequa’s founding fathers had in mind.

So for a long time if people in Baltimore found my accent not to their liking, and there was even a hint that I should expound on my roots, I’d say, “Well, actually, I come from Massapequa,” just to see who was up on current events. Back then, most people wanted to talk about Alec, and I would go into my own little rehearsed snippets about any or all of the Baldwins.

And if it went too long, the person would interrupt with, “You knew him?” or worse, “You knew them?”

I had a number of ways of evading this question and going with the broader stroke, shall we say.

On a train to New York last year I sat next to a man who grew up in Huntington, a neighboring suburb, and as we got to talking about our hometowns, he said, “So . . . Massapequa. . . so many famous people from Massapequa, right?”

I perked up. I was delighted by his attention to detail, and wanted to applaud him for keeping up with fading news stories.

I started by telling him that Alec Baldwin’s father was my history teacher. (This has never been true. But saying, “He was my friend Jill’s history teacher” wouldn’t be the same, so I’ve always gone this route.)

And we all called Alec by his childhood name, Xander, I tell the man from Huntington. (I do recall seeing Alec as a little boy with his Dad in the high school parking lot. About 100 yards away. He was blond. Unless it was Danny, Stephen, or Billy, which it certainly could have been. Maybe I yelled, “Hey, Xander!” I can’t really remember.)

I can see I’m not as good at this as I once was. I’m a little out of practice after all these years, and I blame the Massapequa celebs who couldn’t keep it up and no longer needed a publicist by the millennium. And after a while, it got harder and harder even for me to keep the Baldwin brothers straight, except Alec — or as I call him, Xander.

“Carlo Gambino lived in Massapequa, right?” he asks. This man is really working out as a traveling companion.

It’s been a while since I trotted out all my Godfather facts, but I do my best. I tell him that Gambino’s summer house was right on the water in Massapequa, on Club Drive. The fact that I know the name of his street brings me closer to The Don, and apparently, this is the effect I’m going for.

“His house had no shrubs in front — nothing.” I’m not at all surprised that when I say the word nothing, I linger.

“So no one could hide in the bushes?”

“Exactly!” I say. This is going better than it usually does.

“And he kept a boat docked in Oyster Bay behind his house, 24 hours a day, with an armed guard on board.”

“Is that true? Really?”

“I think so.”

I’m not sure why I equivocate here, and right away I can see he was hoping I’d know more details. He seems disappointed that I never saw Gambino in person. Or that I don’t have details about the horse head scene in the movie. Or an answer to his next ten questions, when the best I can do is mumble, “Um, I’m not sure.”

By the time we pull into Penn Station, I feel like reminding him that no one famous ever grew up in Huntington.

The Incontinence Aisle? You’re Welcome!

| Linda DeMers Hummel

On the back of the women’s room stall at the airport, at just the right height for reading, is an advertisement for a new adult diaper. I commend the marketing genius who put this here because I’m betting that ¾ of the women sitting down at this moment in this bathroom fit the demographic. And I know from a lifetime of being every corporation’s target audience that — for a few more years at least — Baby Boomers will still be where the numbers are. We’re the women who never want to pee once we’re on the plane (the logistics being just too cumbersome), so we put off that last trip to the bathroom until minutes before boarding. We’re the ones who have peeing on our minds, so it makes sense that we actually read the ad in a women’s room stall.

I study the woman in the photograph, who has clearly never taken a bite of red meat in her life and has to be a former runway model turned yoga practitioner, without a wrinkle or a gray hair. And no surprise that she is half of a great looking couple, on a beach. They are holding hands and skipping along, their bare feet remarkably four inches off the ground.

It’s the perfect message, and this marketing wunderkind saw me coming: You can still look like a million bucks, and there’s no way you’ll pee down your leg when you cough! And as if that’s not enough, later you and a ridiculously handsome man will check into an ocean-front room where he won’t be able to take his eyes off you. You, my dear, still got it. You, my dear, will have it forever.

Diaper or not, I want to be her. I’m sucked right into the message, and then I smile at the last phrase, at the bottom: Located in the Incontinence Aisle. I wasn’t aware that incontinence now had its own aisle, but I know my generation had everything to do with that. Incontinence was nothing special until we started to gush when we sneezed. You’re welcome, America.

As I board my plane, I begin to wonder how much time I have left before I have to shop in the Incontinence Aisle. I’ve been using the phrase at my age for a while now, and that’s probably not a good sign. I think I use it to punctuate a statement that might not have enough gravitas on its own, which makes me sound like quite a bore, also not a good sign.

I do notice that I’m repeating stories with alarming regularity lately. Even when I take a second to ask myself, Have I already told this person my adorable story that took place 30 years ago? Either I don’t wait for my own answer, or I can’t remember if I did or not, so I launch into it, because, really, it’s my best story of all time: I walked to my aerobics class, all the way across the entire gym floor at the health club I joined the year after giving birth to my third baby. I noticed men looking at me and nudging their friends. I was getting a lot of attention, just by walking through the club. I was thrilled that they were noticing how well I’d whipped my saggy postpartum body into shape and naughtily delighted at how much they all seemed to want me.

When I got to class at the far end of the building, the instructor came rushing over to me, saying, “Oops, you’ve got toilet paper coming out of your leotard and it’s dragging behind you!”

Lately when I’ve told this story, I see a little impatient nodding going on, because my listener has heard it all before and is trying to save me the trouble of finishing. I believe I’ve now told this story to every living person I’ve ever met, though I can’t be sure, so I’m going to keep telling it, just in case.

This happens, too: I’m driving in a perfectly orderly and cautious way and come to a four-way stop sign, where there is a 30-ish dad in his SUV, waiting. He spots me and begins waving that I should go. The first few times this happened, I just thought I was on the receiving end of some respect-your-elders politeness, and I went on my way.

But today it happened again, and this time I got to see the dad’s face. He looked rather frantic, the way he might if maybe I were about to drive a team of wild horses through the intersection and he was thinking of how he was going to save his children.

I wanted to open my window and shout, “Hey, I’m still an excellent driver!” But this is what my father said to the Police after he mowed down an entire hedgerow in front of their condominium in Florida. So I did go first at the intersection, but I also gave the SUV dad a little thank-you wave, showing off that I could still do two things at once without hitting the fire hydrant on the corner.

There are more signs. They’re subtle but piling up.

I can’t remember the last time I got caught in the rain without an umbrella.

Or ran out of aluminum foil, or dryer sheets, or flour. I stock up on everything.

When I bend down now, I always look around carefully to see if there isn’t something else I should be doing as long as I’m down there. I hope that the cheerleaders from high school also have to do this now.

I’m not sure I’ll ever to remember to cough or sneeze into my elbow because every time I feel one coming, I still hear my mother saying “Cover your mouth!”

I’ve never taken a successful selfie.

I don’t know what Uber is and don’t care enough to find out.

And somehow I totally missed the demise of phone booths. One day they all just seemed to have disappeared from the landscape.

In his later years, every morning and every evening, my grandfather wrote down the weather in the little boxes of the free calendar he got from his newspaper boy. I’m happy to report that I’m not even close to doing that, but the world does seem to be spinning so much faster than it used to.

And for anyone keeping score (not me!) the weather sucks today.