Baby Boomer Generation

When Surf Was Up on Long Island

| Linda DeMers Hummel

High school Study Hall. Is there such a thing anymore? I’m guessing no, but I feel too outmoded to ask anyone. The other day I was talking to my college-aged niece, who asked for advice on a paper she was writing. I suggested she look at the microfiche files in the library. Her head tilted. I could see by her baffled look I had — once again — forgotten what century we’re in. I’d rather not feel that way twice in one month.

So for those of you who may have missed it, Study Hall was a period built into your schedule when you were supposed to crack open those books and get to it. As far as I could ever see, it was split right down gender lines. For boys, it was a chance to put their heads down on the cafeteria table and close their eyes until the teacher patrolling the room poked their backs and said, “Sit up straight!” Girls were better at using the time wisely. We spent a solid 45 minutes passing notes. And again, for those of you who may have been born after Richard Nixon resigned, passing notes was texting with paper. Slower but with better spelling.

And if you don’t know who Nixon was, I can’t help you.

Brenda and I sat across from each other, experts at writing quickly, then folding the sheet of notebook paper into a tight white triangle. When the teacher was looking the other way, we flicked the note across the table. As I recall, there was always a lot of punctuation involved in our notes. And lots of P.S. messages at the bottom.

In Study Hall one afternoon, Brenda shot me the first note of the period, and it came with exciting news: “Richie Valenti asked me out!!!” We didn’t know much about Richie Valenti, but the sketchy facts we did have were exciting. He lived on the water in the section of Massapequa called Bar Harbor, where all the cool rich kids lived. And he was a surfer, hence three exclamation points. Hyperbole was required with surfers.

Richie Valenti had all of the surfer prerequisites, while most boys had two or three. He owned his own board. He had a wardrobe of madras and sandals. He was blond and he drove a Mustang convertible.

Looking back, I think the part about actually balancing on a giant piece of fiberglass in the ocean might have been optional. Maybe surfing on Long Island was the beginning of my generation being all full of ourselves and trying to educate our dowdy parents with a universal truth we had discovered: Appearance is everything.

Gilgo Beach Inn

Since I didn’t have boyfriends of my own back then, I made it my business to take Brenda’s very seriously. Lucky for me, Richie invited Brenda to Gilgo Beach often to watch him surf, but her mother insisted I go along, too, because there were bikinis involved, and it made her nervous. The ocean still made me a little nervous, too. As a teenager, I went back to barely attempted standing in the ocean beyond my ankles. I was fearful what I’d witnessed happen to Susie Patterson’s bikini top in the rough waves would happen to me, and then I would have to move to a different state.

This much I will say for Richie’s timing. It was impeccable. Every single time, just as we arrived, he would manage to be wet and running out of the surf. He’d stick his board in the sand, slightly out of breath as if he’d just finished conquering the Bonzai Pipeline. Then he’d take a long time to shake the salt water out of his long blond hair. For the entire summer, we never actually saw him do more than that. But our adoration never faltered.

I’ve always hoped he found his way into advertising.

What I Learned About Love, at 12

| Linda DeMers Hummel

On Saturday mornings in 1962, my mother would take the car keys off the hook by the front door, jiggle them a little and call out, “Who’s coming?” even though she knew the answer was only me. My brothers’ standing excuse — Quick Draw McGraw was about to start — didn’t seem like enough, but it always worked for them.

The nursing home we drove to was attached to Brunswick Hospital, where my mother had worked as a younger woman, the reason, I guess, that Aunt Bertha ended up out here, on Long Island. Bertha had never married, never had children of course, and had outlived everyone who might have more than a passing interest in her, except for my mother.

As a girl, my mother spent two weeks each August at her great-aunt’s third story walk-up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Aunt Bertha would take her annual vacation from being a secretary and treat my mother to some intense attention — devotion she might have directed toward her own daughter if she’d had one — all lovingly distilled into fourteen days once a year.

My mother would talk about those vacations sometimes on the way over to visit Bertha. The tone of her voice seemed oddly pleasant to me, since the visits included sweltering nights, having her hair braided several times a day, and choking down liver and onions for dinner. It didn’t sound like much of a vacation, but my mother said that from the time she was a little girl, she realized how much her aunt adored her. And at 12, I knew that being adored counted for a lot.

In 1962, Bertha sometimes took a few minutes to recognize us when we suddenly appeared at her door, and because she was easily startled, we always began our visits in the lowest gear we could manage. We moved in slow motion so we wouldn’t make her flinch. We spoke softly even though she was pretty much deaf.

“It’s me, Jeannie,” my mother would say. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.

My mother performed the same duties each week. She’d reach for the lotion and squirt it between her palms to warm it, and then rub her aunt’s mottled hands, carefully maneuvering around her swollen knuckles. Even on days she didn’t know who my mother was, Bertha would let her confusion go with the first warm strokes on her fingers and just sit back in her wheelchair and enjoy it.

She used a baby’s comb on her aunt’s hair, so thin that a brush would have scratched her scalp. She took tiny scissors out of the drawer and snipped her chin hairs. She set Bertha’s false teeth in a glass of white fizzing liquid that was supposed to transform them from their putty yellow color. We’d wait for five minutes, watching the bubbles. Without teeth, Aunt Bertha’s whole jaw caved in. She wouldn’t talk again until my mother had rinsed the uppers and lowers in the bathroom sink and popped them back in.

Trying to give our visit the arc it often needed, my mother would say, “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

Then she would take inventory of the metal bedside table to make sure everything was there, items essential to this life – as opposed to Bertha’s jewelry and mink collar circa 1930, safely stored at our house and waiting for her in case she miraculously got young again, I guessed.

We’d push her wheelchair to the Great Room after that. I held my breath down that hall because the floor-to-ceiling tiles smelled of strong disinfectant. My mother said whatever it was, it probably warded off staph infection or something equally deadly in old people. I silently vowed never to be old.

In the Great Room, people’s wheelchairs formed a circle of faux camaraderie. Some people nodded off and snored, others had visitors, and the only man in the whole place sat in the corner and chain smoked all day. Other kids were a rarity, so I can say — without swagger — that I was always in demand in the Great Room. Women awoke as if from a dream to reach out to me.

Sometimes Aunt Bertha would say to me, “I have something for you!” The first time she did it — her eyes all wide and expectant — I thought maybe it was something like a diamond ring or a fistful of hundred-dollar bills. She pulled the gift out from under her left thigh, wrapped in a dozen of the nursing home’s cheap one-ply napkins. Her body heat had made it warm. It was a roll she’d taken from breakfast. Maybe that day, maybe another. I would thank her and on our way out of the building it would hit with a thud in the trash can. Again, I’d make my vow.

One morning, just as we’d delivered Aunt Bertha back to her room and had our coats on to leave, she looked up and asked, “Where is Mr. Raffensberger?”

It was an insistent tone, like he was supposed to be in the room and she was demanding to know where we were hiding him. I’d never heard her speak in anything louder than a raspy whisper. “Where is he?”

My mother acted like she hadn’t heard the question.

“Let’s see . . . where in the world did I put my car keys?”

We were halfway home when I got up the nerve to ask. She never took her eyes off the road. She sighed a little, deciding how much of an answer to give me.

“Mr. Raffensberger was her boss. They were in love. He died about twenty years ago.”

“Why didn’t they get married?”

She sighed again, bigger this time.

“He was already married.”

When I was 12, I wanted to know everything there was to know about love, and I didn’t know anything yet. Aunt Bertha’s story became an unfinished chapter in my studies. So, she hadn’t always been old and crusty as I’d suspected. She’d been young once and in love, and for the whole ride home I sat in a confused silence trying to take it all in.

My mother, sensing she had said too much maybe, didn’t speak of it again. So the rest I had to make up on my own, something I was pretty good at back then.

Even years after her death, the scene went like this. Aunt Bertha cooking dinner in her sparse kitchen, waiting to hear him bounding up the steps. He had a big mustache on a plain, round face. He was a little balding, even in his thirties. He used a cotton handkerchief to mop his brow and couldn’t help talking about the humidity in August by the time he got to the third floor.

When she finished washing the dishes, he said, “You need to take care of these lovely hands, Bertha.” Then he rubbed them in his, with lotion he took down from the shelf above the sink. She relaxed in the touch.

To the New Mothers From an Old One

| Linda DeMers Hummel

My father and his mother, the year she died

In 1978, when I was about to give birth for the first time, my mother-in-law and my mother were full of information I would never need. Motherhood had changed since their day, when babies were on strict schedules and parents believed that letting them “cry it out” was in everyone’s best interest.

We were the New Mothers, and we were reinventing the parenthood wheel. We had everything figured out by reading books, Lamaze breathing our way through labor, breastfeeding on demand, and raising children who might never know a critical word but would always have a room full of soccer trophies to call their own.

I know. I know. It’s a new day, and by now everyone knows that my generation didn’t make fewer mistakes than our mothers had —just different ones. Everything is again different when it comes to babies, and I wouldn’t dream of getting into a discussion about baby sign language or sleep training, because I’m just that far behind in baby trends.

But maybe there are a few things that never changed and never will. So because I can’t see any patent disinterest in your faces as you read this, here you go, New Mothers — truths from an Old Mother.

* You will be holding your newborn, maybe even your first day home, and you will have a flashback of yourself as a teenager. You’ll hear the exact vile words you uttered to your parents, and see yourself as you stomped out of a room, amazed by how truly stupid they were. When that memory comes to you, you’ll wish you could go back in time and smack yourself in your fourteen-year-old head.

* When you find yourself tacking a sign to the front door for the UPS delivery person: “Do NOT ring bell! Baby sleeping!!” you will recall all those conversations you had with friends that started with your saying: “Our lives won’t change after the baby.” You might wish you hadn’t been quite so specific about your plans to backpack through Colorado with your infant strapped to your chest.

* You will glance down at your beloved cat or dog, the one you bought Halloween costumes for and gave a pseudo baby name. Suddenly it occurs to you that it can’t talk. And it eats off the floor.

* Your baby will roll over or sit up for the first time, and you’ll say out loud, “That’s really early to do that, right?” You’ll search the Baby World Records Book to see if he is a contender. You will throw around the word “genius” more than once, even if it’s just in your head. The first Kindergarten parent/teacher conference might rein this in for you. (Okay, it did for me.)

* The word “poop” will grace nine out of ten conversations and you’ll wonder why you didn’t talk about poop more often before this. That’s how fascinating it’s now become. I am not kidding.

* Under oath, you will declare that you cannot possibly love a second (or third or fourth) baby the way you do your first. Then someone will place that new baby into your trembling arms, and you’ll realize that love can be divided in two without changing one molecule. It’s non-mathematical. It’s magical. And it will come over you that very first second.

* In the middle of the night with a screaming infant, you will long for that pregnancy heartburn you believed was the worst thing ever. And here’s a little sneak peek into the future: When your baby is seventeen and out somewhere driving with her friends, you’ll long for the nights she was in her crib, even if she was wailing away. In other words, there is always something coming.

* For the rest of your life, when you read a story about a person who has done something horrible — something despicable and beyond forgiveness — you will think, although maybe not right away, “That is someone’s child.” You will know at your core just what that sentence means.

* Some days will seem many miles long. But the culmination of them will whiz by while you’re looking the other way. Try to laugh as much as you can. It’s one of the few sounds your child will remember for an entire lifetime.

* You will ask, and you will ask this a lot: What did I do before this? How did I love before this? Why didn’t someone tell me?

You just couldn’t hear them until now. Welcome to motherhood.

Why I Don’t Throw Away My Parents’ Letters

| Linda DeMers Hummel

When my parents were in their 70s, they downsized and decided on a sensible condominium. That meant leaving the house on Hamilton Avenue, in Massapequa, where I had grown up. They began getting rid of stuff, and my mother made it clear that I should make room in my car on my next visit to take some things back to Baltimore.

When I got to their house, five boxes with my name on them were stacked by the front door, my mother’s subtle way of saying, “Please get this crap out of here.”

Two contained books I didn’t read in college. Two more held clothes that might come in handy for a Halloween costume somewhere down the line, if I could ever fit into them, which would never happen. The last was a shoebox labeled, Linda’s Letters from College.

The box with the letters was unexpected. I didn’t know my mother had kept them, and knowing what they said, I wished she hadn’t. I considered just throwing the box away, unopened, knowing how embarrassed I’d be if I read them. Then I thought, “She saved them for 30 years.” So when I was back in Baltimore and alone, I opened each letter as if a hairy spider might jump out at me. They were every bit as bad as I remembered.

I can see I wrote every week of freshman year. I don’t know what got me the most — that I come from an era where people actually wrote letters, or that these innocent little envelopes contained such didactic drivel. Apparently, I had figured out everything by second semester away at a state college, and I felt the need to share.

I want to say it’s the letters from sophomore year in 1970 make me wince, but it’s worse than that. I’m ashamed of them. I was taking Sociology 101 that spring, which made me an expert on Vietnam, racial tension, and poverty. I had an epiphany in that class about my upbringing and, in those letters, hit my parents over the head with it, with lengthy paragraphs outlining their many mistakes.

They had given me a middle class childhood that I would now have to crawl out of because — really — there were few conditions worse than being middle class. Even I (who was practically a sociologist at that point) couldn’t think of anything worse. I lectured them on how they had bought into “the system.” They were materialistic. They didn’t understand oppression in America. If I had to label the tone I adopted, “How dare you!” would probably do it.

In 1950, ever the planners, my parents moved into our home a few months before I was born. Our neighborhood was just-planted maple trees, loose gravel on the road, and no sidewalks.

Most of the streets within a mile radius were named for American states and cities. But by the time they got to my street, Canada was suddenly involved with the street names Toronto, Ontario, and my street, Hamilton. I walked nine blocks to school, passing streets with names like New Hampshire, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Massachusetts, which gave me time to think about how the street-naming process should have been more organized. I wanted a street name that was American. I didn’t think it was too much to ask, considering the times and my patriotic heart. I took some solace in the fact that I didn’t live on the next street over from mine — Jerusalem — because I had no idea where Jerusalem was.

My parents wanted a house with a basement, not one built on a concrete slab, so Levittown was out. Ours was a two-bedroom Cape Cod with one bathroom. These houses also came with a garage, an unfinished basement, and an attic that, sooner or later, almost everyone would expand with a dormer for more bedrooms. Even when our parents looked at the tiny boxes these homes were, they were imagining the future.

The basement space came in handy for the rec room. I used to see ads in the Saturday Evening Post of families gathered around their ping pong tables, with trays of food behind them on a built-in bar. The lighting was always soft, and those rec rooms had carpeting. Some even had a fireplace and a piano with a dozen or so people arm in arm, belting out a tune.

Our rec room had trouble keeping up. It was at the bottom of our wooden stairs with those brown rubber pads on them so you wouldn’t trip. It had one tiny casement window, knotty-pine paneling that went halfway up the wall, and a linoleum floor in a pattern that looked like an accident of some kind. In the summer I’d make believe it was air-conditioned when we watched TV down there. In the winter you needed a blanket over you. My parents talked about mildew a lot. But at least our house didn’t sit on a slab.

My father signed up for the GI Bill and began college classes at night after his workday at Grumman was over. For twelve years, he commuted to Hofstra two evenings a week. The other three nights my mother worked the evening shift as a nurse at Brunswick Hospital, in neighboring Amityville. Those nights my father studied while taking care of me, and later, my two brothers. On the weekends they cleaned house, food shopped, and cleared the decks for the week ahead.

In the summers we took a vacation, but my father, a history buff and reader, was always partial to places like Gettysburg or Fort Ticonderoga, so even then I wasn’t having as much fun as other kids. Holidays involved the same cast of characters my whole life — aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. Food, fun, and lots of noise. Imagine my angst.

That was the life I was up against when I took stock in 1970. Years and years later, I got over the embarrassing situation my parents had put me in, and began carving out — imagine this — a middle class life for my own kids. The only differences were that I worked half as hard and talked about it twice as much as Jean and Ed DeMers did.

When do you get far enough away from your childhood to really see it for what it was? Maybe when you get your first job and that alarm clock isn’t your friend, and it dawns on you that your dad did this every single morning while you were asleep in your cozy bed.

Maybe the moment you see your first baby. And that overwhelming love takes you by surprise. And only then do you understand how your parents felt the day they met you.

I think my mother knew exactly what she was doing when she handed me that box of letters. It was as if she was saying, “Someday you’ll see.”

And I kept them all. And I do.

11/22/63 in Massapequa . . . and 4/27/15 in Baltimore

| Linda DeMers Hummel

Parkside Junior High School was a pretty buttoned-up place on November 22, 1963 at about 2:30 that afternoon. Another teacher knocked on our classroom door and motioned for our Social Studies teacher, Miss Foley, to come into the hall. From my seat I could see her. Her eyes went wide and she covered her mouth with her hand. This scared me because Miss Foley was not given to emotional jags of any kind. As far as we knew, she didn’t even have a first name.

I said, “Whatever it is, it’s really bad.”

There was the usual 8th grade speculation, which was never hard to come by. Craig Norton said, “I bet Russia dropped the A-Bomb.”

Then Miss Foley composed herself a little and came back inside. She abruptly handed out a ditto and told us the principal would be making an important announcement. Scary silence took over. She clearly might have begun sobbing at any second, yet no one asked what was wrong. Not one kid.

Our principal was a man of few words, and even this afternoon wasn’t going to change his style. “President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas this afternoon,” he said over the loudspeaker from the office. Miss Foley, already knowing the rest of the story, put her finger to her lips and closed her eyes.

“The bullet was fatal.”

I wasn’t sure what the word fatal meant, until I turned and saw all the crying girls and the boys hitting their desks with closed fists.

By the time that word had filtered down to us in that classroom, the president had been dead for an hour.

At home, my mother was ironing. Today, thanks to You Tube videos that show the news coverage as it was unfolding on November 22, I can see exactly how the word reached her in our living room. CBS was airing As the World Turns, and two characters were talking about their upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. Without warning, the picture changed to a black screen with the word BULLETIN stamped across it in white letters. There was a ruffling of papers and then Walter Cronkite’s unmistakable voice. The first details were in audio only — the shootings of Kennedy and Governor Connally, and that they had been rushed to Parkland Hospital.

Those facts took less than a minute to deliver, and then Cronkite said: “Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.” What followed was a commercial for Nescafé Coffee, a promotion for an upcoming episode of “Route 66,” and then back to the same two soap opera characters, who were still talking about Thanksgiving dinner.

In the next hour, broadcasters rushed to get on the air, some of them out of breath, all of them male and all of them white. Some of the anchormen wore rumpled shirts and crooked ties. They ran their hands through their hair and smoked wildly as they read from sheets of paper and talked on big bulky rotary phones to reporters in Dallas.

Sometimes my knees ache, and that makes me feel old. I just realized my oldest grandson will be 9 in December, and that makes me feel old. But watching this archival film makes me feel like I must have lived in the Dark Ages. Fifty years ago I sat in the middle of a news blackout  — unheard of today — waiting to hear what had gone terribly wrong in the world. And it took the media most of the afternoon to get the word out in any meaningful detail.

Compare that to this week when violence erupted in Baltimore, where I live, and all at once we were enveloped in every detail in real time. We could watch footage live from different locations at the same moment thanks to split screens. We had close-ups of it all, the tension, the anger, the fear. We could listen to debates — almost immediately as the situation unfolded — about whether these people were protestors, thugs, criminals, or high school students. Everything was broken down instantly, even semantics.

It’s good to have more information than less, I tell myself. It’s better to be able to access what I need to know instantly than to wade through those dribs and drabs that came in black and white from Dallas in 1963. We put up with the excruciating slowness of it all not realizing it was frustrating at all. And I can almost smile, even on this horrible day, to think that if anyone in Parkside Junior High School had suggested that someday we’d be watching live feed on our phones, it would have been a fast track for a visit with the School Psychologist.

But that’s not the whole answer. Watch the You Tube video of November 22, of  Walter Cronkite putting his glasses down and letting the words that the president had died get caught in his throat and swallow hard. Watch his eyes well up, just for an instant, before he gets to his next sentence. We may never see a moment like that again. The race to get it first is just too intense.

I sit at my laptop, and with a few clicks I see what has happened in Baltimore and in the world in the last hour. One hour — the same amount of time it took the scared kids in that classroom to find out what had upset their teacher so badly.

There are advantages to having one foot in each century, and I’m okay with that.

Feeling my Age at Panera

| Linda DeMers Hummel

Whenever I eat alone in a restaurant, I bring a little notebook and jot down what I’m thinking. It helps me feel less awkward, as if people might be wondering why I don’t have a lunch partner. Sometimes I write down bits and pieces of what I’m overhearing, conversation I may use later in something I’m writing.

I read an Anne Tyler interview once where she said she takes her notebook everywhere and writes down what she hears around her — dialogue, inflection, words that lead with the famous Baltimore accent. So when I pull out the little notebook, I just pretend to be her. I’m always hoping someone will mistake me for her, too, like they’re thinking: Hmmm, maybe she grew her bangs out. Hmmm, she looks a little heavier than she did on her last book jacket, but — you know — that happens. As far as I can tell, no one has been fooled yet.

I had my notebook out one day last fall when a group of high school kids walked into a sandwich place in my neighborhood. They took three tables and slid them together and, as their first official act, plopped down their phones. Their talk kept getting interrupted by different customized ring tones and scores of texts going back and forth with other kids who weren’t at the table.

It felt exhausting to me, not being able to understand all of what was going on. And I’d had this exact feeling when I was a kid. Instead of technology, though, it was Italian that did me in.

Our neighbors across the street were first generation immigrants from Milan. Their niece, who was my age and bilingual, would come to visit from Brooklyn with her Italian-speaking parents. One summer she and I got to be friends and I was invited across the street often, where she acted as my interpreter.

In my mind, her extended family ate a lot, more often than my family did, it seemed. Maybe the dinners were just longer and louder. Conversations constantly switched from English to Italian and back again without warning, sometimes in the same sentence. My friend never lost a word of whatever the topic was, and I was jealous of that. I found getting half of any story frustrating.

One day I said to her, as if this would be no big deal, “I want you to teach me Italian.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “If you just try really hard, you’ll be able to understand everything my parents say. Just listen to e-v-e-r-y word.That’s what I do.”I know she wasn’t purposely steering me wrong, that in her mind that’s what she’d done since she learned to talk.

I, of course, continued to be exasperated that I’d get to the end of a story and suddenly the medium would change on me and I’d be lost. I must say that what these high school students were doing at the next table wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for old people like me either. A lot of questions seemed to go unanswered as their heads bobbed up and down from their phones, and their thumbs were in constant motion. They wore earbuds and went from listening to talking to reading without warning.

What really caught my attention, though, was when they started talking about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The 50th anniversary was coming up, and I’m sure there were hashtags involved, whatever the hell that means. For all their advanced technology, though, their facts were sketchy, and one of them — who kept showing his hand with words like Los Angeles and killed in the hotel kitchen — was talking about the other Kennedy assassination.

For a minute, I thought about gently leaning over into their space and setting the record straight, perhaps the old school teacher in me. I realized, though, that if I started talking in an I was there tone, they would look at me as if I’d been front row at Ford’s Theatre, too.Because when I did the math, I realized that, chronologically, they’re about as far from Kennedy’s death as I was from the McKinley assassination (about which I know nothing). I wisely stayed silent.

It’s easy to keep quiet when you realize that you came of age watching a black and white TV, and the kids at the next table have a good chance of somehow confusing that with Morse Code. Or Mamie Eisenhower with Mary Todd Lincoln. Or any number of mix-ups that would make you feel #old.

[Up on Thursday: “11/22/63 at Parkside Junior High School”]

“Plus You Have a Really Bad Accent”

| Linda DeMers Hummel

As a college freshman in 1968, I landed in the middle of New York State and couldn’t believe there wasn’t a decent bagel anywhere. I was homesick for Long Island, the center of my universe. I’d never seen so many pickup trucks or people chewing (and spitting) tobacco as I did on Main Street in Cortland. It snowed on Halloween. I felt like I’d moved to Jupiter.

To counterbalance, I talked about Massapequa incessantly — how you could find anything you needed on Sunrise Highway, and how my high school had a championship football team. One day in the dining hall, I was in the middle of explaining to some girls why my hometown was known as “Matzo-Pizza” because it occurred to me that near-strangers were mesmerized by stories of my youth. (And here you’re thinking, she hasn’t changed much. You’re on to me.) Anyway, I was taking way too long in my explanation, figuring I had to go slowly because they’d probably never heard of matzo or stepped inside a real pizzeria.

Finally, a girl from Utica had enough.

She stopped me and said, “You know,” The City doesn’t always mean New York City, and The Island doesn’t always mean Long Island.”

I think I paused here, maybe with my mouth open a tiny bit, because she felt the need to simplify. “There are other cities and other islands in this state.”

Somehow, this was big news to me.

She wasn’t finished. “Plus you have a really bad accent.”

The first part amazed me, but as I began to look around I could see she was right. Who knew there were girls in the United States who had never stepped foot in a mall? Or that a town might have only one supermarket? Who knew that you could spend kindergarten through 12th grade in one building? For that matter, I don’t think I realized that people actually lived on farms. I thought they just hired people.

The second part stung. I didn’t know I had an accent, much less a bad one. Until I got to college and met people from Syracuse and Buffalo, I’d never heard a “flat a” sound in my life.

So I took a breath, and later that afternoon — being the deep thinker I was back then — I began to reinvent myself. I decided I kind of liked the way upstate people spoke. They sounded buoyant and hopeful. That’s what I wanted to be. I started with the word “cawfee” and went from there.

I also changed my handwriting because suddenly all the complicated capital letters in the ornate Palmer Method no longer suited me. I went instead with a print-like conglomeration that I hoped would say Linda is a simple, generous young woman, who does not overwhelm people with her large, loopy letters. If you didn’t know she was from Long Island, you might think she came from a quaint little hamlet on a lake with a population of 150.

After a few months, I stopped mentioning Massapequa every ten minutes like it was the cradle of civilization. By second semester, my accent — bad or otherwise — was completely gone, and my mother was complaining that my handwriting looked like a second-grader’s. When I graduated, I stayed in Central New York.

The first time I reopened my high school yearbook probably took five years. When I did, I read lots of this: “Never forget all the fun we had in French.” Or the laughs we had trying to conquer the uneven parallel bars. Or the day the lunch lady dropped that tray on John.

When the 10-year reunion happened, a time when I could have refreshed my memory about that gym class or poor John and the lunch tray, I couldn’t make it. I’d just had a baby, and if I’d considered traveling 300 miles to stand in a hotel ballroom with anyone, it wasn’t going to be when I hadn’t slept in four weeks and my breasts leaked milk every time I looked down at them.

The 20th reunion took place the year I was in a bad mood. We had moved to Baltimore. I couldn’t understand anything people said because they spoke in a thick dialect meant to throw Yankees off course. We had bought a split-level house — the type of home I swore I’d never live in. And my kids were a sloppy mess about how much they missed their friends.

Now our 50th reunion approaches, so clearly it’s been a while for me and the Class of ’68. I wonder how much I’ve changed, or I wonder if I’ve changed as much as I think I have. The older I get, the more I think that you pretty much are what you were when. Except for changing a few vowel sounds. And now we come with more stories to tell.

I think by 2018, our class will have long forgotten those singular, sweet and silly memories of high school that we inscribed in each others’ yearbooks. But we’ll be filled with the only bond that really matters. Massapequa will always be our “when.”

Maybe the day after the big party, we’ll have “cawfee.” And maybe I’ll even say it the right way.

My Neighborhood “Uncles”

| Linda DeMers Hummel

She is wearing a fluorescent green bathing suit. She is 10 maybe. I can see from her body language that the ocean is just not her thing.

The man she calls Uncle Nick is gently coaxing her into the surf, to her ankles, then her knees, where they let the waves break over them, and she begins to laugh. Before long, the girl has mastered the art of riding waves and coming to a sandy halt. Then, as if on repeat, she jumps up and she leads him back in so they catch the next one.

I’ve seen  her go from “I don’t want to,” to “Watch me, Uncle Nick!” in the space of an hour. And I’m remembering my 10-year-old self. And thinking about my uncles.

I was accorded several real uncles, who appeared automatically in my life the day I was born. But like most of the kids in my Long Island neighborhood in the 1950s, I was also entitled to other “uncles,” not related to our family but connected in a way that was just as real. They were my parents’ oldest friends or neighbors who knew me my whole life, like Uncle Herb, who lived around the corner from us.

I was a cautious child who liked lots of practice in private before I did anything publicly. Riding waves with scores of people standing in the surf at Jones Beach carried too many risks for the child I was. Wading would have been forever fine with me, had Uncle Herb and I not stood together that day in the shallow surf, ankle deep. He was getting his toes wet, chatting with me about the school year that had just finished. His children, a slew of blond hearty kids who were never afraid of anything, had already taken their positions out past the breaking surf, and were yelling for their father to come out and join them.

I’m pretty sure I was an afterthought. “Come on, Linda,” he said, “Let’s ride some waves.”

He held out his hand. Hoping he wouldn’t make fun of me when he saw how inept I knew I’d be, I went, but just barely. He talked me through my nerves as the waves bounced me around.

“Put your arms like this,” he said. “Try to keep your head down,” and I remember how different he looked wet and without his eyeglasses. He held on to me when a big wave overpowered my skinny body and I was tossed under.

Uncle Herb stayed with me until I caught on, and I continued riding waves (with a certain panache, I’ve always thought) for a few more summers, before watching lifeguards eat their lunches became more worthy of my time at the beach.

Labor Day that year, it was barbeque time. In a houseful of company, most of whom were relatives, my mother decided to pass around some of my poetry. I was never sure about this. I was proud that she thought I had talent, but she seemed oblivious to public opinion. Most of the adults would glance at a page  and then mumble a few kind, vague words, having not really read any of it. Then they’d go back to talking about more important issues, like maybe the sale on pork chops at Bohack’s.

“Herb,” my mother said, “Have you seen these poems?”

I would say “poems” was a kind way to put it. I would say that I was blessed with a mother who thought I was pretty when I wasn’t, had a flair for the artistic when I didn’t, and who believed that she had given birth to the next Emily Dickinson. Hence a continual thread of conversation in the living room that began, “Have you seen these?”

Now it was Uncle Herb’s turn, and frankly I thought he had already put in more than his share of time with the whole ocean thing. But he smiled and took the handful of notebook pages. Peeking in from the kitchen, I watched his eyes moving over every word. After he finished the last piece, he found me and pressed them into my hand. And as if he had unearthed a great secret between us, he said, “You’re a writer. A real writer.”

My “uncles” told us when it was time to go in on summer nights when we didn’t want to stop playing tag. They sat on our back patio and popped open a can of Budweiser as they discussed the Mets. They toasted my college graduation. They danced at my wedding. They held my babies in their arms and pronounced each of them beautiful whether they were or not. Even now when he answers the phone with a soft, barely audible “hello,” I wouldn’t think of starting any other way: “Hi Uncle Herb, it’s Linda.”

If we’re lucky, we have an adult in our lives who, even for one summer afternoon, teaches us how to negotiate the surf — when to jump, when to dive, and how to ride the waves all the way to shore.

“You did great,” Uncle Nick is telling the girl in the green bathing suit now, as they shake the water from their hair and jog toward their blanket on the beach. I watch her face.

Same ocean. Different uncle. I hope she remembers, too.

Years of No Lobster

| Linda DeMers Hummel

EK_0003 For part of 1932, my grandmother served oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the only food they could afford. When the Great Depression ended and life got more comfortable, she had a hard time relaxing. That’s the sweet way to say it. Really, she ran herself into the ground for the next 30 years making sure she’d always be ready, just in case the universe crashed in on her twice in one lifetime.

She sewed all her own clothes, including suits. She stretched pea soup with just the promise of a ham bone, and used every scrap of paper on both sides. She and my grandfather walked to the bank at the end of every month to see how much interest they’d earned. Even as the numbers grew, nothing more than a cautious sigh ever slipped out of either of them.

So it was no surprise that she elicited a collective gasp at Sunday dinner when, at 59, she made an announcement that began, “I’ve decided to live a little.”

“A little” meant that she would continue to run her home as she always had, shopping at sales and never buying rib eye when flank would do just fine. But there would be one big change. She’d made a list of every swanky restaurant in New York City and intended to eat in every one, starting with the Four Seasons because she’d read that movie stars were often spotted there, so it seemed the logical place to begin.

“And I may even order a martini!” she added. Again, gasps.

My grandfather didn’t think life got much better than a frozen dinner in front of whatever western was on TV that night, so he was quickly out of the running as her dinner partner. She chose me. I was 12.

Two weeks later, my mother took me to the Massapequa Railroad Station for my first solo trip into the city. I would travel in the second car on the train, which my grandmother had calculated meant the fewest number of steps for her at Penn Station, which, in turn, gave us the greatest chance that I wouldn’t end up walking aimlessly and alone through the largest city in the world.

As the train rolled into the station, I said, “Please don’t,” to my mother, trying to look as mature as possible, hoping that she wouldn’t implore the conductor to keep an eye on me.

“Please keep an eye on my daughter,” she said to him anyway. “She’s never traveled alone before. Her grandmother will meet her at Penn Station.” I know in the days before cell phones, this was not crazy behavior on her part.

But it meant that after every stop, the fatherly conductor would pause at my seat and in a voice not nearly quiet enough, say, “Still doin’ okay, Sweetie?” and rattling every embarrassment bone in my body. And for anyone who has never traveled on the LIRR, I believe there were 109 station stops between Massapequa and my destination that afternoon.

My grandmother was right about the Four Seasons being a big deal. There were trees inside, and everything seemed angular and modern. There was a coat room because at this place you didn’t just hang your stuff over your chair. There was a maître d’, who did nothing to hide his disdain for children in the restaurant (he probably would have called it his restaurant) even though it was barely 5PM and no one who really mattered would have been there at that hour.

My grandmother brightened at the waiter’s suggestion of a cocktail, as if she’d just then thought of it, and ordered the martini she told us she would. My Shirley Temple arrived in a heavy etched goblet. She held her glass to mine in the air and said, “Here’s to living it up!” We clinked them together. I might as well have been Eloise.

“Anything you want,” she said as we opened the menus. Then in a Hollywood whisper she added, “Except the lobster.” She pointed to the words Market Price on the menu. “They don’t tell you how much it costs because then they can just make it up when you get the bill, and by then it’s too late. That’s why we’ll never order the lobster.”

The waiter treated us royally. I’m sure he hoped for a hefty tip, and I wished I could have told him that this woman who didn’t trust Market Price also thought tipping was invented to gouge diners out of their hard-earned cash. She complied, but just barely and always using her little pad and pencil to get it to the penny. Had he known, he might have paced himself and saved his fawning for the movie stars who were coming later.

At dessert, I whispered that I was pretty sure Cary Grant was sitting at the very next table. My grandmother turned and stared at the man for what seemed minutes.

“Nope,” she said, turning back, “but keep looking. He’s bound to show up in one of these places!”

My grandmother had grown up poor and without a mother, taking up space in a childhood that never rose from dreary. She then raised her own children in tough times, with only her tenacity to lean on. But here she was, at one of the best restaurants in New York City, and, for all we knew, she might be sitting next to a bank president or a movie star. And though it may have taken her many years to get to high tea at the Plaza, or a steak dinner at Delmonico’s, once seated, she didn’t waste a moment. She reviewed the food right down to the garnish. She’d point out art on the walls or remark on the freshness of the roses. Whether we had to go or not, she’d insist on a trip to the ladies’ room just to admire the wallpaper or rate the quality of the hand towels.

At the Brasserie, I learned that escargots were nothing to be afraid of, though they were also nothing to brag about. I tasted caviar for the first (and last) time at the 21 Club. I learned that no one, not even my grandmother, expected me to clean my plate at Leone’s. I ordered Baked Alaska as often as it showed up on a menu. In the seven years we ate dinner together, we never did see Cary Grant.

Tavern on the Green in Central Park was our last dinner together, though we didn’t know it that night. I was home from college, on winter break. It had snowed. The trees bathed in their twinkly lights were just behind her, the dark wood beams just above.

“Isn’t this just the life?” she smiled, as she sat down and took it all in. Then she looked over my shoulder, lost in thought. I was going to ask her what she was thinking just as her eyes came back to me. And then with a wink, always the inside joke, “Remember now, anything . . . except the lobster.”

My cautious and often worn-out grandmother decided to live a little and took me with her on the adventure. Only now that I’m a grandmother can I really understand how she felt. At the tables of New York’s finest restaurants, every time I discovered something that amazed me — like a napkin folded into the shape of a flower or the fact that I really did like steak tartare — I watched her joy being multiplied. I learned to trust the world from the woman who distrusted Market Price as much as she adored her granddaughter. So no lobster. Just lucky, lucky me.