Little hut filled with big memories

It’s Friday, time again for another posting of Interesting Jewish Stories and Facts. The days are growing shorter and there’s a chill in the air. It’s fall and time to build ourselves a little hut.

Pine trees. That's what I think about each year as the Jewish festival of Sukkot approaches. The ancient holy day — it began Wednesday at sundown — was celebrated by the Children of Israel thousands of years ago to thank God for a bountiful harvest and to pray for God's blessings in the coming year.

Jews still ask for God's blessings during Sukkot, but also observe the holiday by building little huts — the simpler the better — symbolizing both the tents farmers would sleep in at harvest time and the temporary dwellings the Israelites lived in during their 40 years of wandering from Egypt to the Promised Land.

There are all sorts of esoteric rules that have been compiled over the years detailing the correct way to fashion a sukkah. Jewish law specifies the huts must be big enough to hold "the head and most of the body" of a person, together with a table at which to eat; the walls must be strong enough to withstand a "normal wind" and can be made of wood, stone or even canvas over a metal framework; and the roof covering — known as sekhakh — must be made of cut vegetation, such as tree branches, bamboo shoots — or pine trees.

The problem, at least when I was a youngster growing up in the Land of Cotton in the early '60s, is that someone had to leave the comfort of their home, trek out into the woods, cut down a bunch of pine trees, drag them onto a truck, bring them back into the city, and toss the mess atop the communal sukkah at our synagogue, Shearith Israel, on Wynnton Road.

My father, who actually liked fresh air and loved telling me and my three brothers about the cow and chickens his family kept in their backyard when he was a child, turned this annual project into a family outing for years.

He would borrow a truck from the "Uneeda Glass Company" on the Sunday before the beginning of the festival, pile us and a few of our friends, along with some saws and axes, into the cab, and head west on Macon Road to Harry Kaminsky's farm — a gentrified house, surrounded by dozens of acres of woodland, dotted with rusted out cars and tractors, an aging barn and decaying fences; dusty dirt roads and sagging power lines.

For the next few hours we would play at being lumberjacks, whacking away at pine branches and saplings, piles of fallen debris and underbrush. The limbs and smallish trees were lugged over to the truck and piled high, resting uncomfortably between the sides of the vehicle, towers built to hold glass securely, not the makings of a sukkah.

The one real thrill of the outing came on the trip back to the city, as we sat atop the fragrant pine chunks, bouncing about joyfully whenever we hit a dip in the highway. It was all sort of a holiday roller-coaster and the admission was simply a bit of sweat.

By late afternoon we were back at Shearith Israel, climbing the metal framework of the permanent sukkah that we’d crown with our day’s work. The rest is a bit vague – someone would cover the sides with canvas and youngsters would decorate the expansive space with bits of fruit and drawings made during Hebrew school.

I know there were services we attended and recall that each year one of the highlights of the holiday was receiving a length of sugar cane – go figure! It all comes together sweetly now, a euphonic blend of Judaica, Paul Bunyanesque work and family tradition.

The sweetest memory, of course, is the stuff I disliked the most – tossing aside briars and banging away at sticky saplings that had a way of whipping across my arms and face.

I hated the work, but loved the company and would give almost anything this holiday to be able to spend a few additional sweaty hours with my father. He died over a decade ago. But Dad continues to hover about, especially when the days grow short, a chill fills the air and little huts start popping up across the Land of Cotton.

Once upon a time, trains were the way to go

A recent posting by Elisson, neighborhood bud and blogger pal and mentor, had me choo-chooing back to the late ’50s. Ellison’s post was all about a delightful trip he recently took from here to the Nawth, much of it via trains.

I took a similar trip, one of my all-time great vacations. It was the summer of 1959 and I was just breaking into my teen years, still unsure about most everything. My Dad, who just about never went on vacation – he was the man behind a one-man business – decided to visit an old army buddy in upstate New York and, for whatever reason, also decided to take me along.

The trip was filled with a fistful of firsts that I still recall and cherish, even after five decades have come and gone. It was the first, and quite possibly the only trip my Dad and I took together without other family members – I have three brothers; the very first time I visited Washington, D.C., visited all the Smithsonian museums, the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington Cemetery and Mount Vernon; the first time I made it to the Big Apple, visited the studios of NBC, walked along Broadway, ate my way through the Carnegie Deli and – drum roll, please – attended a game at Yankee Stadium, sitting in center field, only a few dozen yards away from, that’s right, Mickey Mantle.

But I digress. It’s the trains that Elisson got me thinking about, those glorious, gleaming streamliners that glided on rails through the heart of America, connecting us all in a special way that is nothing more than a distant and vague memory today.

Yes, we can now get from here to there much faster. But something has been lost in the translation – elegance, civility, a sense of magic and adventure? Now it’s all about getting to our destination. Back when I and my father made our way north it was all about the journey.

And that journey began at a little station, just a mile or so east of the Chattahoochee River in west Georgia. We boarded the Man o’ War, sparkling and shiny and slow as molasses – can you say milk run! It took an agonizing three hours to make it to the Land of Cotton, 100 miles to the north.

But that was okay. The big city was a happening place, I could tell that as we scurried from Terminal Station in the Land of Cotton, over to the nearby and bigger Union Station – an imposing edifice of stone and brick, featuring a series of columns that stood as silent sentinels at the entrance of the impressive building and its cavernous main hall.

Both stations were reduced to rubble in the 1970s, the massive space turned into massive parking lots – a balancing act of sorts since cars were among the reasons train travel was headed the way of the dinosaur.

But I digress, yet again. The trip really began when our train was announced and its schedule blared across the waiting room, the names of villages and cities spread across the Southeast echoing around the massive space – now boarding on track 4, the Southern Crescent, with stops in Greenville, Spartanburg, Charlotte, Greensboro, Lynchburg, Manassas, Alexandria and Waaaaash-ing-ton!

The Crescent was huge, 14 gleaming cars that seemed to stretch on forever – two state-of-the-art diesel engines, coaches and sleeping cars, two dining cars and a lounge.

It was an adventure just to walk about, to sway and stumble your way through coaches filled with plush, velvet seats, then push aside the massive doors that separated the cars, and keep your balance in that space where they were joined together. If you were lucky, a porter was resting in this area with one of the windows open, the wind and countryside rustling by at a frenetic pace.

The rhythmic rocking of the train, the constant clickety-clack of the wheels sliding along the rails, is heady stuff for a 12-year-old. Everything about the train seemed fresh and new and exciting – white-jacketed porters and linen-covered tables in the dining cars; leather couches and stainless steel tables way back in the lounge car. This, as I recall, was a special place – smoke filled, the adults drinking their way through the night, youngsters like me staring through the back door of the train, watching the miles fade into the darkness.

Before returning home, we experienced all these thrills, and more, aboard two additional trains: the Pennsylvania between Washington and the Big Apple and the Nickerbocker – you gotta love that name – from Grand Central Station in New York to Albany.

It was a different time, when hope and excitement and the slight stench of diesel fuel and cigarette smoke filled the world, when everything seemed absolutely possible and dreams were the stuff of life. At least that’s what I remember now – and for today that’s more than enough.

Remembering my Dad on Father's Day

It was a moment in time, a second captured on film.

The details are hazy, of course, as you would expect. After all, I was only a toddler, still staring out at the world with a bit of wonder. My best guess is I'm around 4 or so in this photo. That would make my Dad around 40, twenty-two years younger than I am now -- a mere kid.

It was 1952, and my father was still getting over the emotional burden of World War II. He'd been drafted when the U.S. entered the war in 1941, a buck private who made his way to warrant officer pretty quickly, then was shipped off to the Philippines with an artillery unit from Georgia.

He never detailed the fight and all I really know about that time is that he returned home weary and sick. He had picked up some sort of bug, lost 40 or so pounds and, unfortunately, his appetite for life.

My father, like thousands of other U.S. servicemen, had been a lighthearted kid when the world went a little loopy. His youthful blush and zest for life was lost in the South Pacific and it would take a few years for Dad to right himself.

But William, called Bill by family, friends and strangers -- and there were very few strangers in my father's life -- was nothing if not a scrapper. By the time this photo was snapped, he was back in the game, fighting the good fight to provide for his family and capture the American dream -- a home in the suburbs, a car in the driveway, a lovely wife and handful of kids -- four boys at final count.

He had worked in a pawn shop before the war, so it was only natural that he would end up as a pawnbroker. It's a tough business, a job that can tear at your soul if you're not careful. He was careful.

Central Pawn Shop was a tiny place, probably only a dozen feet across in some spots and maybe five times that size from front to back. It was essentially a large, brick box that my father had made usable by creating a loft of sorts in the back. It was on this second floor where he kept the bulk of pawned items -- musical instruments and guns; tires and tools; cameras, record players and speakers; suits and leather coats. On the first floor, in a small, cluttered office screened off from customers and the rest of the store, was a huge safe that was pushed underneath a staircase. It was here where the good stuff -- watches and rings, gold chains and fancy jewelry -- was stored.

Dad's business was capitalism refined to its essence. If you needed money and had something of value, you could offer it up as collateral for a loan. Say you wanted $5 more than you needed to know the time. You might consider pawning your watch. You then had 30 days to repay the loan, plus 10 percent interest. So on a $5 loan, my father would make 50 cents. Of course there were plenty of customers who couldn't manage to pull together $5 all at one time, but didn't want to lose their watch. Each month they would show up with 50 cents, and a little notation would be added to the back of their pawn ticket extending the transaction for another 30 days. For some customers it would take years to pay off their loan.

It was this give and take, playing with nickels and dimes and people's lives that could rip away at your innards. On some intuitive level, my father understood this, managing to balance out his life by always giving out more than he took in, reaching out to family, friends and the community. He was, quite simply, a good soul and constant source of light.

Overstated? Not really. My father was the quintessential "people person", the guy who was always around to lend a helping hand, the consummate volunteer. He joined the Lions Club, selling brooms -- you heard correctly, brooms -- to raise money for the organization's national program to aid the blind; he was the adult supervisor for our synagogue's youth program, president of the shul's Men's Club and Commander of both the local chapter of the Jewish War Veterans and, eventually, the state organization.

He voluntarily raised his synagogue dues every couple of years, just because it was the right thing to do, and at the end of each month wrote checks to a dozen charities, once again because it was the right thing to do.

On Thanksgiving, he donated food baskets to the hungry and on Christmas he volunteered at area hospitals so Christian workers could spend time with their families. During the Jewish High Holidays, he was a volunteer usher. A few weeks later on Sukkot, he was the guy, kids in tow, who went out and chopped down pine branches (trust me, it's a Jewish thing) to cover the communal sukkah -- a sort of hut that is an integral part of the ancient festival.

Dad fancied himself an amateur thespian, joining the city's little theater group, at first only providing props -- hey, if you couldn't find stuff for a production in a pawn shop, you weren't really looking hard. He later took on minor roles -- the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof, one of the gamblers in Guys and Dolls. He was horrid, but he was always loud, energetic and willing!

In the early 1980s when he turned 71, Dad managed to finally get serious about his volunteering. He quit his day job -- actually sold his business and sort of retired -- then essentially joined the local police department, helping out on its pawn shop detail. He still had a few hours each week to play around with, so he also began volunteering as a gofer at a local hospital. With those two gigs, a little travel with Mom and constant weekend trips to visit nearby family and friends, he managed to stay busy for the next decade.

In the summer of 1997, Dad was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He died four months later, just a few days shy of his 84th birthday. Two days before his death, he rested on a hospital bed, centered in his den, surrounded by a cloth-covered couch and leather recliner, console television and wooden display cases filled with an assortment of tchotchkes. He was draped in robin-blue pajamas and sat listlessly on the edge of the bed, staring out vacantly toward the television and fireplace. The cancer had eaten away at his gut and trimmed off twenty pounds of fat. He looked haggard and tired, but surprisingly fit.

He was lost in that place where people go as death approaches, befuddled and depressed, in pain and straining for breath. He took little notice of my arrival. My youngest brother was in the room. My mother sat nearby. A hospice worker was fiddling with some meds and making small talk about his plans for Thanksgiving.

I was standing in my parent's house, in my father's den, watching him gasp for breath, listening to a hospice worker talk about turkey. It all seemed surreal, a world gone slightly askew. I could make little sense of what I was hearing and what was happening. Neither, apparently, could my father. He glanced over at the hospice worker, a look of puzzlement spreading across his face and slowly began shaking his head. And then he spoke. "I want to go home."

He mumbled the words again, and then again. "I want to go home." It was a plea, the words of a lost little boy, unsure of where he was and where he was headed. "I want to go home." They were the last words I ever heard him speak.

I like to think that my father made it home, met up with his brothers and sister, his parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I also like to think that just behind his family were some of the thousands of people he managed to help during his life, strangers who had become his friends.

Take a moment and glance back at the photo at the top of this posting. See how my Dad is bending over, checking me out, a father in love with his son. That's what I remember most about my father, a man always reaching out, willing to do a little bending if necessary to make life better for other people.

I mourned his loss when he died a dozen years ago and now I miss him more than ever. He was my hero -- still is today.

MOMENT IN TIME: Me and my Dad (photo above) in the early 1950s at Central Pawn Shop. And, yes, I did enjoy the coke.

Flag rekindles hope this Memorial holday

While cleaning out my garage recently, tossing aside paint cans and rusted rakes, boxes of old clothes and crates filled with crumbling papers and fading memories, I happened upon a flag. It was protected from the elements -- dust and dirt, spiders and their webs and other icky things -- folded neatly inside a plastic cover.

The stars, white against a field of blue, first caught my attention and I immediately recalled the history of this particular pennant. It was the flag that had covered my father's coffin when he was buried over a decade ago in Columbus.

The flag was just one piece of the military honors that were part of his funeral, the reward for his Army service in the South Pacific during World War II. My father was part of the "greatest" generation, that group of men and women who lived through the dark days of the Great Depression, then put themselves in harms way to protect a precious way of life, this idea we call the United States of America.

I often wonder what he'd think about the country today, a land divided by contentious issues that have many hunkering down in warring camps of Blue and Red. Of course there have always been divisions and disagreements here, an obvious byproduct of the rich immigrant stew that has been part of America since its founding.

But people use to talk and listen. Now they yell and hold ever tighter to their core beliefs. That there's plenty to be truly frightened about these days doesn't help.

The economy has soured and it could be years before it bounces back; we're fighting wars in foreign and distant lands where our enemies are deadly and invisible; nature and greed has unleashed an oily mess that could lead to the worst ecological disaster this country has ever known while irreparably altering the lives of millions.

And then there's my father's flag.

The last time I remember holding it was a little over eight years ago. The nightmare that we now remember as 9/11 had just happened and there was fear across the land. But there was also something else, a stronger emotion that, for lack of any other word, I'd call patriotism. Sometimes it takes something really bad to bring us all together. And for a time America was in a special place, everyone pulling for one another.

Flags started showing up in public places, in front of government buildings and businesses, at schools and shopping malls, at apartment complexes and draped over the entrances to neighborhood subdivisions. They hung from makeshift flag poles in front of homes, dangled from second-story windows and covered front doors.

I wanted to join the crowd, be part of the neighborly effort. But I was a little late coming to the game and there wasn't a store in my little corner of the world that had any flags to sell.

Then I remembered my father's funeral. I found the flag that had draped his coffin buried in the back of a closet. It was huge, but I managed to drape it between two windows outside a front bedroom of my home, tying it off with a length of rope.

I stood in my front yard, a light wind rippling the Stars and Stripes and felt something stirring in my heart, my thoughts filled with my father, the struggles and successes of his generation. Hope was right there in front of me, once more part of my life. It was Red, White and Blue and I knew that everything was going to be okay.

And that's my message on this Memorial Day weekend. For just a moment, as you relax and spend time with family and friends, remember the millions who have served this country, sacrificed their time, their comfort and their lives for an idea that remains a work in progress.

Most importantly, remember those who continue to serve today and for an instant remember that we're all in this together and that hope is a commodity we still have control over.