Scottie Was Late.

                                   Scottie was late.

Scottie was late. He was always late. Even today, when I was going to get a new mother. I had special permission to be excused from PS 90 for the afternoon, so time was important. Scottie was a screw-up, a first cousin, but much older. There is a big difference within generations when a family begins with 18 children--- give or take a few depending on who is telling the story. My father, who was the youngest and last to leave home said 18; his older siblings long flown the Polish coop to London, Glasgow, and the west Bronx, said fewer, but what did they know? Over the years and great distances people lose count or weren’t there to continue counting. Hitler took care of those who stayed put, and that was most of them. Far-fetched? Benjamin Franklin was the 15^th of 18.

When I was 18 I went to Dublin to meet my cousin Eddie. Another first cousin, he was the son of my father’s oldest brother, Sanny, who started as a tailor and finished as a horse player and story-teller, taking naturally to the Irish life. Eddie was born in 1907 so he older than me by almost 40 years, and much older than my father, his uncle. He died in the Jewish Home of Ireland at 92. I hope I have his genes. The home was run by young Catholic girls from the country. They were far more observant Jews than the Jews and kept everything strictly kosher, not even allowing a birthday cake in the door which we had arranged to be delivered from afar.

Scottie, or Stanley as he began, grew up in Glasgow. His parents stopped there on the way to the Bronx from Poland. Many ears later, after they had raised 4 children, all of whom had picked up broad Scottish accents and presumably learned to support Rangers or Celtic before they were aware off the Yankees. The family resumed their journey to 1820 Loring Place, just off Tremont Ave. Scottie’s mother Rachel was my father’s oldest sister. He was a tall, slim, great looking young man with a shock of blond hair. He was a charmer and knew it. I suspect it was surprise later to discover he needed more than charm to get by. He got married, got married again (my father grumbled: again a wedding present?). Then he got married again. By then he wasn’t such a great looking kid, but a man who looked too much like a kid, too old to be one. A Scottish-American Jackie Coogan. Rachel must have been in her 50s but she seemed ancient, ageless, however old witches get to be in the nightmares of 6-year-olds. She may have been kind but she didn’t feel it. She made lumpy porridge and made us eat it, even cold. Her pastries, which she used to roll out in long rows on the dining room table, were heavy, indelicate, from Poland, not Vienna. She was heavy, with underarms that sagged, and heavy-handed. What she wasn’t was my mother. My father parked us there while he tried to restart his life after my mother died at the end of a two-year-long breast cancer. He needed to find a job, go to work, pay the rent (which friends had been paying for a year), and find a mother for us who happened to be a wife for himself. Rachel as caretaker did her best and we were eternally ungrateful. She just seemed from another age. Meanwhile, what the new Ida took on at the not tender age of 39 was impossible to conceive of: a ready made but broken family. And a couple of seriously screwed up kids who showed little mercy until long after and probably far too late, when they realized how lucky they were. She was, as my sister described her, “a beautiful soul”.