A simple ode to the many aged and isolated New Yorkers with memories, but no one to hear them.
Once Upon His Time
How quickly the vanishing,
Where once shone the sun,
Now only skyscraper shade.
Horse drawn wagons
Once parked below tenement smiles
As rope baskets lowered with coins
Returned with apples and grapes.
Knife sharpening push carts,
Their grinding wheels
Ever turning razor sharp edges,
Made cutting cheap meat special.
Tilted fedoras patronizingly tipped
By cashmere-draped gangsters
Greeted numbers-hungry tenants,
While knickers-clad children
Ran their errands for pennies,
Warning shop owners
They needed protection.
Then...
Came post-war-family-building,
Turning wanton streets alive,
Baby strollers passed
Job hungry veterans passing
No Help Wanted signs
In slumlord heaven.
How precarious his street became,
Teetering between shelter and commerce,
Preservation and extinction,
Wrecking ball and obstinacy.
Finally...
Housing Department placed him elsewhere.
Nice, he guessed.
Missed the old stairs though.
Squeaks.
Creaks.
Scrapes.
Sounds and smells,
His special friends.
Now
Seems little comfort is left.
Modern whoosh of elevators,
Whirls of air conditioning,
Frequent ambulance sirens
Stopping below,
Providing the lucky ones
With their last ride.
Boredom no more…
Once upon his time.
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I recall traveling knife sharpeners that came to our old farmhouse along the highway in a small rural town and actually sharpened some of our knives.
I also recall in the industrial town of my grade school days where a wrecking ball knocked down some buildings near downtown. And the hotel, the Delmonico, managed by my grandparents for a year, a shadow of the one in New York City, was a slum dive on Main Street frequented by the FBI about once a week looking for fugitives.
And when I tried to look up on the Internet the aunt of the bride, the sister of the bride's deceased father who offered the bridal party two free wedding parties for the reception and wedding at her fabulous off Fifth Avenue Garden restaurant, I found very little. But I found one article that indicated that she had been evicted from her apartment and put on the street with all of her belongings that were being picked at by vandals in the most terrible way.
Even the rich and old age suffered in those days.
Ron