Hole In One

 [Today would have been my father's 102nd birthday.  In honor of him, I am posting a small true story about an incident in his childhood.  It reflects the kind of clever and inventive ways he approached life and navigated difficulties.]

 

Bobby grew up in a brick and grey concrete world called Brooklyn, the sooty streets shimmering with waves of heat in summer, slick as the Arctic in winter, and devoid of hope when the Great Depression descended like a train wreck.  They were poor before, but this new despair added even more water to the soup and rubbed bigger holes in the bottom of their shoes. 

His mom, dad and seven-year-old brother rented a walk-up apartment in a three-flat building so narrow that one large tree, two houses down, shaded all the backyards on the block. His mother was one of the fortunate ones.  She got up early every morning, put the soup pot on the back burner, and took the streetcar to work.  She taught public kindergarten, thirty kids in the morning and thirty more after lunch. Teaching was considered a solid job, but provided a meager paycheck only nine months of the year. His father loved to fix things, and in that broken world, there were always friends, family or strangers who struggled with life and needed his help.  They just couldn’t always pay him.

There was no money.  Life was hard.  And then harder still.  There was talk of sending the boys to live with their great aunt Albertina who lived above a noisy tavern.  The boys’ nightly prayers changed from “Now I lay me down to sleep” to “Please, dear God, anything but that.”

“There has to be an answer to these problems,” Bobby said to his mom.  “There always is. We just have to solve it.”

“Son, I know you love problems.  There is no one around like you who does math problems just for fun.  But this is your world,” his mom replied.  “This is where you live and breathe and have your being. Why do you always think you can do anything different? This won’t be the last time when your life is going to be hard.  Learn to live with it.”  His mom rolled her eyes and looked away.  His dad looked right at him and winked.

Bobby turned to his brother Donnie, now the only one left in the room, “We have to do something to make some money.” But there were no jobs for able-bodied men, even for his dad, let alone young boys with no skills.

A week later, yet on another day with nothing to do, Bobby stared out the cracked back window at their tiny bleak yard where weeds would not even grow. He watched his brother swinging a big stick that had blown out of the neighboring tree in a storm.  Donnie was hitting rocks on the ground with it.  With a regular drum beat, the rocks ricocheted off the tall wood fence.  A stick and a rock.  “That’s it,” Bobby said out loud. “Thank you, little brother.  We’re gonna be as rich as the Rockefellers.”

That night after their parents went to bed, and they could hear their dad snoring through the paper-thin walls, Bobby told Donnie his crazy plan to transform their yard into an elaborate putt-putt golf course for the neighborhood children to play. “You’re nuts,” his brother said.  “Do you know that?” 

And then, Donnie grinned his toothless smile.  “When do we start?”

There was no money to build it.  So, they scrounged through the garbage piled up in the alleys, found bricks and discarded wood where houses had been condemned, and scoured the dump for anything usable, tin cans, rusty nails, and once, two bent wheels from a broken baby carriage. The heap in the back yard grew.  Mom and Dad were either too busy to notice, or overjoyed that the boys were staying out of trouble. The way through the maze was not always obvious, and sometimes stuff didn’t fit together at all, but they tried out and dismantled dozens of designs and then went back to the drawing board again.

Over the space of many late nights, the pile of junk took shape like a piecemeal medieval castle with moats, ramps and secret passageways, a spectacular golf course of sorts, emerging from the rubble.

Word traveled fast.  The kids in the neighborhood began jostling each other in line, anxious to play.  But there was still no money.  The other children had no more cash than the boys did.  Yet as Bobby often surmised, every problem had a path through it.  He just had to find it, like the physics problems in his dad’s old textbook.

After another long and lean weekend, no answer in sight, Bobby and Donnie stood at the back door, overlooking their forlorn kingdom.  As it was Monday morning --laundry day-- the boys watched mothers and grandmothers clipping their weekly wash on the clotheslines zigzagged above the yards, sheets and colorful shirts flapping like national flags, vying for their attention.  The boys looked at each other.  “You’re nuts,” Donnie remarked.  And by noon, the boys were open for business.

All week, to the delight of the neighbor kids, even those as far away as Delancey Street, Bobby and Donnie charged the children just a few clothespins to play a round of golf, dropping them like gold coins, one by one into large cloth bags. 

And then, early every Monday morning, two young smiling boys went knocking door to door and sold clothespins to unsuspecting moms. 

Like hitting a hole in one, every week.