LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

Stroudsburg is a small town in Pennsylvania, south of the Pocono Mountains. I spent my childhood there in the late 1940's. We lived in a fairly large corner building on the second floor. My father was a doctor and had his office on the first floor. My sister was three years younger than I and I practically have no memories of her during this time. I attended grade school a few blocks away at the top of a gentle hill. There was a large playground in the back of the school where we enjoyed recess. We got report cards several times a year and rated either below average, average or above average in each subject. I must have been a pretty good student because most of my grades were above average. My lowest grade was below average in Music. I don't remember the names of any of my teachers but they were all women and treated me well. My 6th grade teacher was especially fond of me and spoke highly of me to my mother.

After school I played mostly with my best friend Dougie, short for Douglas. He lived only a block away and we built forts in an open field behind my home. Every afternoon at 5:30 a few of the kids in neighborhood met at Kristy's house. She was the first girl in my class living nearby who had a TV in her living room and we sat quietly on her couch and watched Howdy Doodie. Buffalo Bob may have been the leader of the group, but my favorite character was Princess Summer Fall Winterspring. What a great name and creative costume.

One afternoon while playing in the field I was crawling along the ground and noticed blood coming out of my lower leg. Frightened, I ran to my father's office. The blood was due to a cut I got while crawling over a broken bottle. My father wanted to sew up the wound, but I was scared and he settled for a bandage. Soon a scar formed, but the incident was minor compared to one that was to come shortly.

My grandparents lived in Scranton, an hour away from Stroudsburg, and we visited them for Jewish holidays. I remember Passover the best with the grown-ups sitting at the big table and the kids sitting at the small table down at the end. I vaguely remember my great grandmother who was revered although she hardly spoke. I had little interaction with my grandmother who also hardly spoke. Grandfather of course led the Seder entirely in Hebrew. The service seemed especially long and I was impatient for the meal to begin and very bored with the grace after the meal. I still have some of that impatience today.

Yiddish was spoken frequently which was frustrating because I could understand very little. During the summer the family spent time in several trailers in fields outside of a small village called Gouldsboro. There was a lake for swimming and a railroad track that ran through the area. I would enjoy watching the railroad cars go by and counting them as they did. Particularly impressive were the trains that had over 100 cars. Also enjoyable was picking huckleberries that grew nearby and my mother using them to bake pies. Once a week I went upstairs from the General Store where they showed cowboy movies. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Lone Ranger were the highlight of my week.

Back in Stroudsburg we got a TV. My favorite show was the Lone Ranger. I frequently played alone in my bedroom. I had a cap pistol and would stand near the window that looked out on an alley. I imagined the bad guys shooting up at me in the window, but I would kill them with my pistol.

Next door lived Barbara, a girl about my age. We would take a blanket out in the alley, pull the blanket over our heads and play "doctor". We would slowly take off all of our clothes and pay close attention to and examine our genital regions. I noticed that my penis would grow larger during our play, but of course I didn't understand why. There were no computers at this time so our games were imaginative and involved close contact and interaction with each other.

Another game that was fun was flipping baseball cards. Almost every boy in the neighborhood collected baseball cards. We stood about five or six feet away from a building wall and took turns flipping a card toward the wall. The boy whose card came closest to the wall would win both cards. The challenge was to get your card to lean up against the wall, called a "Leaner", which almost always would be a winner. On Thursday afternoons I would walk close to a mile to Hebrew school where we would learn stories from the Bible and Elementary reading in Hebrew. I have practically no memories of the teacher or actual classes but there is one day that I left home for Hebrew school that I will never forget. I was late and in a bit of a hurry but after crossing my street I remembered I forgot my watch and turned around and went back to cross the street to go to my house and get the watch.

The next thing I remembered I was laying in the street and my head hurt. A few people had gathered around and I could hear voices but could not see anything. Much later I found that a car had hit me and one of the front wheels of this large car had run over my midsection. My forehead had scraped the pavement as I fell and was the only place that was bleeding. There were no broken bones. I was taken to the local hospital, placed in an oxygen tent and put on the critical list. My stomach began to swell up but the doctor did not know exactly what was wrong with me. I was eight years old.

The details of what came next are very vague and came mostly from what my parents told me after I had recovered from this accident.

The scrape on my forehead healed quickly leaving no internal damage but a scar that lasted many years. The view inside the oxygen tent was bleak. I could not distinguish individuals and was very thirsty. "Water! Water! Please bring me water!" I remember shouting. Eventually a nurse brought me a few ice cubes to suck on.

My father temporarily turned his practice over to another doctor and spent most of his time by my side. The hospital doctors didn't know what to do so my father brought in a surgeon from New York. There were no MRI's in those days and the decision was made to make an incision down the middle of my stomach. There was internal bleeding and damage to the stomach and other nearby organs. A decision was made to punch a hole in my right side at the stomach level to continuously drain fluid through a tube into a bag. After a week I was taken off the critical list and transferred to a nice bright hospital bed with a clear view of the park outside. I stayed in one position for several weeks except for turning my behind so that a Penicillin shot could be injected into my backside twice a day. I resumed eating simple meals, got a lot of "Get Well" mail from friends and tried to keep up with my school work using my class books. After six weeks I began to learn to walk again holding onto the railing from the wall. Eventually I came home. It was weeks before I returned to school but had kept up with my lessons.

I remember being irritable and cranky, my father not being around for a while and my mother pressuring me to claim that I had looked both ways before entering the street when the car hit me. There were unsolved matters of insurance and how much money in benefits I would collect. I simply don't remember the intricate sequence of events that lead from entering the street to lying helpless...