When I was young my mother used to always take me food shopping. My parents didn’t drive, so we always walked. One place we always shopped was the butcher shop. It was about two and a half blocks from our house, crossing local streets. It’s where we purchased most of our meats, dairy and fruits. The owner of the butcher shop was Jack. He was very friendly. I used to wrangle a free banana off of him by doing impersonations. A popular singer at that time was Eddie Fisher. One of the impersonations that I did was of Eddie Fisher singing the song, “Oh My Papa”. Jack would ask me to stand on one of his milk cartons and sing that song. At that young age, I wasn’t very inhibited. As a reward I got the banana. I always enjoyed going to the butcher with my mom.
This story takes place when I was three years old, a few blocks further away from Jack’s. It started at a supermarket called Daitch, which was located on Riverdale Avenue, the same boulevard that my fire alarm incident would happen when I was two years older. Daitch, unlike the Chemical Bank, was on the south side of the street, so one didn’t have to cross Riverdale Avenue to get to it.
My mother as always, with no one home, took me with her to shop. We had been shopping at Daitch for a while, when my mother looked down and discovered that I was missing. She looked for me all over the store. She was frantic. She pleaded with the manager of the store to help, but I was nowhere to be found. She decided to leave the store and see if I was outside. She looked all along Riverdale Avenue and in all of the neighboring stores for me. I can only imagine what was going on in her head.
As a last resort she started to walk home, hoping that maybe I, as a three year old, had decided to walk home on my own. It was a 6-block walk back to our apartment building. My mother chose to reverse the route we had just used to get to the supermarket. She couldn’t believe that I would have attempted to cross a street by myself. After about two and a half blocks, she passed Jack the Butcher’s shop. She saw me inside, sitting on a milk crate, calmly eating a banana.
She came into the store both relieved and furious. Before she could utter a word I said, “What happened to you, did you get lost?” It left her speechless.
Time has a way of making a terrifying incident, a humorous one. She used to share that story all through my growing years, telling everyone what a handful I was.
