Keep Your Eye on That Kid!

Keep Your Eye on That Kid!

When I was young, my mother always took me shopping for food. 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 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 took place when I was four, a few blocks up the road from Jack’s. It started at a supermarket called Daitch, located on Riverdale Avenue, the same boulevard where my fire alarm incident would happen a year later when I was one year 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, 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 I was missing. She looked for me all over the store. She was frantic. She pleaded with the store manager 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 the neighboring stores for me. I can only imagine what was going on in her head.

As a last resort, she started walking home, hoping that I, as a four-year-old, had decided to walk home alone. 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 I would have attempted to cross a street alone. 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 speak, 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 shared that story throughout my growing years, telling everyone what a handful I was.