RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,110
(ground down to nothing at all)
Perth Amboy, outside of that, held
few mysteries. I'd been there a lot
as a kid - for some reason my
parents did most of their shopping
there. I can remember the open-air
market and all the stores in a row;
Jewish names, a lot, Lerner's, Slobodien
Shoes, etc. The other Slobodien that
there was, the brother, was a doctor
at the other end of town and, along
with a number of others, was on my
train wreck case, like forever. I was
always headed to Doctor This or Doctor
That. It never meant anything much
to me, but a lot of the same family
names were involved - it seemed -
doctors in one place, merchants in
another section of town, and lawyers
in the walk-up, second and third-floor
offices too. Pretty weird. Back then it
was more of a city, not so much at all
the junk-heap it is now. Once it was
pretty proud of itself - Jewish, as I
said, Slavs and Poles, etc. All proud
and specializing in their own stuff.
Bakeries, foodstuffs, remedies, and
churches. There was a synagogue
there, right in the center of town;
gone now. My first job, selling
magazines, was right across the
street from it. I was sad to see it
go when it did. In the 1970's I
guess. There was nothing regal
about it, it as humble, red brick,
and little twisty, with an off-center
entryway that was odd. It always
intrigued me, even just to see the
people entering or leaving; a real
taste of some exotic old ways of
being. Sometimes Jewish feminines
drove me crazy. I never figured why.
I think it was some mental thing
about deserts and sands and strange
locales; the little I knew of it anyway.
At my uncle's house too, there was
a Jewish family right across the street,
and with an intriguing daughter too,
and they always seemed to have their
own, opposite, seasonal decorations and
all going - the candelabra with all the
branches and a new light lit for each
day. Yeah, I finally got to the bottom
of all those tales and stories (no help
from anyone else), but I had to do
all the digging on my own. None of
tht paltry Catholic stuff ever touched
on it. They simply erased the old and
gave out the whole 'accept his on faith'
crap instead. No backstories, to depth.
Like you expect that Jesus, when he
was little, would just accept all the
changes to come, oddly enough all
to be based on him (?) without asking
a bunch of questions? But, who would
he ask, and wouldn't he already know?
See what I mean, how weird all this is.
The synagogues, by contrast, were
all old and settled, traditional and
ancient. There was another, large,
synagogue atop the hill, over by the
City Hall, at the roundabout and
monument thing there - some fancy
George Washington stuff, with an
etched story line and dates to go with
it. man, if that ever gets taken away,
I'd consider everything OVER, big time.
I think it's High Street or something.
That larger synagogue, by the way,
whenever it was built, had been built
at the location of Perth Amboy's once
most famous landmark, something
called the Castle. I forget; I'll have
to look that up.
-
One thing I hate is how I'm always
running out of time - like about
this Castle thing, I should just drop
everything now and look it up, search
it out. But it's way late, I'm beat,
all I ever do is sit here typing my
fool brains out watching night and
day roll me by (OK, OK, roll by
me). It gets so, every night, that
when I finally do bail and crash
land in real tiredness, the words
in my head are still flashing, lights
going on and off, messages pulsing,
and it doesn't really stop and then
I stop it figuring I'll remember it
in the morning and then it's all gone,
forever, and never heard from again.
That really annoys me. Like a
boat captain or something, with
a boat filled with people, and who
then loses the destination and the
direction while out on the ocean,
and they all just drift around forever
until they fall into some weird
hole, or a slit, between the water
and the sky, and the whole shebang
is gone forever. Never heard from
again, like one of those Bermuda
Triangle mysteries we always
used to hear about. In the 1970's
anyway. I wonder now what
happened to all that; those tales
and stories and mysterious losses
and encounters. All of a sudden
it doesn't happen anymore?
-
And speaking of disappearances,
that Stanislaus guy I mentioned,
that whole section of town - by
his church, the neighborhood and
funeral homes and all that - they're
all gone too. Stanley's old Polish
identity-section is now mostly
disappeared. The tall spire of the
one impressive church, where he
was, that's still there, but the grass
and the yard and the area, etc., is
all different and gone. It's really too
bad, and I know maybe one or two
others who lived, and maybe
still do, in that area too. I'm not
sure of all the what-became-of
and where-are-they-now stuff; but
they're around, just transplanted,
like nice flowers, and now just
growing somewhere else. It's like
that in this misery-carnival we
still call life. 'Stanley's' older
section of town, like his name,
has changed: Guatemalans now,
Hondurans, all sorts of Hispanics
I can't tell, have displaced the
generational rollover of the 1950's
Euros. It's, again, all so strangely
staged, how that works. Ferment,
but not really; never really 'violent,'
the small upheavals take place
anyway, and a person just
acknowledges and lives with it
or moves on. The synagogue
that they tore down, that too
represented, once, another way
of life when Perth Amboy's
center-focus could take a
Jewish presence - the merchants
and brokers and all that. That too
had supplanted all those more
original settlers - Scotch and
Irish and English. There's a
cemetery nearby, just above
the harbor, that holds all those
people: Generation One, at
their own Ground Zero, now
ground down to nothing at all
and even the memory fades.
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