WHERE ARE WE?

By Rob Mariani

Wait a minute. I thought you said we were going to the Bronx.

This is the Bronx. Country Club Road, the Bronx.

No. This is the Bronx?

The Bronx. Yeah. My old neighborhood.

This cant be the Bronx. Wheres the projects? Wheres the street gangs? The traffic and the abandoned cars? This has trees for Godsake.

I told you, this is a part of the Bronx you never see. Its a little secret, this area.

You grew up here.

Yeah. Heres our old house. 3305 Campbell Drive. From our living room window you could just see a glimpse of Pelham Bay between those other two houses. And that big old house across the street there, the Providence Rest rest home. It used to be a private house owned by these two little old ladies named Davis. Sisters. One was deaf and she talked like a baby. The other one talked like a witch. Theyd let us play in the woods all around their house. We used to play guns, ring-a-leaveo, sword fighting. Go sledding down their hill in the winter. Theres a seawall in the back we used to go fishing off of.

This is like the Riviera. In the Bronx!

This was just a workingmans neighborhood back then. When I lived here everybodys father was either a fireman or a pipe fitter, or maybe they owned a bar or a hardware store up on Burhe Avenue.

What kind of name is that? Burhe?

I dont know, Dutch, I think.

My father, he was a chiropodist in Westchester Square. The house right next to the Daviss there? That one on the right with the Bay right in the back yard Doctor Perotta used to live there. He had this inboard speedboat. And these two big Great Danes. And three gorgeous daughters.

And there, thats Mr. Yules house. He was an air raid warden. During the War he went around with his flashlight and his helmet making sure everybody had their lights out and their shades down. In case the Nazis tried to bomb us.

Right along here near the bus stop? That was my grandmothers house. They just tore it down and replaced it with that white brick monstrosity.

This block here, Polo Place, there used to be a big open field here. I doubt if anyone ever played polo on it. Woof-Woof Field, we called it. I think because somebody once said that all the dogs used to take a crap there. But it was really pretty clean. We played baseball and football here. Made our own baseball diamonds. Flattened out tin cans for bases. Now its all these houses. But these are about the only new houses theyve built since I was here as a kid. Every place else is pretty much the same as I left it back in 1956. No house over two stories high. Every one with a little backyard. And from practically every house, if you cant see the Bay, you can always smell it. Especially when the tides going out.

Whats that place with the adobe roof?

Thats the Spanish nuns convent. Used to be a vacant lot where we played all the time. We called it The Roslyn. Then Richie Swift burned it down and they built the convent. Richie was my best friend from the time I was like 7. I lost track of him a long time ago though.

This a school here next to the convent?

The Villa Maria Academy. Its an all girls school except when I was a kid they took boys in first and second grades only. I went there my first two years of school. Its run by nuns Mother Saint Arthur. Mother Saint Patronella. They could be tough

I still cant believe this is the Bronx. Theres trees and grass and birds and its so so quiet.

Well, like I told you, this little neighborhood was and still is-- like a little bit of heaven. Its like that until you cross Bruckner.

Bruckner?

Bruckner Boulevard. Another Dutch name. You cross over that, go past the Indian museum a little ways and then the other Bronx starts the one everybody always thinks of when you say the Bronx.

CHRISTMAS IN THE BRONX.

By John Mariani

Maybe it didn't snow for Christmas every year in the Bronx back in the '50s. But my memory of at least one perfect snow-bound Christmas Eve makes me think it did often enough that I still picture my neighborhood as white as Finland in those days when I lived along the choppy waters of the Long Island Sound.

But for all the decorations and the visits to stores and Rockefeller Center, it was the sumptuous Christmas feasts that helped maintain our families' links to the Old Country long after most other immigrant traditions had faded away. Food was always central to everyone's thoughts at Christmas, and the best cooks in each family were renowned for specific dishes no one else dared make.

The assumption that everything would be exactly the same as last year was as comforting as knowing that Christmas Day would follow Christmas Eve. The finest ancestral linens were ironed and smoothed into place, dishes of hard candy were set out on every table, and the kitchen ovens hissed and warmed our homes for days. The reappearance of the old dishes, the irresistible aromas, tastes and textures, even the seating of family members in the same spot at the table year after year anchored us to a time and a place that was already changing more rapidly than we could understand.

It's funny now to think that my memories of the food and the dinners are so much more intense than those of toys and games I received, but that seems true of most people. The exact taste of Christmas cookies, the sound of beef roasting in its pan, and the smell of evergreen mixed with the scent of cinnamon and cloves and lemon in hot cider were like holy incense in church, unforgettable, like the way you remember your parents' faces when they were young.

No one in our neighborhood was poor but few were rich. Yet we mounted feasts as lavish as any I could imagine in a book, and in the days preceding Christmas people took enormous joy in spending their money on foods only eaten during that season.